Resisting Victimhood in Corsica

Abstract

In recent years, the French media have increasingly focused on the incidence of racism against Franco‐Maghrebians in Corsica. On an island which has long been the locus of a minority nationalism organized on an anti‐colonial frame of reference, this new problematic challenges and unsettles fixed binaries of victim/perpetrator, powerful/powerless, majority/minority. While for some, this new development reveals the “underlying xenophobia” of Corsican nationalism, for others, this is just the latest episode in France’s age‐old “defamatory misrepresentation” of the island. Rather than attempt to adjudicate this debate, the article unpicks its discursive regularities. At stake in these complex politics of victimhood are issues of the representative (which instances are typical?) and the commensurable (which comparisons are acceptable?)—both of which are central also to anthropological accounts of victimhood. As a result, this case study raises some issues concerning anthropological comparison.

Keywords:

• Minorities
• Nationalism
• Racism
• Corsica
• France

Notes

[1] The terminological issues here are as complex as the state policies and identity politics which underlie them (see for instance Gross et al. 1997).

[2] In this context, the rich metaphorical construction of “the village” as fortress and eagle’s‐nest, inaccessible and dominating the plain comes into its own, particularly when the village becomes a metonym for the island as a whole, under siege (Jaffe 1999; Candea 2005).

[3] In Corsica as in the rest of France, the pieds‐noirs were given state subventions and preferential loans to aid their resettlement. By the mid‐1960s, around 17,000 pieds‐noirs had resettled in Corsica, the equivalent of about ten per cent of the insular population. Many of the pieds‐noirs—some historians say more than half—were of Corsican origin, with or without continuing ties to the island (Bernabéu‐Casanova 1997: 56).

[4] The colonial framing of Corsican victimhood was not without bearing on the previous theme of representation: many Corsicans who had lived and worked on “the continent” (as the French mainland is commonly known) were aware of the way broadly “Orientalist” stereotyping applied to them as well as to their Southern Mediterranean neighbours. In fact, the association of Corsicans and “Arabs” had a long history in French imagination, as the following comments—recently reprinted in a volume about “anti‐Corsican racism”—attest: “At the sight of Corsica in arms, a foreigner might wonder whether he is in France or in Africa, and whether the laws of the most civilised of nations are all suitable to the rustic mores of a people which could be taken, in these mountains, for Arabs of the desert” (Constant 1918, quoted in Santini 2001). “The Arab at the foot of the palm tree, the Corsican at the foot of the chestnut tree… The Corsican chestnut forest is the superb laziness of its peasants” (Jean Lorrain 1905, quoted in Santini 2001). The editor of the volume argues: “If proof were needed of French colonialism in Corsica, it could be found in the constant outpour of anti‐Corsican racism, expressed for centuries by the greatest minds as well as the most mediocre. Racism is not a secondary phenomenon, but a truly fundamental component of colonial ideology” (Santini 2001: 3).

[5] Similarly, the Regionalist Front’s pamphlet “appropriating an island” (Main Basse sur une Ile), explained that “the [government]’s attribution of land plots is reminiscent of attempts at population colonisation in the past and the present worldwide” (Front Régionaliste Corse 1973)

[6] Nationalists I spoke to who were young during the 1960s and 70s remembered many stories of families frought by internal conflicts between nationalists and “legitimists” for whom the anti‐colonial framing was unacceptable.

[7] These debates over local toughness were powerfully brought out in a comedy sketch performed in the summer of 2003 by the popular Corsican duo “Tzek et Pido”. The sketch also illustrates the theme, mentioned earlier, of the village as a stronghold of Corsicanness, a bastion inaccessible to foreigners. Tzek et Pido’s sketch featured a stereotypical Parisian suburban youth on holiday in Corsica, and the first part of the sketch is based on a caricatural rendering of the presumably Franco‐Maghrebian youth’s posturing hip‐hop “hardness”. The actor walks around on slightly bent legs, waving his arms about and speaking in a comedy rendering of suburban slang. The sketch then shows us the youth trying to “chat up” a local (and thoroughly disinterested) girl, played by the other male comedian in a long blonde wig, who gives a convincing falsetto rendering of a rather affected southern Corsican accent. At one point, the Parisian youth recounts how he and his friends had been to a seaside club the previous night and “tried it on with some local bitches” (taspés). Unfortunately, he says, one of them happened to be the sister of the club owner, who pulled out a gun and emptied a charger in their general direction. He comments on the “hardness” of Corsicans, and on his lucky escape, and says that tonight, he plans to go to a dance “somewhere up in the villages”. “Up there,” replies the girl laconically, “they won’t miss” (“là‐haut, ils te rateront pas”). As this sketch suggests, there is often a strongly gendered and sexualized aspect to such narratives of invasion and resistance, an issue which deserves more space than I can give it here.

[8] The handful of people I have spoken to in Corsica and in mainland France who described themselves as receptive to the Front National’s ideas often stressed this latter aspect, discussed at length by the French historian of ideas Taguieff (Taguieff 1987; Taguieff, 1989). In principle, the Front National claims to respect cultural difference, and to eschew any expansive or imperialist project. Steering clear (in their explicit pronouncements at least) of traditional biological racism, the Front National has risen on a platform of what Verena Stolcke has described as “cultural fundamentalism” (Stolcke 1995), and others have called new or cultural racism (Balibar 1991; Barker 1981; Cole 1997; Gilroy 1987).

[9] On the 13^th of June 2003, the Corsican head of Jean‐Marie Le Pen’s cabinet came to the island to speak in the name of the Front National about a forthcoming referendum. The essence of his message was less striking than the fact that he delivered a large part of it in Corsican. He justified this in an interview by the following phrase (in the same language): “I am Corsican, and when I speak to Corsicans, I speak Corsican”. Commenting on the Corsican situation in French, he added: “Identity is Man’s fundamental anthropological need [, ensuring the] stability of society”. Both the use of Corsican as a language of public political address, and the theme of “identity” are unmistakeable markers of the Corsican Nationalists’ platform. The Front National has so far never made any significant electoral inroads into Corsican politics, but it seems from this example that they are constantly on the lookout for new ways “in”.