Word: corsicas
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...good pun and a useful one in a century overburdened with Bonapartes. Like a swarm of corpulent drones they rose from the thickets of Corsica and fell with a sodden thump on the sinecures of empire. Noisy, ugly, greedy, provincial, quarrelsome, ostentatious, lewd and downright criminal, they terrorized Europe off and on from 1801 to 1870 and frightened Napoleon himself almost as much as the Grand Alliance did. All through his reign they ridiculed, insulted and cheated him, and when he needed them most a number of them cynically betrayed him to his enemies. Of all modern dynasties, the Bonapartes...
...decision echoed across France. By last week, neighbors of airports in Bastia, Corsica, and Paris had filed suit, and Air France feared its legal problems were headed into the sacrebleu yonder. Said one official: "In no time at all we are likely to be sued for millions of dollars all over the country." As for the Blue Bird's owner, things were looking up. Not only did he seem likely to get a good hunk of the $400,000 he had sued for, but he had finally succeeded in selling two more apartments-to deaf...
When he retired to the granitic little island domain of Caprera, between Corsica and Sardinia (much of it paid for by English friends), Garibaldi dreamed of a Shelleyan end-to be burned, like the poet, on the beach. When he died in 1882, he was instead given the usual Christian burial on Caprera. Nature supplied the Garibaldian touch. A melodramatic storm came up, and the vast granite block that now covers his body cracked and broke...
...against the French mainland (which Corsicans still call le continent) is nearly as keen as that against the repatriates. Complains Jean Zuccarelli, 33, a philosophy teacher turned farmer: "France can provide irrigation for Communist countries, can pour aid into North Africa, but hasn't enough money to help Corsica." This is not quite true: Somivac, the French-supported farm agency, has built six dams and developed 104 farms in the past six years at a cost to Paris of some $20 million. In an effort to placate the locals, Somivac last week nervously assigned four additional farms to native...
...Corsica's angry natives want more than tourism. "We want autonomy," says Philosopher-Farmer Zuccarelli, "with our own Parliament and our own budget." A delegation of Corsican officials, recently returned from a ten-day tour of autonomous Sicily and Sardinia (which still retain ties with Italy), felt the same. "Autonomy is the essential ingredient," said one. "This is not just evolution, but revolution," said another. Paris doubtless was recalling the words of Corsica's favorite son. Regarding Corsican separatism, Napoleon himself took a realistic view: "All these notions of national independence for a little island like Corsica!" exclaimed...