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Conflict was endemic in Corsican society, and there were many ways of attacking one's enemies and achieving vengeance, short of actual violence or killing. Both behaviour in or vis-à-vis the courts and political action could thus be modes of feuding in the broad sense. Before discussing these in detail, a broader account of these other forms is appropriate. In some areas and more generally among the educated élite later in the nineteenth century, non-violent means of taking revenge predominated. Montherot commented in 1840 that ‘vengeance killings have become very rare in Corte, but enmities continue. A local man told me: “We would like to harm one another, but in practice we no longer do so.”’ The Gazette des Tribunaux noted in 1833 that, in the Balagna, there were ‘no murders as a rule, no bloody brawls, but many actions at law; acts of ruse and chicanery abound, and petty wars are fought not to destroy one's neighbour but simply to ruin him and enrich oneself at his expense. The inhabitants of this region use their pens instead of their daggers and conduct their vendettas with pieces of paper.’ Elsewhere, and particularly in the south, non-violent and violent or violent and less violent means might be used together. While acknowledging, for example, that ‘the spirit of vendetta’ inspired many homicides in the Sartène region, Patin de La Fizelière observed at the end of the eighteenth century that ‘it usually degenerates into trickery of all kinds’, which included using the judicial machinery and making denunciations. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Various aspects of patronage and clientship have been discussed by historians, social anthropologists and political scientists. For the modern Mediterranean world, most emphasis has been placed on the role of patrons as mediators between poor, backward and isolated regions and the central state apparatus. Local patrons with their exclusive outside contacts controlled access to the benefits which the State had to offer in the form of official positions, grants, public works, etc., and they channelled these benefits towards their followers, offering the State and its representatives loyalty, local information and votes in return. The form of the patronage phenomenon was altered with increasing state intervention, the introduction of universal suffrage and the creation of political parties, but these only introduced complexities into the system and added further layers to it; they did not fundamentally change it. Patronage took different forms, depending on the structure and culture of the society in which it was found. Patronage always acted as a counterweight to class consciousness and class conflict, but it could assume an outwardly egalitarian mode where land ownership was widely diffused and economic relationships indirect, or it could act as a buffer system segregating an élite from a labouring class via a stratum of bailiffs, middling petty bourgeois and domestic servants. Patrons, moreover, could be aristocrats or notables of obviously higher standing than their clients (though not in the modern period of different legal status), a situation quite compatible with informal personal ties; or they could be brokers more on a social level with their clients, being superior only in special political skill or knowhow. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It is generally recognized that feuding takes place over long spans of time. But social anthropologists cannot usually describe this essential feature of feuding directly, since they know the societies which they study only in the short term. At best, they may learn the prevailing mythological history of a feud from one or both parties to it, though even this may be missing, as feuding itself dies out and the memory of it is either forgotten or repressed. As a long-term phenomenon and one that was very important in medieval and early modern Europe, feuding is therefore the proper object of historical study. Historians, however, are not usually in practice much better placed as investigators, since the indirect and fragmentary nature of their evidence precludes detailed reconstruction of the chronology of individual feuds. Corsica, however, belongs to that small number of societies where feuding survived into the modern period within the purview of agents of a relatively efficient bureaucratic State. From administrative reports, judicial records and other sources, it is possible to trace the history of feuds in a number of villages from the end of the eighteenth century, thus filling a gap in our general knowledge of how feuds work as well as providing a basis for the more extended treatment of the subject in the chapters which follow. We have selected as examples those villages where the evidence is most complete or where distinctive patterns of feuding may be discerned. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

General accounts of banditry have alluded to its connection with ‘vengeance and family honour’, but this has rarely occupied a central place in their description and analysis. The Corsican example suggests, by contrast, that although banditry had other aspects, its essential significance cannot be appreciated unless it is situated in a society where blood vengeance was operative and the defence of family interest and honour by violence a common imperative. The Corsican example also lends weight to the view elaborated by a number of writers in criticism of Hobsbawm, that, where banditry had a political dimension, it was less as a protest against the rich and the powerful in pursuit of liberty and justice and more as a component of intensified competition among local élites in the circumstances of incorporation into a modern state. In Corsica, too, when banditry did become distanced from the system of blood vengeance and honour, this may be seen as a sign of serious social crisis. This is not the place to deal with the history of banditry in modern Corsica in detail, but some rough chronological outline is required. The struggle against the Genoese in the mid-eighteenth century had, to some extent, fostered banditry, and it continued to be an important phenomenon during the Paoli administration (1755–69), as evidenced by the draconian decrees issued against it. Banditry was again prominent in the resistance to the imposition of French rule after 1768, and during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic periods, when external intervention exacerbated ‘internal dissensions’ and conscription filled the maquis with draft-evaders and deserters. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

No discussion of conflict in Corsica and of the operation of the system of blood vengeance there would be complete without a consideration of the wider notions about death and the dead, which formed the context for homicide. How was death by violence accommodated in funeral ritual and burial practice, and how did it relate to beliefs about the ultimate cause of death and about links with the ancestors? Our data here is often sparse and difficult to interpret, though there is no doubt that death was of central importance and ‘one of the axes of Corsican religious culture’. We may begin on relatively firm ground with a description of funeral ritual, based on the many accounts which exist from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, and dealing in the first instance with the ritual followed where deaths were not caused by violence. When a person was dying, relatives, friends and neighbours were in attendance, and the last rites were administered by a priest. In most parishes there was a priest ‘whose special function was to administer such aid to the moribund’, and much importance was attached to this service. In many villages, when the priest set out with the last sacraments, a bell was rung, ‘and everyone, men and women, accompanied him to the house of the dying person’. News of the death itself was similarly quickly broadcast, by word of mouth, by tolling bells or by blowing horns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Wallace-Hadrill has referred to ‘the natural pulls inherent in a feud-society towards settlement and composition’. In some feuding societies this pull was stronger than in others, and in some it gave rise to formal arbitration machinery that is not so obviously present elsewhere. Corsica clearly belongs to this latter category, and some well-informed observers have even claimed that ‘conciliation in disputes rarely occurred’, and that most vendettas were not peacefully settled. But this is to exaggerate the intransigence of Corsicans. Procedures to prevent and to mediate in conflicts were well-established, and these were applied to feuds. Despite the prevalence of conflict and the positive valuation of violence, peace was also esteemed and appreciated in Corsican culture. It was celebrated as a good in a number of proverbs, for example: ‘With work and peace one lives in plenty.’ In connection with a dispute over the remuneration of the parish priest in the mid-1850s, the municipal council of Penta-di-Casinca stressed not untypically in its deliberations that its aim was always to ensure ‘the public peace’, ‘peace in the village’, ‘public tranquillity’. Peace, moreover, had positive religious sanction in a Catholic society. Certain shrines were dedicated to peace bringing saints. The chapel of San Petro in the mountains south of Zicavo was apparently built around 1500 to commemorate the ending of a feud and is still the object of pilgrimage. The Madonna of Loreto-di-Casinca was called Our Lady of Peace and reconciliations were attributed to her influence as they were to that of Our Lady of Mercy in Ajaccio. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We turn now to the third type of conflict, which coexisted in Corsica with intrafamilial conflict and with conflict between families. In order to understand conflict between communities, it is necessary first to know what constituted a community and how strongly the sense of community was expressed. Some writers have stressed the lack of association in Corsica at the village and higher levels in the face of family loyalty, individualism and patronage, while others have emphasized the force of local solidarity. The truth is that both centripetal and centrifugal forces, tendencies towards unity and towards separation or segmentation, complemented each other in a variety of ways. Conflict between communities, moreover, was only one way in which community was demonstrated and reinforced. More generally, community found expression in the physical lay-out of villages, and in political, economic, social and ritual terms. First and perhaps most obviously, Corsican villages were isolated by the nature of the island's mountainous terrain. They were situated in high valleys, on the slopes of foothills and on spurs. Sometimes they were clustered together, as in the Tallano; and they had been grouped together for ecclesiastical and administrative purposes in parishes or pievi in the pre-Revolutionary period, but, although such ties might be important, villages within sight of each other could be hours apart on foot and unconnected by roads, while rivalries and fission within pievi were constant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Corsica is the third largest Mediterranean island after Sicily and Sardinia. It measures just over 50 miles from east to west and just over 100 from north to south and is situated at about 50 miles from the present Italian and at about 100 from the present French coast. The landscape is dominated by two mountain chains, one smaller of schist in the north-east, the other much larger of granite in the south-west. The average altitude is 1,864 feet, and the highest peak, Monte Cinto, reaches 8,890 feet within 20 miles of the sea. If nature has made Corsica on this grand scale, she has by the same token made it poor. Less than a third of the territory of the island was cultivated through the nineteenth century. Of the remainder, some 20 per cent was forest and some 50 per cent maquis, natural pasture or waste. The most important timber tree was the Corsican pine (laricio), which grows to 150–160 feet and is found at altitudes of over 3,000 feet, together with beech and fir. Maritime pine, found at lower levels, was tapped extensively for resin. Below 1,500 feet there was holm oak, used for charcoal, firewood and tannin, and cork oak. The roots of tree-heather were grubbed up for pipe wood. There were also important chestnut plantations, to which we will return. Though the forests were exploited in these ways, they were difficult of access, even after special roads had been built in the second half of the century, and they were the object of dispute between the State and local communities, attached to their grazing and use rights and opposed therefore to long-term commercial concessions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Every Corsican’, Benson wrote in 1825, ‘… has a set of fixed principles of action, and determinate notions of honour, from which he seldom swerves’. The importance of individual and family honour was stressed in proverbs and perhaps even more in laments for the dead. ‘You were the honour of the pieve / And the object of respect for all your kin’, a sister sang, for example, of her schoolmaster brother from Zicavo. Recommendations, legal pleadings and petitions for clemency also commonly made reference to the honourable status of the families of those on whose behalf they were made. Complementary to and contrasting with the notion of honour (onore) was that of dishonour or shame (bergogna). As elsewhere in the Mediterranean world, shame was both a proper quality of some persons in some situations, for example young girls in the presence of strange men, and also described a derogatory condition, which it was sometimes possible or even imperative to repair by performing an act of honour to cancel out the offence which had caused it. So, at the extreme, ‘dishonour could only be washed away by blood’, i.e. killing. Dishonour or shame in this sense was distinguished from disgrace (disgrazia) or misfortune, which was often the consequence of following the requirements of honour and implied no moral or social disapprobation. Those who had met violent deaths were often referred to as ‘disgraced’ in this sense. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

We turn now therefore to a consideration of conflict generally in nineteenth-century Corsica, of which feuding was only a part. Here we will distinguish conflicts of material interest, conflicts of honour, intrafamilial and inter-community conflict. Writing in 1841, Léon Griffon, a former teacher at the college of Calvi, isolated the unremitting pursuit of material interest as a particular Corsican trait, linking it to the island's poverty and lack of natural resources: ‘Corsicans need to practise the strictest economy … and they have thus become sordidly materialistic to the point that they will never agree to anything unless they see an advantage in it for themselves.’ Other observers shared this view and pointed to the intense competitiveness which reigned at all levels of Corsican society. Again and again, trial summaries make the point that conflicts arose from ‘reasons of interest’ or ‘differences of interest’, and causing deliberate damage was probably the commonest form of offence against property all through the nineteenth century. As we have seen, moreover, attacks on material resources were part and parcel of feuding. ‘How many affronts were inflicted on you!’, a wife told her dead husband in a lament. ‘Walls pulled down, / Grange set on fire, / Trees cut down … / Then they killed your oxen / Asleep in the straw; / Alas, it was on that day … / [that you said] “I have had enough. / The blood of my oxen / Will be avenged”’. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]