Colonna’s Requiem // Over Ajaccio by Night
In times of interregnum the evaporated power of Europe appears to flow and coalesce in the Mediterranean. The rocky outcropped islands seem to float above the tideless wine-dark waters which swirl around their banks.
The era of Actium, the civil wars following the death of Caesar, were a chrysalis in which Europe’s metamorphosis would take place, a metamorphosis which would determine that there would be a Europe at all. The old order was dead, and yet the new Imperium-to-be had not yet been articulated. Only premonitions floated about, in the Urban Populism of the Seven hills, and floating in the cold foreign air of the Legionaries’ camps.
The Islands, Corsica, Sardinia, and Sicilia, were granted over in this time to Octavian. First they were his launching pad to dominance, then afterwards to become the exile of Pompeii.
It was a stepping stone for the constant procession of powers which sought to straddle the distance from one side of the sea to the other. The expeditions of Genoa and Pisa secured it against the Saracen raiders at the height of the latter’s medieval sea power, and made it the turning point from which the Maritime Republics of Italy would begin their roll-back of the slavers. The white marble columns of Pisa and their relief carvings attest this time. The Aragonese Crown contested the island with the Genoese Magnates, seeking to strengthen the bridge of their domains from the Catalan shore to the Napolese cliffs. In 1958, the Algerian war grew bloodier and the Fourth Republic became only more stagnated, and the Officers of Algiers rose in their May 13th Revolt.
“On that morning anything was possible”
In Operation Corse the paratroopers seized the island bloodlessly. The capture of Paris by the mutinous armoured columns outside the city was called off by their success. The Fourth Republic fell with Corsica.
//
Villèle arrived in Algiers on Saturday 24th May; he had come via Spain. Pasfeuro, who was used to working with him, welcomed him back with a certain amount of pleasure but also slight irritation.
Together with a few other journalists, whose names had “been drawn out of a hat,” he had been summoned to appear next day at the military aerodrome of Maison-Blanche. From there they were all to fly to Corsica, where some serious incidents had just occurred.
…
…On the way they had picked up Colonel Tomazo, known as “Leather-nose,” who had arrived from the Constantine district.
“Where are you off to?” he asked Pasfeuro, whom he had known for some time.
“Corsica.”
“Will you be back this evening?”
“Of course. We’re just going there and back.”
“Then I’ll come with you.”
…
//
On March the 21st 2022, Corsican nationalist and folk hero Yvan Colonna died in a French Prison hospital after three weeks in a coma. He had been attacked by a Cameroonian Jihadist, a fellow inmate, and strangled to death over the course of a ten minute struggle, in which Prison Guards did not intervene.
Riots were sparked and the streets of Ajaccio burned. Yvan had been a symbol for the Corsican nationalist movement, something akin to their Bobby Sands. The French government maintains Colonna’s guilt in the assassination of the Prefect Érignac, the Paris-appointeed governor who had been shot by a pistol in the back of his head as he entered the theatre. It was act-too-far, and represented the culmination of the conflict’s brutality. Corsican nationalists maintain Colonna’s innocence, and consequently he fills the shoes of the time-honoured archetype of the wrongly-accused underdog.
Departing from Sands’ figure Colonna becomes something much more distinctly Mediterranean, something intensely Latin. He flees the police for five years. He evades them over the sparse rusted hills, with their sun-bleached sepia grasses. Seeking shade in the sparse shrub-like trees. Knowing the cool hidden springs among the dusted rocks. He is an outlaw, yet a man who belongs to his people, because like them he truly knows the intricacies of his land, a knowledge which compiles over centuries in small deposits in the collective ethnic memory. His pursuers, these Gallic occupiers from the Seine and Loire valleys, are alien to this land and do not know what he knows. « Le berger de Cargèse » : “The Shepherd of Cargèse”. He escapes them. He is an outlaw. A man of his land. A man of his people.
And yet Colonna represents something else yet again. In the latter stage of the Corsican’s guerrilla struggle the FLNC split apart. The old forms of Corsican society, never far below the surface, resurfaced. The clans, the vendettas, the murders, the honour bloodily injured and bloodily satisfied over and over again, in its age old cycle. Colonna was notable in his ability to stand aside from this. In the minds of Corsicans, he sees the clan and personal struggles of Corsica as a difficulty, to be subsumed to his nation. The honour of men, brotherhoods, and families to be made subservient to the honour of Corsica. He becomes in their minds a herald of unity, an Arminius who brings together the feuding factions in an act of ethnic resistance.
//
The aircraft took off, vibrating in every strut. It was a machine used for parachute drops and the transport of wounded, with two steel benches down each side.
The bigwigs, with Bonvillain conducting, broke into song:
“’We are the lads of Africa
Who’ve come from far away …
Who’ve come back from the colonies
To keep the foe at bay.’”
“A benevolent society.” Said Villèle. “Paris and the whole of France is trembling before a benevolent society! Tomorrow the whole country will be transformed into a benevolent society.”
…
//
In his youth Napoleon was a noted fierce defender of the nascent proto-nationalist movement of his home island. A recovered doodle from some of his classmates shows him, drawn with exaggerated Corsican features, attacking a professor in defence of the movement’s leader Pasquale Paoli.
Paoli had led a resistance of nobles, clans, and peasants against the Genoese. The de facto independent Republic he created in 1755 was heralded by the intelligentsia of Europe as a model (but maybe more accurately a petri dish) of an enlightened constitutional republic, most especially by those British elites who backed it – a natural gambit for the London thalassocracy to extend its power in the Mediterranean.
This gambit was to be crushed by the looming tellurocratic despot to its north. The Genoa Republic sold its rogue island to the Kingdom of France. The Kings of Versailles had had their noses bloodied too often in their attempt to extend across the Rhine, and so pivoted to their South. At Ponte Novu, where Paoli met defeat at hands of the French Crown’s troops, two changes were ushered in. In Britain the government was collapsed by the Corsican Crisis. And for France, the sea road which would lead them to Algiers was laid open.
Yet this seed of an “Enlightenment Government” was carried on by Paoli’s young admirer, Bonaparte, in the strangest of ways. Paoli’s Corsican independence and patriotism would find no satisfaction in Napoleon, but enlightenment would. His great world-transforming wars implemented constitutions across Europe, and swept away the Millennia old order of the Ancien Regime, and laid the foundations of the Liberal World order which we live in today. Impossible to know whether the laws of causality or synchronicity are at work here.
//
Night was beginning to fall when the aircraft touched down on the deserted aerodrome of Ajaccio, in the warm acrid smell of resin.
A little paratroop captain was waiting for the passengers, standing in front of his company, which presented arms. Pasfeuro recognised him. It was Orsini.
“Yet another officer from the 10th Regiment,” he said to Villèle. “Anywhere there’s something afoot you’re sure to find them, either in civilian clothes or in uniform, wearing in turn the blue beret of the home troops, the red beret of the colonials or their own cap. It’s not a regiment that Raspéguy raised but a coup d’état school!”
The bigwigs drove off in their cars, and the journalists waited for someone to look after them.
The paratroops marched past with the loose-limbed gait and vanished into the darkness. Indifferent to everything but their own dreams and nostalgias. They sang a strange dirge about the memory of something or other:
“‘The memory of a gallant pal
Scalped by the Indians in the war,
The memory of a bonny gal
Who left me to become a whore …’”
“Now that’s a bit all right,” said Villèle, “it stirs you up inside, it’s got something. Don’t you want to march off with them into the dark? Nothing else exists except the pal marching in step beside you, lost in a strange sort of exalting and melancholy dream. It’s dreadful, this temptation!”
…
//
So cars burn and windows are smashed across the towns and cities of Corsica. Purely by the vengeful spectre of Colonna?
Once more a melange of issues swirl into this island. Once more, it is as it was prior to the first conflict’s outbreak, the mainland does as it pleases and does little to ingratiate itself with this outpost. In the 60s large firms mined and polluted the landscape with impunity, and fleeing Pied-Noirs were settled into the eastern plains of the country. In the 2010s the mainland wealthy flock to their new favourite resort and drive the home-prices beyond native reach, and Islamic migrants come too, almost as if on the tails of the Pied-Noirs.
Fights have already broken out between Corsicans and Muslims in recent years. On the low-end, cultural clashes over the sight of burkinis on Corsican beaches; On the high-end, virtual pogroms against the communities of Islamic newcomers. Like the subjects of so many other overarching powers the Corsicans have been pushed into conflict with the other subject clans of the Parisian regime.
Jean Audriad’s 2009 movie “A Prophet” is now eerily named (once more in Corsica, synchronicity appears to be at work). It told the story of a Muslim prisoner, who gradually rises within, takes over, and overthrows the Corsican gang into which he is adopted. The death of Colonna at the hands of a Jihadist almost feels as though it were fitted to the script.
The honour of clans and the subsequent feuds may be subsumed to the higher cause of national struggle, but they do not vanish. The honour of the clan becomes the honour of the nation, and when attacked the feud of nations now ensues. Again and again, the great abstracted conflicts of nations or nations-in-bondage, conflicts that seem to almost manifest in abstracted realms, are materialised and are transformed, as they manifest in the tangible realms of clan and gang struggles. A bitter contest between a handful of prisoners becomes a violent schism between millions. But this has probably always been so.
On the 24th of April 2022 Marine Le Pen lost her second presidential contest against Emmanuel Macron, yet it was noted that she came much closer. She easily led in Corsica.
//
The journalists piled into an open truck and drove along a deserted road into Ajaccio. There were no lights except in the square in front of the prefecture. The café terraces were filled with men and women who were waiting with a certain impatience for the curtain to rise and the great commedia dell’arte of the Corsican revolution to begin.
A row of paratroopers separated the auditorium from the stage. People were bawling out the “Marsellaise” and making historical speeches. The mayor, Casalta, played his part to perfection. In accordance with the agreement made with the “factionists,” he descended the great staircase wrapped in the folds of the town hall flag, singing “Aux armes, citoyens!” slightly off key. Everyone carried a weapon, but no one was anxious to use it.
Colonel Thomazo found himself, by the oddest chance, appointed military governor of Corsica, which led Pasfeuro to remark:
“I’m partly responsible for his appointment and Corsica hasn’t had a governor since Napoleon!”
The journalist managed to catch up with Captain Orsini, who, with his beret pulled over his nose, was rushing about on his stumpy legs.
“How goes it Captain?”
“Let’s not talk about it. I’ll never make another revolution at home. Half my family is for it, the other half against, but they all want to be on the Public Safety Committee. Esclavier was able to shout everyone down; but I can’t, they’re all relations.”
“But where are Esclavier, Glatigny, and the rest of them?”
The little captain’s tone changed; his voice became harsh:
“I don’t know and it’s none of your business.”
He turned round and rushed off.
“The moral of all thus,” said Villèle, “is what a chap in the crowd said just now: ‘After all, we’re not going to fight for a revolution! If it was elections it would be a different matter.’ Well Pasfeuro my lad, the whole of France thinks the same.
“And now, since I’m tired of this comic turn, which is too Mediterranean by half, I’m going to turn in.”
He whistled through his teeth:
“‘The memory of a gallant pal
Scalped by the Indians in the war …’”
and was swallowed up in the crowd, which was beginning to break up into little groups as though after a firework display.
[Excerpts taken from “The Centurions” by Jean Lartéguy]