Corsican Brothers? Metropolitan Ethnic Minorities, Colonialism, and National Identity among the Corsicans of French Indochina

This paper examines how minority ethnic and national identities are shaped and altered through participation in colonial projects. In particular, I argue that Corsicans in colonial Saigon (and French Indochina more broadly) simultaneously developed a stronger sense of Corsican ethnic identity and French national identity at a moment that these two identities were coming to be seen as increasingly antithetical in the metropole. Focused on the 1920s and 1930s, this paper explores this dynamic by considering the disproportionate employment of Corsicans at lower levels of the colonial administration (especially the military, police, and penitentiary service), the relatively high percentage of Corsicans among Saigon’s European population, and Saigon’s modernity relative to Corsica. Above all, this paper foregrounds the colonial relationship between Corsicans and Vietnamese in shaping the former’s sense of ethnic and national identity as the legal and social privileges afforded Corsicans on account of their race and nationality contrasted to the marginalization they experienced due to their identity back in the metropole. This paper takes as a focal point two prominent Corsicans, a prison guard who climbed the social ladder to become a prominent Saigon hotelier, and a communist lawyer whose advocacy for Vietnamese political prisoners jumpstarted his political career in the metropole. Close analysis of these two cases will demonstrate how active participation in French colonial projects and racial hierarchies provides a means through which Corsicans identified more strongly with both their Corsican ethnic minority identity and French national identity while providing insights into ways that other metropolitan minority identities shifted in other empires through participation in colonial projects.