La Corse contemporaine au prisme du XVIIIe siècle français : de l’enracinement républicain à l’affirmation nationaliste

Abstract

This article aims to explore the links between Corsica and the French eighteenth century. During the Corsican revolutions, marked by the island's period of independence until the French conquest (1755-1769), the island and its leader Pascal Paoli were admired by the philosophers of the Enlightenment, particularly Voltaire and Rousseau. During the Third Republic, this reference was approached from the perspective of rooting the republican ideal on the island. In September 1889, Corsica experienced an important statuary event with the return to Corsica of the ashes of Paoli. One of the ideological issues at stake was the historiographic reconstruction of the figure. Paoli became, in a teleological and shortened way, the precursor of the French Revolution. After 1945, the French 18th century was still present, albeit in a completely different political configuration. Indeed, the period of the Enlightenment was now mobilised by the nationalist movement of the 1970s in its entirety (autonomists, independentists, and clandestines, etc.). The key quotations of the famous philosophers concerning Corsica were thus reproduced on numerous media, tracts, and manifestos, including within the cultural sphere that was then in full expansion. The slightest publication or claim did not fail to allude to it, the subject asserting itself for the nationalists as a true legitimation of their political project.

Keywords

• Corsica
• nationalism
• Enlightenment
• French Revolution
• cultural history
• national constructions