Those who persist in believing that Tony Blair has sabotaged Britain and her history by handing the Scots and Welsh (some) self-rule may think otherwise when they consider the result of taking the opposite course. Having done so in Corsica, France is suffering for it. I don’t mean to suggest that England’s Celtic kin can necessarily be compared with the difficult Corsicans, but the autonomy question nonetheless concerns them all. And France’s latest approach is an object lesson in how not to handle it.
No, Corsica is not an easy place to manage. Corsica is surreal. This Mediterranean island (population 240,000) is half as large in area as Wales and twice as high on its own lore. Gangsterism and the maquis are only part of it. Unfortunately Corsica’s bizarreness seems to be catching, for France itself has come down with a nasty case. In trying to subdue pro-independence clans and their ready bombers, the representatives of the French state have turned to acting more oddly than the foe. The government’s pro-consul on the island, together with the head of police and ranking gendarmes, are in jail for doing precisely the opposite of what they were supposed to be doing; that is, restoring the rule of law. In a nutshell, they stand accused of becoming terrorists. Indeed, all but the prefect have owned up to a part in burning down a popular beach restaurant. This may seem a small thing to get upset about on an island where worse frequently happens, but it doesn’t say much for the French state’s concept of the rule of law. No reigning prefect has ever been put behind bars before. What it does say is that repression can be no part of a sane devolution policy.
What of that charred beach bistro near Ajaccio? There are hundreds of such establishments on Corsican strands. They start out as straw-topped shacks erected without permits and end up somewhere between three-star seafood venues and Mafia treasure chests. When the previous government prefect was murdered by unknown assassins early last year, the prince of the state sent by Paris to replace him was told, rashly, to do what he had to do to restore the rule of law.
The new prefect, Bernard Bonnet, keen to track down the assassins, interpreted this as carte blanche to repress the natives. The problem wasn’t a lack of force. He had the usual plethora of French police and gendarmerie units at his disposal plus, significantly, a shadowy special force he himself formed. The problem was where to strike. Since beach bistros, however inviting their cuisine, are palpably dodgy enterprises, he determined to get rid of them forthwith. They are so much a part of island life, however, that he was obliged to heed Corsican indignation and delay demolition until after they have cashed in on this summer’s holiday season.
The delay, so the prefect seems to have feared, made him look soft. So members of his special force torched the Ajaccio restaurant at dead of night. They made such a hash of it that investigators called to the scene couldn’t help but trace the criminal act to them.
The point of this exotic tale is that not even Lionel Jospin, a thoughtful and competent prime minister, seems able to see further than the French state’s jealous nose on Corsica, which was integrated into France for good at the time of the 1789 revolution, right after a provocative year or two of British rule. Local elections this spring showed only one in six Corsicans sought outright independence, though islanders consider themselves a different breed from the mainland French. Since de Gaulle’s time, successive governments have refused to grant more than a spoonful of autonomy for fear that Corsica will break loose or that the state may be seen to be losing its grip.
This reflects just how centralised France remains at heart despite the recent devolution of certain spending powers to regional parliaments in Brittany, Burgundy and so on. Corsica enjoys a special autonomy statute giving it additional privileges, mostly involving tax and inheritance, but it has precious little self-rule wriggle room. France even prohibits official reference to a “Corsican people” lest citizens get the wrong idea.
It may be assumed, one hopes, that Jospin and his interior minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement, a true French nationalist, were unaware of their Corsican brigade’s pyromaniacal bent. Yet they ought to know better than condone the setting-up of a special police force working to its own agenda. The fiasco suggests a blind refusal to consider the Blairite path of giving a people with its own culture a responsible way to live out its identity.
How much more practical it would be if the government were to risk granting some genuine autonomy to Corsica. The island has long been an economic basket case, accustomed to living off heavy handouts from the state. It produces little, merely consumes. A perfect situation for Mafia clans and independence extremists (who are often one and the same) to prey upon. A new sense of political responsibility awakened by self-rule could only change that for the better.
There is, moreover, a silver lining to this particular crisis. Justice has been permitted to get to the bottom of it. Whoever would have thought it? At the first sign of prospective humiliation the instinct of all French governments within memory has been to hobble judicial inquiry. This time the law is getting free rein to bring the state’s offenders to book: a real advance for French democracy.
The strangest thing in this strange tale is that in failing to impose the rule of law on Corsica, France has imposed it upon itself.
Content from our partners
Related
