The CorsAfrique: The Corsican milieu in Africa, between business and raison d’Etat

Compared to its Sicilian counterpart, the Corsican “Mafia” has historically attracted little attention from scholars and decision-makers. Nevertheless, despite clear differences in the level of bureaucratization and of violence employed with respect to the Sicilian mob, in the latter half of the twentieth century criminal organizations from Corsica managed to create networks of power and business which penetrated and partly influenced the French economic and political system. Even if these events never clearly pointed to the existence of structural cooperation between them and (a part of) the French state, the economic activities pursued by the Corsican milieu laid the foundations for the development of a transnational network—built on family ties and customary allegiances—able to spread throughout the whole French Empire. In Africa in particular, these racketeers found a fertile ground for their activities. Building on these premises, this article aims to analyse to what extent Corsican criminal organizations shaped the evolving relations between France and its former African colonies. In the existing literature, the term FrançAfrique designates a form of neocolonial dominion based on personal ties and clientelar chains involving the Franco-African political and economic elite. With this article we show that this informal system of power created a hierarchical relation of dependence, where private/corporate and national interests are mixed and blurred, and actors such as Corsican gangsters are contemporarily criminal entrepreneurs, informal state agents, and gatekeepers, influencing perceptions and interests of both French and African decisionmakers. In this sense, the Corsican milieu is a crucial case, yet largely underexplored, for exploring how practices and forms of control employed in informal/illegal domains can influence and redefine states’ interactions and chains of authority in low-institutionalized contexts