THE BATTLE OF IDEAS – The autonomy of the Isle of Beauty risks accentuating the archipelagoization of France. But the anguish of the disappearance of the Corsicans, like that of peripheral France, is legitimate.
Autonomy: the word is written for the first time in black and white in a draft statute, intended to be engraved in the marble of the Constitution. Nearly twenty-six years ago, Jean-Pierre Chevènement, then Minister of the Interior, slammed the door of the Jospin government for less than that. In a column published in Libérationtitled “Let’s not introduce racism and discrimination into the Constitution”the constitutionalist Benjamin Morel and the CNRS researcher Patrick Weil see in this draft constitutional law a profound rupture in the French republican order. At the center of their criticism: the recognition of a “historical, linguistic, cultural community, having developed a singular link to its land”.
Rightly, the two authors are worried about a dangerous precedent which would open the way to institutionalized communitarianism. In a French society already archipelized, there is every reason to think that, if adopted, this project…
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