Corsica, the island that gave France its emperor

Napoleon Bonaparte was born in Ajaccio on the 15th of August 1769, in a modest house that still stands near the town's cathedral. The timing matters more than it might first appear: the Republic of Genoa had ceded Corsica to France only the year before, ending centuries of Genoese rule and a long Corsican struggle for independence under the local leader Pasquale Paoli. Had Bonaparte been born a decade earlier, he would have been Corsican rather than French by any citizenship a Paris bureaucrat would have recognised, a detail that has fed Corsican arguments about identity and autonomy ever since, not always comfortably.

An island Genoa fortified and then lost anyway

Corsica's coastline is still ringed with the evidence of who wanted it before France did. Squat round watchtowers, built by the Genoese from the sixteenth century onwards to warn of Barbary pirate raids and, later, to keep watch on their own restive Corsican subjects, stand on headlands the length of the coast, more than eighty of them still recognisable today. Genoa held the island, on and off, for close to five centuries, but never entirely subdued it: Pasquale Paoli led a Corsican republic that governed most of the interior from 1755 until the French takeover in 1769, and is remembered on the island today as something close to a founding father, with a considerably more complicated relationship to Napoleon, the Corsican who went on to rule the country that absorbed his homeland.

The scrub that gave the Resistance its name

Away from the coast, much of Corsica's interior is covered in a dense, fragrant tangle of low shrubs, myrtle, rockrose and wild thyme among them, known as the maquis. It is nearly impenetrable in places and famously good cover: during the Second World War, French Resistance fighters who took to the hills, in Corsica and on the mainland alike, became known as maquisards, a term drawn directly from this landscape and still current in French to describe anyone living or operating outside the law. Corsica itself has the distinction of being the first French department liberated in the war, in the autumn of 1943, largely through the efforts of Corsican Resistance fighters and Free French forces landed by submarine, well over half a year before D-Day.

A geography that explains the temperament

Corsica is often described, not always kindly, as more mountainous than an island its size has any right to be: a granite spine runs almost its full length, with peaks over 2,700 metres rising within a short distance of Mediterranean beaches, a combination that gives the island both its skiing, briefly, in winter and its reputation for producing a population as rugged as the terrain. The distance between the coastal towns the French administration governed and the mountain villages that kept their own dialect, customs and, for a long time, their own law, goes some way to explaining why Corsican identity has always sat a little apart from the rest of France, in language, cuisine and a continuing, if now largely peaceful, movement for greater autonomy.

Calling at Corsica

Corsica turns up on a number of Mediterranean sailings, usually calling at Ajaccio, Napoleon's birthplace, or the smaller southern port of Propriano. Fred. Olsen's South of France & Corsica, seventeen nights from Liverpool, calls at Ajaccio between the Spanish coast and the French Riviera, and Amalfi Coast, Italian Riviera & Corsica, eleven nights from Alicante, takes in the island alongside Italy's Cinque Terre.

The longer Adriatic with Corsica & the Amalfi Coast, twenty-one nights from Alicante, folds a Corsican call into a wider tour of the western and central Mediterranean, from Croatia to Montenegro.

A single day ashore rarely reaches beyond Ajaccio itself, but that is enough to see Bonaparte's birthplace and to understand, from the watchtowers visible along the coast road out of town, an island that was defending itself against outsiders for a very long time before it produced one who went on to rule half of Europe.