Chap. IX
Environs of Olmeta.—Bandit-Life and the Vendetta—Its Atrocities.—The Population disarmed.—The Bandits exterminated.
Olmeta stands, like most Corsican villages, on the point of a hill, forming one side of an oval basin, the slopes of which are laid out in terraced gardens and vineyards. Here and there, in sheltered nooks, we find plantations of orange-trees, now showing green fruit under their glossy leaves. Some fine chestnut and walnut trees about the place, and the magnificent elms (olme) from which it derives its name, soften the aspect of its bleak, exposed site, and gaunt houses.
Charming as the natural landscapes are in Corsica, one finds most of the villages, however picturesque at a distance, on a nearer approach, a conglomeration of tall, shapeless houses, black and frowning, with windows guarded by rusty iron grilles, and generally unglazed. Altogether, they look more like the holds of banditti than the abodes of peaceful vinedressers; while the filth of the purlieus is unutterable. Throwing open the double casements of the widow’s sanctum, I may not call it boudoir, when I leapt out of bed to enjoy the fresh morning air,—underneath was a noisome dunghill, grim gables frowned on either hand, but beyond was the riant landscape just described. Here truly God made the country, man the town.
While my friend was sketching, I strolled up to the pretty church we had seen by moonlight. Close by is a large, roomy mansion, which belonged to Marshal Sebastiani. He was a native of Olmeta, and, from an obscure origin, arriving at high rank as well as great wealth, partly, I understood, through a brilliant marriage, bought a large property in the neighbourhood, which has been recently sold for 150,000 francs to a French Directeur. I went over the château: to the original mansion the marshal had added a handsome salle, and a lofty tower commanding varied and extensive views towards Fiorenzo and the Mediterranean. My conductor was a gentleman of Olmeta, who accidentally meeting me, proffered his services, pressing me afterwards to take breakfast with him. We had done very well at the widow’s long before, with delicious bread, eggs, apples, and figs, and coffee in the smallest of cups. We brewed our own tea in a bran-new coffee-pot, purchased for that purpose at Bastia. Butter and milk were wanting, but whipped eggs make a very tolerable substitute for the latter.
My new acquaintance informed me that the decree, passed the year before for disarming the whole population, combined with measures for increasing the force of the gendarmerie, and making it highly penal to harbour the bandits or afford them any succour, had been actively and rigorously carried out, and were completely successful. The life of a citizen is as safe in Corsica as in any other department of France. “You may walk through the island,” added my informant, “with a purse of gold in your bosom.”
This was true, I imagine, with regard to strangers, in the worst of times; their security from molestation being nearly allied to the national virtue of hospitality, which is not quite extinct. Nor were the Corsican banditti associated, like those of Italy, for the mere purpose of plunder, though they have heavily taxed the peaceable inhabitants, both by drawing from the poor the means for their subsistence in the woods and mountains, and by levying, under terror, direct contributions in money from the more wealthy inhabitants in the towns and villages. These are, however, but trifling ingredients in the mass of crime for which Corsica has been so painfully distinguished. Would, indeed, that robbery and pillage were the sins of the darkest dye which have to be laid to the account of the Corsican bandit! Most commonly, his hands have been stained with innocent blood, shed recklessly, relentlessly, in private quarrels, often of the most frivolous description, and not in open fight, as in the feuds of the middle ages, not in the heat of sudden passion, but by cool, premeditated murder.
Philippini, the best Corsican historian, who lived in the sixteenth century, states that in his time 28,000 Corsicans were murdered in the course of thirty years. A later Corsican historian calculates that between the years 1683 and 1715, a period of thirty-two years, 28,715 murders were perpetrated in Corsica; and he reckons that an equal number were wounded. The average, then, in their days, was about 900 souls yearly sent to their account by the dagger and the fusil in murderous assaults; besides vast multitudes who fell in the wars.
It was still worse in earlier ages; but those of which we speak were times of high civilisation, and Corsica lay in the centre of it. What do we find in recent times, up to the very year before we visited the island?
I have before me the Procès verbal of the deliberations of the Council General of the department of Corsica for each of the years 1850, ’51, and ’52. From these I gather that 4,300 assassinats had been perpetrated in Corsica since 1821; and, in the three years before mentioned, the “Assassinats, ou tentatives d’assassiner,” averaged ninety-eight annually from the 1st of January to the 1st of August, to which day the annual reports are made up; so that, reckoning for the remaining five months in the same proportion, the list of these heinous crimes is brought up to the fearful amount, for these days, of 160 in each year.
Well might M. le Préfet observe, in his address at the opening of the session of 1851: “La situation du département à cet égard est sans doute profondément triste. Le nombre des crimes n’a pas diminué sensiblement.” So low, however, is the moral sense in Corsica with regard to the sanctity of human life, that these atrocities excite no horror, and the sympathies of vast numbers of the population are with the bandits. They are the heroes of the popular tales and canzoni; one hears of them from one end of the island to the other, round the watchfires of the shepherds on the mountains, in the remote paése, by the roadside. They are the tales of the nursery,—the Corsican child learns, with his Ave Maria, that it is rightful and glorious to take the life of any one who injures or offends him.
To a passionate and imaginative people, these tales of daring courage and wild adventure have an inconceivable charm; though stained with blood, they are full of poetry and romance. Such stories have been eagerly seized upon by writers on Corsica,—they make excellent literary capital. Unfortunately, banditisme forms so striking a feature in Corsican history, that it must necessarily occupy a conspicuous place in a faithful review of the genius and manners of the people. There are doubtless traits of a heroism worthy a better cause, and sometimes of a redeeming humanity, in the lives of the banditti; but one regrets to find, though happily not in the works of the English travellers who have given accounts of Corsica, a tendency to palliate so atrocious a system as blood-revenge. Vendetta, the name given it, has a romantic sound; and it is treated as a sort of national institution, originating in high and laudable feelings, the injured sense of right, and the love of family; so that, with the glory shed around it by a false heroism, it is almost raised to the rank of a virtue.
To take blood for blood, not by the hand of public justice, but by the kinsmen of the slain, was, we are reminded, a primitive custom, sanctioned by the usages of many nations, and even by the laws of Moses. We know, however, that among our Anglo-Saxon ancestors the laws humanely commuted this right of revenge for fines commensurate with the rank of the murdered person. But while the Mosaic law forbad the acceptance of any pecuniary compensation for the crime of manslaughter, and expressly recognised the right of the “avenger of blood” to exact summary vengeance, it provided for even the murderer’s security until he were brought to a fair trial. But Corsica, alas! has had no “Cities of Refuge,” and examples drawn from remote and barbarous times can afford no apology for the inveterate cruelties of a people enjoying the light of modern civilisation and professing the religion of the New Testament.
The vendetta is also represented as a kind of rude justice, to which the people were driven in the long ages of misrule during which law was in abeyance or corruptly administered. There is, no doubt, much truth in this as applied to those times; but the prodigious amount of human slaughter shown in the statistics just quoted, as well as the continuance of this atrocious system to the present day, long after the slightest shadow of any pretence of legal injustice has vanished, seem to argue that the ferocity which has shed such rivers of blood, if not instinctive in the national character, at least found a soil in which it took deep root.
For more than half a century, there can be no question but, under a settled government, strict justice has been done by the ordinary proceedings of the courts of law, in all cases of injury to person or property, submitted to them. But the turbulent Corsicans were ever impatient of regular government—one great cause of their ultimate degradation, not a little connected also with the growth of banditisme; and the failure of justice has not lain with the authorities, but with the population which harbours and screens the criminals, and with the juries who refuse to convict them.7
The only other instance in the present day of crimes similar to those which have been the scourge of Corsica, is found in the case of unhappy Ireland. There, however, the blood-revenge has been mostly confined to cases of supposed agrarian grievances, and the number of victims sacrificed to it is comparatively limited; more innocent blood having been shed in Corsica in a single year, than in Ireland during, perhaps, a quarter of a century.
The vendetta, is also palliated as vindicating wrongs for which no courts of law, however upright, can afford redress. Among the most polished nations, “the point of honour” has been held to justify an injured man for challenging his adversary to mortal combat. But the duel, from its first origin among our Scandinavian ancestors, savage as they were, and through all its forms, whether legalised or treated as felonious, to its last shape in civilised society, has nothing practically in common with the Corsican vendetta. In the one, the appeal to arms has always been tempered by a punctilious chivalry, which recoiled from the slightest unfairness in the attendant circumstances; in the other, the enemy is, if possible, taken unawares, shot down by a cowardly miscreant lurking behind a tree or a rock, or suddenly stabbed without an opportunity of putting himself on his defence. The practice of the vendetta is mere assassination.
Stript of the colouring shed round it by sentiment and romance, banditisme, in its latter days at least, has been a very common-place affair. Great numbers of the Corsicans, too indolent to work, were happy to lead a vagabond life, harbouring in the woods and mountains with a gun on their shoulders, and as ready to shoot a man as a wild beast. “C’est qu’en général,” said the Préfet, in the address already quoted, “ces crimes proviennent moins du banditisme que de la déplorable habitude de marcher toujours armés, par suite de laquelle les moindres rixes dégénèrent si souvent en attentats contre la vie.” One hears continually for what trifles assassinations have been perpetrated; and a recent traveller informs us that his life was threatened for having merely resisted the extortionate demand of his guide to the mountains.
The hardships to which the bandit is exposed in his wild life in the maquis cannot be much greater than those of the shepherd who, from fear or favour, shares with him his chestnuts, his goat’s milk, and cheese. The gendarmes, indeed, are sometimes on his track, but there is stirring adventure in eluding their pursuit, triumph in the ambuscade to which they become victims, glory even in death heroically met. With all its perils and hardships, such a life of lawless independence has its charms; and the bandit knows that his memory will be honoured, and his death, if possible, revenged. But who laments the unfortunate gendarme who falls in these encounters? Who pities the widow and orphans of men as bold, resolute, and enterprising as those against whom they are matched? In the tales of banditti life, the ministers of justice are sbirri, conventionally a term of disgrace; all the sympathy is with the culprit against whom the gendarmerie peril their lives in an arduous service.
The brigands must live by plunder in one shape or another. It is not likely that bands of armed men, the terror of a whole neighbourhood, would be always content with the mere subsistence wrung from the scanty resources of the poor shepherds. Not that they robbed on the highways; it answered better to levy contributions, under pain of death, from such of the defenceless inhabitants as were able to pay them. Mr. Benson tells a story of one of the most celebrated of the bandit chiefs, who levied black mail in the wild districts bordering on the forest of Vizzavona.
“Leaving Vivario, we heard from the lips of the poor curé, that Galluchio and his followers were in the maquis of a range of mountains to our right. The curé was busy in his vineyard when we passed, but as soon as he recognised our French companion, he left his work for a few moments to join us. ‘Sir,’ said he, addressing himself to M. Cottard, ‘I feel myself in imminent danger; Galluchio and his band are in yonder mountains, and only a few evenings ago I received a peremptory message from him, requiring 300 francs, and threatening my speedy assassination should I delay many days to comply with his demand. I have not the money, and I have sent for some military to protect me.’”8
There is reason to believe that these forced contributions have not diminished since Mr. Benson’s journey. We were told of a case in which a wealthy man, having received notice to pay 10,000 francs, under penalty of being shot, was so terrified, that after shutting himself up in his house for a year in constant alarm, his health and spirits became so shattered by the state of continual terror and watchfulness in which he lived, that he sank under it, and was carried out dead. In another case, a young man of more resolute character was called upon for 1000 francs, and having no ready money, was allowed three months to raise it, on giving his bill for security. He armed himself, and went to the appointed rendezvous. The brigand was waiting for him; he made him lay down his arms, and searched him. The young man had filled his pockets with chestnuts, and had contrived to secrete a small pistol about his person, which escaped discovery. The brigand, producing paper and ink, ordered his victim to draw the bill. The young man excused himself on the ground that he was so frightened, and his hand trembled so that he could not write;—he would sign the bill if the other drew it out. The brigand knelt down by the side of a flat stone to do so. Meanwhile the young man walked up and down eating his chestnuts, and throwing the shells carelessly away. Some of them struck the brigand. “What are you doing?” said he, startled. “Eating my chestnuts;” and he took out another handful. Occasionally he stopped and looked down on the bandit while engaged in writing; still, with apparent sang froid, munching his chestnuts. Presently the bill was finished; he pretended to look it over, found some error, which he pointed out, and while the brigand stooped to correct it, drew his concealed pistol and shot him through the head.—The so-called vendetta has shrunk more and more to the level of vulgar crime. It is even notorious that bandits have become hired assassins, employed by others to take off persons against whom they had a grudge,—“mais plus pour amitié que pour argent,” said my informant, giving the fact the most favourable turn.
It seems surprising that such enormities should have been permitted in a European country, at an advanced period of the nineteenth century. Could a strong national government have been established in Corsica—which, however, seems to have been impracticable with so lawless and factious a people—its first duty would have been, as was the case under Pascal Paoli’s administration, to give security to life, coûte que coûte. The successive Governments of France appear to have been too much occupied by their own affairs to pay any regard to the social state of their Corsican department, flagrant as was the disgrace it reflected on them. Perhaps they were impressed with the idea that the passion of revenge, the thirst for blood, were so inherent in the native character, that law and force were alike powerless, and the vendetta could only be extirpated by a moral change more to be hoped for than expected. Thus speaks the Préfet, in his inaugural address of 1851:—“Ici, messieurs, vous en conviendrez, l’administration est sans force. C’est à la religion seule qu’appartient la touchante prérogative de prêcher l’oubli des injures:” and a traveller who spent some time in the island during the year following, gives the result of his observations in the following words:—“There is probably no other means of certainly putting down the blood-revenge, murder, and bandit-life, than culture; and culture advances in Corsica but slowly.”9
The same author says of the general disarming, proposed in 1852: “Whether, and how, this will be capable of execution, I know not. It will cost mischief enough in the execution; for they will not be able to disarm the banditti at the same time, and their enemies will then be exposed, unarmed, to their bullets.” These doubts and forebodings are proved to have been imaginary. It might have been long, indeed, before preaching and moral culture had eradicated evils so deeply rooted in the genius of the people. In such an extreme case, the exercise of a despotic power was required to put an end to the reign of terror and blood which has desolated this fair island for so many centuries. One bold stroke has broken the spell; the measures adopted for the suppression of banditisme have completely succeeded. “The prisons are full,” said my informant; “in the last year, 400 of the brigands have been sentenced or shot down, and as many more driven out of the country: the land is at peace.”
The only wonder is that the experiment was not tried before.