Rousseau and Revolution

38 Rousseau and Revolution
insisted, as Fanon on postcolonial states would later, that the newly independent
Corsicans should not aim to emulate the culture of their former colonizers,
but to lead a concerted national effort to identify and cultivate its
indigenous resources, most centrally its people. This would require Corsicans
treating Corsica as its own economic and political center, rather than as an
outpost or appendage to the political economy of the mother country of its
colonizers. One indispensable resource for this project was that Corsicans
were not decadent; they did not display the individual and collective vices of
their supposedly more civilized Western counterparts. This, for Rousseau,
meant that they remained spirited. Still, this strength could easily collapse
into widespread banditry, especially if people grew impatient with the project
of building a legitimate democratically governed state. Rousseau argued
that they did not need to become different from how they were but to preserve
this in the absence of a shared enemy that united them across differences.
They could do so by directing their collective forces toward maintaining
their independence (Rousseau, 1986, 125).
Rousseau insisted that the characterization of Corsica as a lumpenproletarian
island of people more inclined to be thieves than hard-working citizens
obscured the origins of these predilections in the culture of colonialism
itself. He wrote,
Who would not be seized with horror against a barbarous Government
that, in order to see these unfortunate people cutting each other’s throats,
did not spare any effort for inciting them to do so? Murder was not punished;
what am I saying, it was rewarded [ . . . ] [I]t had as its goal [ . . . ]
keeping them from rising up, from being educated, from becoming rich.
Its goal was to get all produce dirt-cheap from the monopolies of its offi -
cials. It took every measure for draining the Island of money in order to
make it necessary there, and in order always to keep it from returning to it.
(Ibid., 137)
In other words, Corsicans had come to deplore labor not only because it
was, under colonial conditions, a pure loss to them, but also because it was
a seemingly permanent and destructive sentence. It was from this condition
that Rousseau now hoped the Corsicans could emerge. He recommended a
temporary isolationism that would enable the island to increase the internal
interdependence of its regions, making a culture of cultivating and depending
on their own forces (ibid., 125).
Rousseau underscored the appropriateness of different governmental
forms to different environments and argued that such a rustic place was