Corsican Fragments: Difference, Knowledge, and Fieldwork

5 People

People [Cultural difference] is experienced in contradictory ways by Corsicans. Are they different from the French? A majority will respond[,] we are French! So, you are the same as the French? Oh no, not at all, we’re Corsican and proud of it! —Culioli 1990, translated in Jaffe 1999 You are Corsican or you are not. You are Corsican if you are, well, from here, you know. —Petru, personal communication Seeing Like a (French) State In 1991, the highest French legal authority, the conseil constitutionnel, ruled that the expression “the Corsican people” was contrary to the French Constitution. This decision was a response to a drafted bill which, in its first article, referred to “the living historical and cultural community which constitutes the Corsican people, a component of the French people” (quoted in Hossay 2004, p. 420). The conseil constitutionnel ruling canceled this first article, thereby reconfirming that Corsicans were not to be officially distinguished or set apart as a group within “the 98 | Corsican Fragments French People,” which “must be considered a unitary category, unsusceptible of any subdivision by virtue of the law” (Conseil Constitutionnel 1991). Unsurprisingly, there were some immediate reactions on the island. Corsican nationalists who had been calling since the 1970s for official recognition of the Corsican people were outraged. By contrast, the influential Corsican center-left leader Paul Giacobbi endorsed the decision in the strongest terms, claiming that “[w]hen you recognise the Corsican People within the French people, you are making a racist distinction!” (Giacobbi, quoted in Hossay 2004, p. 420). It is thus not an overstatement to say that the question of Corsican identity and difference from the French is one of the key ongoing matters of concern and public debate on the island. There is a broad consensus about the existence of “Corsican” and “French” as categories. Debate mostly occurs over their proper definition, de jure and de facto. Do claims to Corsicanness imply cultural, sociological discontinuities with Frenchness or even, as some nineteenth-century Corsican regionalists once tried to claim, racial ones (see Pellegrinetti 2005)? Should such differences be recognized and regulated by (French) law? Is Corsicanness the same kind of category as Frenchness? Are the two compatible, hierarchically ordered, mutually exclusive? Can/should Corsican culture change, and in what way? Can one become Corsican, and how? These debates are inflected by a set of existing legal and material provisions and constraints which make the category French, on the institutional level at least, seem far more solid than Corsican: however complex, shifting, and elusive such oft-invoked objects as French identity, culture, or national consciousness might be, French nationality at least is a straightforwardly verifiable fact (Stolcke 1997). Thus, the majority of people in Crucetta are French in this sense: they have in their possession passports and identity cards which state this fact and are counted in the national census as French. This Frenchness derives from and is defined by a set of simple criteria: French people in Crucetta were either born in France, or of French parents, or have been naturalized. The category Corsican, by contrast, benefits from no such de jure reality. For instance, the INSEE national census of 1999 (the most recent at the time of my fieldwork) reported that the population of Crucetta was at that time 838 people, 743 of whom held French citizenship. There were 537 residents of Crucetta, the document noted, who were born in Corsica, 190 in continental France, and 111 abroad. It went so far as to tell us that 98 people who were living in Crucetta in 1999 lived in mainland France ten years previously, and thirteen lived abroad. This is precise, detailed, and interesting information to be sure, and it tells the reader much about the migration patterns of the population of Crucetta, but one cannot discern from it the kind of distinctions which were ethnographically highly salient in Crucetta among Corsicans, Continentals, and Arabs, for instance. The invisibility People | 99 of such categories in state statistics is, of course, not an omission. It is consistent with the constitutional council’s decision, noted above, against the recognition of the Corsican people, which in turn is motivated by the explicit principles of what has been termed French republicanism and, principally, the French state’s refusal to recognize sub-national minorities as collective political entities or as bearers of group rights (Lloyd 2000; Silverstein 2004; Bowen 2006)—although the French...