Nothing much had happened to Corsica since Napoleon left home in 1779. The island's haughty, hawk-nosed men still rode off sidesaddle on their donkeys to fight vendettas. Their wives still milked the native sheep to produce a cheese with the clout and consistency of a plastic bomb. The sun still sank blood-red behind the Sanguinary Isles, while local folk singers recalled the prowess of Bonaparte in their atonal anthem, L'Ajaccienne. A calm enough scene—until early last summer, when the somber, somnolent island awoke to the 20th century. Suddenly, bombs exploded in the night, and walls proclaimed the scrawled slogan: "Corsica for the Corsicans!" By last week, the Corsican question had even entered France's presidential campaign. Rightist Candidate Jean-Louis Tixier-Vignancour stormed across the island, hoping to turn Corsican wrath against Charles de Gaulle.
"Sea & Monopolies." The trouble was triggered by an invasion: since 1958, some 15,000 French ex-colonials, mostly from Algeria and many of Corsican origin, have swarmed onto the island. Their arrival has turned France's most underdeveloped department into its noisiest headache. The "repatriates" grabbed up much of the island's fertile eastern plain—a region that accounts for nearly half of Corsica's arable land, but was uninhabitable because of malaria until U.S. Army engineers cleared it with insecticides during World War II.
Though the slow-moving Corsican natives have themselves to blame for not moving into the new land fast enough, they nonetheless curse the newcomers —and Paris—for their plight. "This is an island," says one bitter native, "surrounded by the sea and monopolies."
Jerks & Gangsters. Indeed, from Cape Corse to the Strait of Bonifacio, the 114-mile-long island, which lies just 105 miles southeast of Nice, is little more than scenery. The snow-topped mountainous spine of Corsica is traversed only by a Toonerville-style railroad, the Micheline, which looks out on ruined citadels, deserted villages and scarred forests. Once rich in timber (pine, chestnut, cork trees), Corsica has been hard-hit by forest fires. Population has drained from 300,000 in the 1870s to 170,000 today. Ajaccio, the capital, is a cluster of quaint but quaking buildings, though a scattering of new apartments is rising beyond the old perimeter.
The attitude of the repatriates is not likely to win over many of the natives. "Corsicans are apathetic and do nothing," says Repatriate Jean Camy, 37. "He who couldn't be a customs guard or an army sergeant stayed here as a shepherd. All the good ones left; just the jerks stayed on." Still, Camy takes a certain pride in his expatriate heritage: "The President of Venezuela, the top cops, the top gangsters—all the real men in the world are Corsicans."