August 21, 1975, Aléria village, on the great plain of the eastern Corsican coast. About thirty armed men, led by Edmond Simeoni, the father of Gilles Simeoni, the current island chief executive, occupy a wine cellar allocated by the French State to a returnee from Algeria in a vast program of development of Corsica which they intend to denounce. The French authorities storm and two gendarmes are killed in the brief firefight. Edmond Simeoni surrenders, gun in hand. His companions, including Léo Battesti, emerged free and without prosecution from what is considered the founding act of contemporary Corsican nationalism.
Almost fifty years later, we find Léo Battesti on the heights of Venaco, a remote village in the center of Corsica, that of the mountains, surrounded by peaks tinted with a cap still white with snow in this month of March. He shrugs and blows under the looming rain-laden clouds. A reaction to the many graffiti lining the road just traveled from Corte, the city chosen as the capital by Pascal Paoli, philosopher of enlightenment considered “the father of the Corsican nation”. “Gloria to Yvan”, “IFF” (I Francesi fora, [Les Français dehors]), “FLNC”. Of the FLNC, he was nevertheless one of the founding members and one of the leaders.
Léo Battesti without his balaclava, the first face of the FLNC
But at 70, Léo Battesti takes a stern look at his past commitment: “We were a bit like Corsican Khmers,” he says, seated at a cafe in the commercial area of a hypermarket that has nothing to envy. to those on the continent. For what results? Have we put an end to real estate speculation? In the far south, there are today 42,000 inhabitants for 43,000 second homes. And yet more than 10,000 bombs were planted. »
It was one of them, in 1978, that earned him a nine-year prison sentence. It was to target a tax center, under construction in Bastia. But the police appear as the team prepares to install the device. Léo Battesti and his companions fled in his Renaut 12. “I knew I was identified by my car,” he rewinds, both elbows on the table, his glasses hanging from his sturdy neck.
The nascent armed struggle movement immediately organizes a press conference during which Léo Battesti takes off his balaclava, thus becoming the first face of the FLNC. His run ends three months later. “I was stashed in a disused building of the gendarmerie,” he laughs. He was imprisoned in the central Melun where he left in 1981, thanks to the amnesty granted to political prisoners by François Mitterand shortly after his election.
When he left, he took over the leadership of the CCN (consults nationalist committees), a legal showcase political party for a growing FLNC and the Ribombu (“l’écho”, in French), its press organ. In 1986, he was elected to the regional council from which he resigned in 1992. He then called, alone and first, for the self-dissolution of the FLNC: “I had a presentiment of the internal war within the movement which was about to break out. The early 1990s marked the split of the organization into two main groups (the historic FLNC channel and the usual FLNC channel) and the emergence of a deadly internal struggle against a background of power struggle.
“Within the FLNC itself, some, very few, were able to drift”
“One evening, in the premises of the newspaper, 150 meters from the Bastia police station, all that Corsica had of terrorists gathered”. An argument breaks out, the weapons are drawn. “That evening, some only pushed back the time of their death,” he now understands. The following years carried away twenty of his former companions in the settling of accounts, regrets Léo Battesti.
Since then in withdrawal, the former executive of the FLNC devotes himself to his passion for chess which he developed during his stay in prison. He became president of the Corsican league, then vice-president of the French chess league. He creates his professional activity in IT and printing and is saddened to see the “mafia drift” underway on his island. “There is a political porosity between the mafia gangs and the functioning of Corsica,” he believes. From “mafia gangs”, pouring into extortion and trafficking of all kinds, the police services have counted 25 of them according to a report showing an almost geographical division of the island. Léo Battesti finds there a certain extension of his fight for the self-determination of Corsica. He participated in the creation in 2019 of the collective Maffia nò, a vita iè (No to the mafia, yes to life) and pleads for the establishment of an “Italian legal arsenal”.
This “mafia drift”, he concedes however having been able to contribute to create it: “Among the causes, we will not rule out that within the FLNC itself, some, very few, could drift. Because inevitably when hundreds of people wear balaclavas, a gray area is created. »
“In Corsica, we have a lot of respect for the dead”
At the time of the examination of conscience, Léo Battesti does not however consider himself as a repentant. He looks at the ongoing discussions with the State on the institutional future of Corsica with “relative optimism” and is now outside the political field. In one sentence, he sweeps away the renewed activity of violent clandestine movements observed in the last year since the death of Yvan Colonna: “It has nothing to do with it. Today there is no massive strategy”. He demonstrated, however, after the assassination of the activist. “I have a form of love and affection for those who made this fight”, he explains before adding: “You know, in Corsica, we have a lot of respect for the dead. Perhaps even more than for the living”. The walls of the island, populated by the face of Yvan Colonna, frozen by stencil paintings, will not contradict this.
A veteran position that many refuse to comment on. Pierre Poggioli, another former leader of the FLNC believes for his part that “for a long time, [leurs] steps have moved away”. “Many today don’t even remember him as an independence activist and if some within the FLNC had a Marxist-Leninist political base, he is a liberal”, analyzes Thierry Dominici. “His fight was first of all on the cultural level”, continues the political scientist specializing in Corsican nationalism.
A cultural fight led by his generation which has shed light on Pascal Paoli who gave his name to the University of Corsica, located in Corte and created in 1981. “Everyone now claims Paolism”, has noted the researcher. “Paoli? Until my high school, I had never heard of him, ”replies Léo Battesti, who however considers that this end does not justify the means employed.
“Revolutionary logic was a monstrous error”, still poses the Corsican who defines himself today as “reformist”. Without however succeeding in throwing out his baby with the bathwater of the past years: “We had the wind of history with us. We have opened minds. Starting from the armed struggle box to end up as an opponent of all forms of violence, the career of the former FLNC executive is reminiscent in certain respects of a madman’s diagonal. A piece that would have crossed the entire political spectrum without changing color.