“French shit”, “French, sub-race”, “I francesi fora (“the French outside”)”, “Arabi fora” (“the Arabs outside”), “the suitcase or the coffin”. These inscriptions soiled the Corsican walls after the demonstrations which followed the fatal attack by Yvan Colonna at the Arles power station (Bouches-du-Rhône), on March 2.
For the past five weeks, the island has been living to the beat of rallies and riots, carried by sometimes xenophobic and violent slogans. These movements made Yvan Colonna a “martyr of the Corsican cause”, who was sentenced in 2011 to life in prison for the 1998 assassination of the prefect of Corsica.
“Each time, we avoid the worst, but I don’t want a tragedy to happen, because I live here with my family and I want to go home in the evening”, entrusts, on condition of anonymity, a police officer installed for ten years on the island. He says to himself “frightened” by the hatred of young rioters who promise the police to ” kill them “. Like some officials, like “many continentals”, he prefers to remain silent in an open powder keg where words are sharp weapons.
“We have no right to criticize”
The student protest movement fell as quickly as it rose. Three weeks of urban tension and violence: “We always feel this leaden screed”, observes a teacher from the Laetitia-Bonaparte high school in Ajaccio. « Everyone was surprised by the degree of violence and everyone was walking on eggshells to try to defuse the blockages,” he continues. In his establishment, classes sometimes turned into “group therapy”, in fiery debates around the Yvan Colonna affair. “What is the construction of a myth? Twenty-four years ago, the nationalist movement itself said that the commando which had killed the prefect Erignac came from a brigadier drift, today, we come to say “Yvan, gloria à tè, Gloire à you, Yvan”: how did we get here? », the teacher wonders about this young generation that was not born on February 6, 1998, when the prefect of Corsica was shot three times in the back.
In his class, the discussions turned to the declamation, by certain pupils, of “Punctures”, from “poorly digested political slogans”. The omnipresence of this preaching is the sign, according to him, “of a kind of single thought, of well-thinking”, disseminated by nationalists on these issues, often prohibiting adversarial debate. Also a symptom of « manipulation » youth, which the nationalist movements refute.
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