Native industry is in a very languishing state. It is confined to the merest necessaries—the articles indispensable to the common handicrafts, and to sustenance; the women almost everywhere wear the coarse brown Corsican cloth (panno Corso), called also pelvue; the herdsmen prepare cheese, and a sort of cheesecake, called broccio; the only saltworks are in the Gulf of Porto Vecchio. There are anchovy, tunny, and coral fisheries on many parts of the coast, but they are not diligently pursued.
The commerce of Corsica is equally trifling. The principle export is oil, which the island yields so abundantly, that with more cultivation it might produce to the value of sixty millions of francs; it also exports pulse, chestnuts, fish, fresh and salted, wood, dyeing plants, hides, corals, marble, a considerable amount of manufactured tobacco, especially cigars, for which the leaf is imported. The main imports are—grain of various kinds, as rye, wheat, and rice; sugar, coffee, cattle, cotton, lint, leather, wrought and unwrought iron, brick, glass, stoneware.
The export and import are grievously disproportionate. The Customs impose ruinous restrictions on all manufacture and all commerce; they hinder foreigners from exchanging their produce for the produce of the country; hence the Corsicans must pay tenfold for their commodities in France, while even wine is imported from Provence free of duty, and thus checks the native cultivation of the vine. For Corsica is, in point of fact, precluded from exporting wine to France; France herself being a productive wine country. Even meal and vegetables are sent to the troops from Provence. The export of tobacco to the Continent is forbidden.[D] The tyrannical customs-regulations press with uncommon severity on the poor island; and though she is compelled to purchase articles from France to the value of three millions yearly, she sends into France herself only a million and a half. And Corsica yields the exchequer yearly 1,150,000 francs.
Bastia, Ajaccio, Isola Rossa, and Bonifazio are the principal trading towns.
But however melancholy the condition of Corsica may be in an industrial and a commercial point of view, its limited population protects it at least from the scourge of pauperism, which, in the opulent and cultivated countries of the Continent, can show mysteries of a much more frightful character than those of bandit-life and the Vendetta.
For five-and-twenty years now, with unimportant interruptions, have the French been in possession of the island of Corsica; and they have neither succeeded in healing the ever open wound of the Corsican people, nor have they, with all the means that advanced culture places at their disposal, done anything for the country, beyond introducing a few very trifling improvements. The island that has twice given France her Emperor, and twice dictated her laws, has gained nothing by it but the satisfaction of her revenge. The Corsican will never forget the disgraceful way in which France appropriated his country; and a high-spirited people never learns to love its conquerors. When I heard the Corsicans, even of the present day, bitterly inveighing against Genoa, I said to them—"Leave the old Republic of Genoa alone; you have had your full Vendetta on her—Napoleon, a Corsican, annihilated her; France betrayed you, and bereft you of your nationality; you have had your full Vendetta on France, for you sent her your Corsican Napoleon, who enslaved her; and even now this great France is a Corsican conquest, and your own province."
Two emperors, two Corsicans, on the throne of France, bowing her down with despotic violence;—well, if an ideal conception can have the worth of reality, then we are compelled to say, never was a brave subjugated people more splendidly avenged on its subduers. The name of Napoleon, it may be confidently affirmed, is the only tie that binds the Corsican nation to France; without this its relation to France would be in no respect different from that of other conquered countries to their foreign masters. I have read, in many authors, the assertion that the Corsican nation is at the core of its heart French. I hold this assertion to be a mistake, or an intentional falsehood. I have never seen the least ground for it. The difference between Corsican and Frenchman in nationality, in the most fundamental elements of character and feeling, puts a deep gulf between the two. The Corsican is decidedly an Italian; his language is acknowledged to be one of the purest dialects of Italian, his nature, his soil, his history, still link the lost son to his old mother-country. The French feel themselves strange in the island, and both soldiers and officials consider their period of service there as a "dreary exile in the isle of goats." The Corsican does not even understand such a temperament as the French—for he is grave, taciturn, chaste, consistent, thoroughly a man, and steadfast as the granite of his country.
Corsican patriotism is not extinct. I saw it now and then burst out. The old grudge still stirs the bosom of the Corsican, when he remembers the battle of Ponte Nuovo. Travelling one day, in a public conveyance, over the battle-field of Ponte Nuovo, a Corsican sitting beside me, a man from the interior, pulled me vehemently by the arm, as we came in sight of the famous bridge, and cried, with a passionate gesture—"This is the spot where the Genoese murdered our freedom—I mean the French." The reader will understand this, when he remembers that the name of Genoese means the same as deadly foe; for hatred of Genoa, the Corsicans themselves say, is with them undying. Another time I asked a Corsican, a man of education, if he was an Italian. "Yes," said he, "for I am a Corsican." I understood him well, and reached him my hand. These are isolated occurrences—accidents, but frequently a living word, caught from the mouth of the people, throws a vivid light on its state of feeling, and suddenly reveals the truth that does not stand in books compiled by officials.
I have heard it said again and again, and in all parts of the country—"We Corsicans would gladly be Italian—for we are in reality Italians, if Italy were only united and strong; as she is at present, we must be French, for we need the support of a great power; by ourselves we are too poor."
The Government does all it can to dislodge the Italian language, and replace it with the French. All educated Corsicans speak French, and, it is said, well; fashion, necessity, the prospect of office, force it upon many. Sorry I was to meet Corsicans (they were always young men) who spoke French with each other evidently out of mere vanity. I could not refrain on such occasions from expressing my astonishment that they so thoughtlessly relinquished their beautiful native tongue for that of the French. In the cities French is much spoken, but the common people speak nothing but Italian, even when they have learned French at school, or by intercourse with Frenchmen. French has not at all penetrated into the mountainous districts of the interior, where the ancient, venerated customs of the elder Corsicans—their primitive innocence, single-heartedness, justice, generosity, and love of liberty—remain unimpaired. Sad were it for the noble Corsican people if they should one day exchange the virtues of their rude but great forefathers for the refined corruption of enervated Parisian society. The moral rottenness of society in France has robbed the French nation of its strength. It has stolen like an infection into society in other countries, deepened their demoralization, and made incapacity for action general. It has disturbed the hallowed foundation of all human society—the family relation. But a people is ripe for despotism that has lost the spirit of family. The whole heroic history of the Corsicans has its source in the natural law of the inviolability and sacredness of the family relation, and in that alone; even their free constitution which they gave themselves in the course of years, and completed under Paoli, is but a development of the family. All the virtues of the Corsicans spring from this spirit; even the frightful night-sides of their present condition, such as the Vendetta, belong to the same root.