Paved with Corsican flags, the walls covered with Yvan Colonna’s face and slogans hostile to the state, Cargèse, the family cradle of the pro-independence activist and assassin of Prefect Erignac, seemed to hold his breath on Thursday on the eve of the child’s funeral. of the country.
Deserted streets, closed shop windows: “They all left for Ajaccio to gather on the coffin”, explains a resident, “come back tomorrow, it will be different”.
On Friday, the coffin of Yvan Colonna, in front of which hundreds of people bowed at the funeral home in Ajaccio, will leave in the middle of the day for Cargèse, where a ceremony will take place from 15:00 at the Latin church of the village. Opposite the Greek church facing it, this building illustrates the dual identity of this Corsican land.
Erected at the entrance to the Gulf of Sagone, 50 km from Ajaccio, the ancient city built in 1776 by Count Marboeuf, the first French governor of Corsica, has long buried the ax of war between Greeks and Corsicans. And it is an Archimandrite, a priest capable of officiating in both Latin and Byzantine rites, Father Antoine Forget, known as Father “Tony,” who will lead the ceremony tomorrow.
“A deacon brother will say a few words about the deceased,” the priest told AFP, without being able to say whether members of the Colonna family will also speak in the small church that can accommodate up to 150 people.
Long considered a reflection of the fractures of Corsica, Cargèse, officially 1,300 inhabitants –but 6,000 in summer–, had once housed the Association of French and Republican Corsica (CFR), which had marched several thousand people to Ajaccio against independence, but also one of the most active armed groups in the FLNC.
In front of the entrance to the church, white and yellow, stencil portraits of Yvan Colonna on wooden boards framed the closed front door on Thursday, next to around fifty candles. On the small square surrounding the building, a large Corsican flag and the still hot remnants of a large fire made the day before were still visible.
– “He had paid his debt” –
On the winding road from Ajaccio to Cargèse, many graffiti “Gloria a tè Yvan” (editor’s note: “Glory to you Yvan”) reflected, as during his four years of riding. Yvan Colonna, the most wanted man in France, had taken over the bush after the 1998 assassination of Prefect Claude Erignac in Ajaccio. A crime he has always denied but for which he has been sentenced to life imprisonment three times.
“Statu Francese assassinu”: in the center of the village, between the tobacco press and the butcher’s shop, a large banner denounces, in the Corsican language, a “French state” assassin. The same watchword is visible in several places, sometimes accompanied by a photo of the activist.
“Colons Fora” (Editor’s note: the colonists outside”): other graffiti glorifying the shepherd of Cargèse or hostile to France, sometimes embellished with a drawing of a coffin and a bomb, were also visible in the alleys narrow streets of the village overlooking the sea.
Asking for anonymity, a trader in his forties denounces “state revenge”: Yvan Colonna “had paid his debt to society, even if it was not him. benefit from a rapprochement, if that had been done, he would not have died today”.
Further, an elderly woman prefers to remember “the good times” spent with Yvan, whom she knew as a teenager when he came to settle in Cargèse after studying in Nice. “He played football with my children. He was like a member of my family,” she says. “When I learned what had happened to him in prison, I was driving. I stopped and said to myself: + it’s not possible +”.
“But I kept hoping that he would come out of it. Since I learned that he was gone, I’m sick of it”, she adds, before an anonymous voice advises her, in Corsican, not to say too much.
Another woman, even more discreet, warns straight away: “I’m not very friendly with the Colonnas, so don’t ask me anything, I respect their mourning”.