“The Atlas of contemporary Corsica”: far from the clichés

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Book. Almost twenty years that no multidisciplinary atlas had been devoted to Corsica. A world in view of the changes that the island has experienced over the past two decades. Surrounded by ten researchers and academics and a formidable cartographer, Alexandre Nicolas, including the National Center for Scientific Research as the review XXI solicit talent, Didier Rey takes up the challenge and offers a scrupulous inventory, which leaves nothing out. In addition to the updates expected on territorial issues, political and economic, often linked to the weight of history, rich developments on societal and cultural changes allow a more open, richer view of the contemporary situation.

Among the clichés, we will be grateful to the book, circulating among the six chapters, to measure the passage from traditional banditry to gangsterism and then to a worrying mafia drift; and, regarding the historical legacy, to clear up misunderstandings.

The memorial rivalry between the figures of Pasquale Paoli and Napoleon Bonaparte, frequently exploited, almost became folkloric when the Great War, often seen as a moment of rupture, is intelligently reduced to what it was: a time of acceleration of a fatal dynamic already underway.

Impoverishment of a society

If history, like the chronology of the island during the Second World War, remains singular, and the link with neighboring Italy finely assessed, the major phenomenon is the inexorable bankruptcy of a clan and clientelist political system, contested by the communists and finally brought down by the nationalists, which makes it possible to understand the recent recomposition and the institutional refoundations in progress.

But the most precious thing, for those who scrutinize the island photography offered here, is the place of individuals, of social and cultural issues. Judiciously differentiating second homes and family homes, realities with antagonistic economic assignments, the authors pinpoint the impoverishment of a society that is now deeply unequal. And the demographic vagaries do not augur well for corrections due to the flow of immigrants, fruits of the implementation of the regional action program (1957) which dedicated the island to tourism and the residential economy, and the inexorable aging

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From a society marked by an image of old and tenacious violence, the atlas rethinks the modern wounds (drugs, single parenthood, deficiencies in sex education) which make the bed of intimate wounds. And if Corsica seems to be the least affected of the French regions by sexual assaults – it is however to be feared that the virilism which marks society resists the full freedom of speech – it is at the forefront for homicides.

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