A crumpled copy of the local daily Corse-Matin, badly delivered by the newspaper delivery man, a broken elevator, a cry for better public services… Listeners to “Forum,” the morning program on ICI-RCFM radio, on Tuesday, January 13, uttered familiar laments. But no one mentioned the assassination of Alain Orsoni, who had been shot the previous afternoon during his mother’s funeral in Verres, about 30 kilometers from Ajaccio, Corsica’s largest city. On the terraces of cafes in the “imperial city,” conversations were muted and vague. Guests spoke only in allusions of “the handsome Alain,” who had “cheated death a thousand times,” as one waiter put it, and who led several parallel lives: from his turbulent student days on the far right to the clandestine violence within the FLNC, Corsica’s nationalist paramilitary organization; from organized crime to business ventures, slot machines in Nicaragua, football and, ultimately, politics.
“We are in shock,” said Marie-France Orsoni, the independent mayor of Vera, the town where the crime took place. Onlookers were stunned to see the former nationalist leader fall after being shot in the heart from long range by an attacker who had been hiding in the woods and then fled on foot. A single bullet found at the scene led investigators to suspect the involvement of organized crime, which was confirmed by the involvement of the specialized interregional jurisdiction in Marseille and the national prosecutor’s office for the fight against organized crime.
“This is a horror - people don’t kill themselves in cemeteries, it’s unacceptable,” said Christian Lecca, a relative of Orsoni, who was present at the funeral. A psychological support unit was set up for him and other family members at the Ajaccio hospital that evening. As of Tuesday, no one had contacted the crisis unit. “What is most sacred to us has been desecrated,” said Joseph Peraldi, a long-time nationalist comrade of Orsoni who was convicted. “It’s like a son being thrown on his mother’s coffin,” he added.
“Respect for the mother and for the dead,” two sacred values, have now been trampled on, said Gabriel-Xavier Couglioli, a columnist for the Journal de la Corsea and a friend of the victim. A similar view was expressed by sociologist and publicist Jean Villard, a keen observer of Corsican society, who told Le Monde that it was an act of “exceptional brutality.” All the more so since it took place in the heart of “a masculine, virile, but above all heterogeneous Mediterranean society that is much more complex than clichés suggest.”
Public tributes were rare, except for those from the Ajaccio football club, of which Orsoni was president, and the local branch of the French League for Human Rights, which supported him during hunger strikes in 2010 and 2012, when he was suspected of links to organized crime. The president of the Corsican executive, Gilles Simeoni, paid tribute in a press release to “an influential figure in the contemporary history of Corsican nationalism, with its bright and dark sides,” but at the same time called on the French state to exercise its “sovereign powers.”
For Simeoni, who in 2025 set up a commission to combat the mafia in the Corsican Assembly, the “emotion” was accompanied by “a feeling of concern and disgust shared by Corsicans.” He concluded that the murder “fits into the mafia pressure that is weighing heavily on society.” According to the Interior Ministry, Corsica is the area with the highest crime rate in France. Since 2015, there have been 110 murders, including 50 revenge killings. Violence there takes many forms. Over the past 20 years, 12 elected officials and 17 businessmen have been killed.
The two anti-mafia collectives declined to comment on Orsoni’s murder, but rejected the idea that a new line had been crossed. “We have not lost our moral compass today, because there were strong signals before,” Jerome Mondoloni, a prominent member of the collective, told Massimo Susini. “We remember that in 2011 in Ajaccio, a mother, Angel Manunta, and her daughter, Karla Serena, were targeted by two killers. The men were killed in front of their children in cars. Even earlier, in 1993 in Corte, nationalist elected officials publicly defended the principle of ‘preventive self-defense’ to justify the murder of activist Roberto Soci, who was executed by the FLNC.” The list goes on.
“It’s an unbearably stupid argument: where is the honor among gangsters like the members of the French Connection, who flooded Corsica with cocaine, extortion and murder?” asked Mondoloni, determined to dispel “the myth of a code of honor among criminals.”
The concept owes much to literature and Romantic writers, most notably Prosper Mérimée, who “invented a code of honor for vendetta that never really existed,” said historian Antoine-Marie Graziani, author of “La Geste du peuple” (“The Epic of the People,” 2024). He analyzed Corsican society based on the court archives of Genoa. He argues that Corsican vendetta was not like Albanian vendetta, which was regulated by the Kanun, a medieval customary law. “On the island, women were killed, the murders took place in churches or during funerals, there were no rules — only the bishops forbade rimbecca, the call for revenge,” he said.
Witnessing the “escalation,” Cardinal François Bustillo, bishop of Corsica, interpreted this violence as the legacy of “the Cain syndrome, the law of precise retribution, an eye for an eye, a tooth for a tooth.” The church leader, whose voice carries great weight in Corsican society, told Le Monde that it is necessary to free ourselves from this “morbid and fatalistic culture” in favor of “a culture of peace and hope.”
The text is taken from "Le Monde"
Prepared by: SS
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