In the shadow of the heroes: Marc Biancarelli's answer to the Corsican national myth

The Double Island: Submission and Self-Assertion

Marc Biancarelli: Roman national (Paris: Éditions Actes Sud, 2026). [quote as RNA]

The trout beneath the riverbanks, which one can grasp with bare hands, having learned a patience no stranger possesses—that is the first lesson of this island: it reveals itself only to those who adopt its pace. The maquis, which signifies absolute hostility to intruders, is a second home for the locals, a refuge that for centuries was the only sovereignty no one could take away. The chestnut forests provide flour and winter meat, the oaks fatten the pigs, the high pastures feed the herds in summer and stand empty in autumn—a vertical economy in which every altitude contributes and no surplus is produced that is not immediately needed. The mountain passes, through which two men cannot walk side by side, are bottlenecks, but also protection; the rivers, in which the dead process at night, separate not only valleys, but worlds. Above it all lies a sky that in July can be heavy with fog and thunderstorms, and below, the same chestnut flour soup simmers on every campfire. This landscape has shaped its inhabitants: taciturn, resilient, with a local knowledge inscribed in their very being that no map can replace. They know the cherry tree where the deer roosts at night and the rock behind which one sleeps as if under a blanket of silence. What they don't know, they rightly fear—and what they do know, they defend with a self-assurance that appears from the outside as stubbornness but is understood within as loyalty. The Corsican language that names all of this is older than Rome and carries the syllables of the landscape within itself.

The Corsica that Marc Biancarelli depicts in RNA is a society in a state of perpetual structural crisis, created by external domination but sustained by internal division. In 1564, the year the novel is set, the island has been under Genoese control for two centuries; the population of the Deux Pièves lives in a subsistence economy that leaves no room for political self-determination but has produced a wealth of local loyalties, ritual practices, and linguistic resources that cannot be broken by external power. Against this image of protracted powerlessness rises the rebellion of Sampieru Corso, which provides the historical framework for the novel and poses the central question: What emerges when a society without state institutions attempts to become a nation? Biancarelli's answer is ambiguous and provocative: the nationalism that emerges in the novel is not the result of a shared project, but rather the temporary overlay of private enmities, personal loyalties, and charismatic submission to a single figure. The island defeats Genoa at Caccia and loses at Penta because it makes the same mistakes as always—arrogance, treason, and the inability to distinguish its own internal enemies from its external ones. The book does not address this issue as a specific historical question of the 16th century, but as a universal reflection on national myths, violence, and the conditions under which collective identity arises or fails—and it does so with an urgency that makes its title readable as a provocation: a "roman national" suggests the genre of the foundation narrative; Biancarelli's novel is its critical counterpart.

Corsica is today a "Collectivité de Corse," a territorial entity with special status within France. Since 2018, the two former départements (Haute-Corse and Corse-du-Sud) and the regional administration have been merged into a single institution based in Ajaccio. This grants more autonomy than a typical French region, but significantly less than the independence Corsican nationalists have been demanding for decades. Specifically, this means that Corsica has its own elected assembly (Assemblea di Corsica) with its own executive council, can set its own priorities in certain areas such as culture, education, and spatial planning, but does not possess its own legislative power in the strict sense—laws are still made by the National Assembly in Paris. Corsican is promoted as a language (bilingual signage, instruction in schools), but does not have official status on par with French because the French constitution generally makes multilingualism at the state level difficult (Article 2: "The language of the Republic is French").

Politically, the island has been governed since 2015 by a nationalist-autonomist coalition under Gilles Simeoni, which regularly demands greater autonomy – from tax sovereignty to the constitutional entrenchment of a special status. Paris has responded in recent years with cautious negotiations: in 2023/24, under President Macron, talks took place regarding a constitutional autonomy clause for Corsica, which would grant the island broader legislative powers – a process that has been slow and has repeatedly stalled. The tension that Biancarelli's novel describes historically – loyalty to a foreign protecting power versus its own sovereignty, language as an anchor of identity versus state unification – is therefore by no means merely a thing of the past. In a more domesticated and non-violent form, it remains the political core of the Corsican question to this day.

The title "Roman national" is a self-imposed trap. In French, the term denotes an established historiographical concept: the selective master narrative in which heroes, victims, and turning points are arranged in such a way that a community recognizes and legitimizes itself within them. Since the debates surrounding Nicolas Sarkozy's call for a renewed "roman national" (2007), the term has become politically charged—it represents an attempt to instrumentalize history for the purpose of identity formation, to smooth over complexity in favor of recognizability. Biancarelli's choice is not accidental: he writes in French about Corsica, from a tradition in which the "nation corse" has repeatedly been pitted against the "nation française." The title names the genre the novel promises to fulfill—and then fails to do so on every level. The subtitle "Rumanzu naziunali," the Corsican directly beneath the French, introduces the first point of confusion: Which nation? In which language? For whom? Corsica doesn't appear as a national unity forged in the struggle against Genoa, but rather as a segmented society that briefly unites and immediately disintegrates. Sampieru, the potential national hero, is a woman-killer, illiterate, and a deeply ambivalent figure. The only character the novel ultimately allows to speak is a woman who leaves the country.

Added to this is the ambiguity of the adjective itself: "national" can describe the nation, but also the national as an attribute, as a structural quality. In this reading, the title asks: What is national about this story? The answer is sobering—the national is repetition. The patterns that Biancarelli describes for 1564—internal division, brief unity against the enemy, betrayal, institutional failure, the cost borne by the poor and women—are not historical peculiarities of the 16th century. They are what repeats itself. "Roman national" is, in this sense, indeed a national novel: not because it celebrates the nation, but because it exposes its structural conditions.

The Corsican translation, "Rumanzu naziunali," shifts the meaning one last time. In Corsican, "naziunali" is not charged with the same political debates; it is older, less discredited, closer to the root of "nazione" in the sense of origin, descent, birth—"natio." The title then means: a novel about that from which one is born. Not about the state, not about the flag, but about being born into a language, a soil, a first circle of loyalties. This is the affirmative side of the title, lying beneath the critical one: there is something worth preserving—not the heroic tale, but Corsican itself, the syllables that are older than Rome, the lament that Carrancione improvises for Baldassaru. The title simultaneously holds open the possibility of deconstruction and preservation, critique and love—a book that does not fulfill the genre it claims to, and that, precisely because of this, comes closer to what it loves than any foundational narrative ever could.

Three arcs of a story

The novel begins with Fioravante's childhood, born in 1544 in Arcinivala, a mountain village in the Deux Pièven. With a few archival documents—a baptismal register written in half-Corsican Latin—the narrator grounds the fictional biography in documentary evidence. The first chapter follows the ten-year-old Fioravante trout fishing with young Catalina, depicts the arrival of a recruiting drummer enlisting men for the uprising, the departure of his older brother Filippone, and finally a Barbary raid on the village, during which Fioravante kills for the first time. His father smears his face with the blood of the slain man: an initiation rite that anchors the narrative from the outset in the realm of pre-Christian bodily practices. The second chapter introduces his uncle Carrancione as a scapulomante: he reads the future from the shoulder blade of a freshly killed animal and describes a cosmology of the "culpadori," the wrongly baptized, who can mediate between the living and the dead. In the third chapter, Fioravante has grown into a man; he and Catalina—pejoratively nicknamed "Catalinaccia" in the village because of her strong will—begin their love affair in a dilapidated sheepfold; together they dream of the New World, whose existence a wandering minstrel had proclaimed with Amerigo Vespucci's account, "Mundus Novus." A bout of malaria plunges Fioravante into hallucinations in which he lands in America and makes love to an indigenous woman—a dream foreshadowing of Catalina's later life.

The second narrative arc encompasses the events of 1564. The historical chronicler Anton Pietro Filippini from Vescovato describes Sampieru's arrival, his brutality, and an initial skirmish victory against the Genoese. In the fifth chapter, Catalina, her cousins, and a young maid are ambushed and raped by a Corsican band of horsemen led by Odoardo while returning from a trading trip. Simultaneously, Filippone returns to the village—he had been traveling through Algeria and Constantinople for years as Sampieru's soldier and secret agent. The parallel montage of celebration and trauma defines the structure of the entire second part: Catalina and Fioravante's personal revenge runs parallel to the national liberation struggle, without ever becoming one with it. The delegation's journey to Valderone (Chapter 6) to demand justice for the raped women fails due to institutional indifference; the men from Arcinivala subsequently join Sampieru's side. On the way to the camp at Caccia, Filippini pauses and asks why men wage war—and gives an answer that undermines any heroic subtext: they follow personal feelings of revenge, brotherhood, and a thirst for adventure, not ideals. The victory at Caccia on July 11, 1564 (Chapter 8) costs Father Baldassaru his life; Catalina kills one of her tormentors; Odoardo escapes. After a short campaign into southern Corsica (Chapter 9)—in which Catalina and Fioravante argue about war and love and finally separate—the Corsican army suffers a crushing defeat at Penta (Chapter 10): Filippone falls, and Fioravante and Arrigucciu escape into the mountains.

The third arc encompasses the long aftermath. In the eleventh chapter, Filippini recounts the further course of the war years up to Sampieru's death in 1567. Catalina, whom he has employed as his housekeeper, listens to the chronicler read aloud to her from the "Mundus Novus": the text, which as a child she only knew by hearsay, is now physically tangible, and the scene between the illiterate woman and the learned priest is the poetic core of the novel. The epilogue (chapter 12) shows Fioravante and Arrigucciu in Bastia in 1575: they are bringing the heads of Odoardo and Grisgione to the governor's palace and collecting the offered reward. Catalina has long since disappeared—to Bastia, then onto a ship bound for America. She lands in Darién, rises to become "Doña Caterina," and runs a large encomienda on the outskirts of Lima. The novel explicitly leaves open the question of whether she considers the fate of her own subjects.

Genus hybrid as a self-contradiction

RNA is a complex hybrid genre that simultaneously invokes and juxtaposes at least three literary traditions. As a historical novel, it follows the convention of populating a documentary setting—Corsica in 1564, the Sampieru Corso uprising, the battles of Vescovato, Caccia, and Penta—with fictional commoners whose fates reflect these major events from a perspective that bypasses historical accounts. As a "national novel" in the sense of 19th-century European literature, it promises a foundational narrative: the story of a community that constitutes itself as a nation through struggle and sacrifice. It systematically breaks this promise from the very first page, demonstrating that the community does not constitute itself but is, at the moment of greatest unity, simultaneously at its most deeply divided. Finally, as an anti-hero novel, it denies its characters a clear separation of good and evil: Sampieru is a freedom fighter and a murderer of women; Odoardo is a rapist and a rebel; Catalina kills and leaves; Fioravante avenges and loses everything.

The novel's language is one of its true achievements. Biancarelli writes a literary French of great density—paratactic in the battle scenes, long-winded and essayistic in the reflective passages, and interspersed with Corsican interjections that are not translated but explained. "The language tells of origins, it tells of development, and it also tells of the refinement of what some consider archaisms." ¹ This bilingualism presents Corsican as an undertone that is always present, that resonates through the French without ever being fully assimilated – just like the island itself. This becomes particularly clear in the central scene of the tenth chapter, when Mother Lisandrina holds the exhausted Catalina in her arms and says: ² —and the narrator comments: “Words are the true land, language alone is the nourishing soil, and the enemy knows this, who has always tried or will try to defame or weaken it. The empires will—as always—make the warriors into the traitors of tomorrow; they will do so with ease and certainty, but language is the unchanging source of all resistance because it is strengthened by an indomitable transcendence, because it is nourished by maternal tenderness.” ³ This sentence is the poetics of the novel: language is not an instrument of the nation, but its true bearer – and its last protection.

The autopoetological dimension of the text is also evident in the figure of Filippini. As a historical chronicler who reflects on his own function and admits his own cowardice, he is an embedded image of writing under pressure: “Having unfortunately witnessed the events that shook Corsica in this century, I made myself its chronicler.” ⁴ He is a witness because he has no other choice, and a writer because he survived. Biancarelli, who himself taught Corsican for many years and founded his own Corsican-language publishing house, imbues this figure with a self-reflective element: What does it mean to write about a people who, in the history of writing, have mostly been the object and rarely the subject?

The polyphony of historiography

The novel employs a multi-layered narrative system that does not produce a stable instance. Three voices are distinguishable: an omniscient narrator in the present, who accompanies the characters in the présent historique and occasionally addresses them directly: "I am not speaking here about the peasantry, nor am I speaking about Europe five centuries ago. I am speaking of something much older." ⁵The historical chronicler Filippini, who recounts past events in the first person singular, thereby revealing his own perspective as limited; and the free indirect discourse of the characters, especially Catalina and Fioravante, which occasionally shifts into free indirect narration. This polyphony is not arbitrary: it corresponds to the novel's thesis that there is no single authoritative version of Corsican history. Filippini's voice provides the documented external perspective; the authorial voice provides the emotional experience; the characters' free indirect discourse provides what no chronicle records. None of these three registers is privileged, and this is a conscious poetic choice: "Roman national" writes national history as a fundamentally polyphonic text.

The narrative voice becomes particularly clear in the moments when it addresses itself. In the first chapter, it states: "When it is written that witches bent over his cradle, or when it is said that pagan sacrifices accompanied his birth, then we must assume that these statements contain no exaggeration whatsoever. They are nothing other than the truths of a world that once was." ⁶ The narrator vouches for his characters' magical worldview without ironizing it – but he writes in the subjunctive mood of tradition. This is a precise epistemic position: the novel does not declare the archaic worldview to be true, but to be valid – as the truth of these people, which is inaccessible to historiography.

Bonding and detachment: the spatial arrangement of the figures

The constellation of characters follows a concentric structure of loyalty. At its center is the couple Fioravante and Catalina—two characters from the same village who share the same experiences but draw opposing conclusions. Fioravante embodies attachment: to his brother, to his father, to the Terres family, to revenge. Catalina embodies detachment: she breaks free from every bond that destroys her—first from the perpetrators, then from the village, then from Fioravante, and finally from the island itself. The fact that both survive in the end—he in Bastia, she in Lima—and that the novel gives Catalina the final scene, is not a neutral decision: it privileges the female survival principle of mobility over the male principle of fidelity.

Around this center are grouped the male figures of the loyalty chain: Filippone (brother, military man, traveler), Baldassaru (father, physical strength, earth), Carrancione (uncle, seer, Maquis), Arrigucciu (friend, shadow, survivor). This line represents different forms of male identity in this society—all with different resources, all trapped in the same system of the first circle. Sampieru and Filippini provide the historical framework: one as the embodiment of charismatic violence, the other as the figure of written witness. Between these poles, all the novel's meanings emerge.

The spatial structure corresponds to a semantic hierarchy. The Terres—the Deux Pièves, the Arcinivala—are the space of origin: archaic, enclosed, self-sufficient, protected and protective. The Niolu and the South are the space of struggle—open, without natural fortresses, deadly for infantry in open terrain. Bastia is the space of institutions—Genoese, hierarchical, and corruptible. America is the space of transcendence—unattainable for Fioravante, attainable for Catalina. This structure follows a movement from the enclosed to the open, which runs parallel to the plot: the further the characters move from the Terres, the more dangerous and simultaneously freer they become. Catalina is the only one who takes the final step and survives.

Pace as a value judgment: the temporal layers of storytelling

The novel unfolds over a compressed period of approximately two years (1563–1565) for its main body, framed by a prologue (Fioravante's childhood, c. 1554–1556) and an epilogue (1575). Within this timeframe, the narrative pace varies radically: the childhood scenes are developed in detail, the battle descriptions are concise and almost documentary in their brevity, and the philosophical digressions—on war, language, and nationalism—are timeless. This variation in pace is not a formal gimmick, but rather a hierarchy of importance: what remains are not the battles (for which the chronicler Filippini is responsible), but the moments of connection, insight, and ritual. Reading the "Mundus Novus" takes several chapters—longer than the description of the victorious Battle of Caccia.

In addition, there is a deep historical layering that elevates the text beyond its subject matter. Biancarelli describes 16th-century Corsican society as the sediment of a long history of settlement: “They had followed the animals and learned everything there was to know about the area, about the centuries-old migrations of the animals that allowed them to live virtually in freedom. They called this constant migration of the herds ‘invistita’ and respected it in every respect.” ⁷ Transhumance, as a practice thousands of years old, connects the people of the 16th century with their prehistoric ancestors – and the novel systematically delves into this subject by using language, ritual, embodied knowledge and toponymy as the sediment cores of a non-linear story.

Five readings of a resistant text

Nation as a retrospective construction over concealed bodies.

RNA demonstrates that national narratives always remember selectively, systematically omitting those who paid the price. Biancarelli places Catalina's rape at the center of the text, thereby forcing a question that the national myth cannot ask: What qualifies someone as a freedom fighter if the same hand meant to throw off the Genoese yoke first strikes his own village wife? Odoardo is present at both battles, yet the chronicle does not remove him from its list of heroes. By allowing Filippini's scholarly chronicle and Catalina's bodily experience to coexist in the same book, the text structurally demonstrates what it thematically asserts: Official national history is written on the silence of the nameless.

Language as the only form of continuity and resistance.

Against the fickleness of political loyalties, the novel posits language as the only stable medium. This is not a romantic ideology of language, but a precisely historicized thesis. The novel traces Corsican from its pre-Romanesque roots: “a simple sound, ancient and obsolete, that existed in the lands long before the Greeks or Carthaginians thought of building their cities.” ⁸ from bureaucratic language to Catalina's linguistic curiosity in Filippini's library. The fact that Sampieru is portrayed as illiterate is the strongest polemical point: the man who represents the nation has no access to what Biancarelli understands as its true essence.

Violence as anthropology, not as an exception

The novel rejects any moral hierarchy between different forms of violence. Barbary pirates dismember an infant; peasant women leech the same Barbary pirate before he dies; de Negri is torn apart by dogs; Ravaschieri suffers the same fate on the side of the victors. This symmetry is not indifference, but a statement about the nature of collective violence: it is contagious. Those who suffer it perpetrate it; those who condemn it inflict it. Catalina's conclusion—distance instead of pacifism—is the only one the novel proves to be practical.

The failure of the political subject and the superiority of private will.

All the male protagonists fail to separate the personal from the political. Filiponne follows Sampieru and dies; Fioravante follows Filippone and loses everything; Sampieru sacrifices everything for a cause for which, as the novel suggests, he doesn't even fight—he fights for his own salvation. In contrast, Catalina's logic of action follows no cause other than her own. The fact that her rise to "Doña Caterina" is morally ambiguous doesn't invalidate her model—it merely shows that even the individual who resists collective projection doesn't arrive in purity.

The novel as a reflection on the conditions of storytelling.

The shifting narrative perspectives are the novel's central argument. Filippini's chronicle provides facts and diplomatic history, but no women; the omniscient narrator introduces Catalina but cannot allow her to write; the characters' free indirect discourse provides what no chronicle records. RNA presents itself as yet another version of this chain of transmission—one that makes the silence of others explicit. In doing so, the text questions the title as a genre concept: A "roman national" in the classical sense would be a foundational narrative; Biancarelli's novel is its deconstruction, giving form the means to question itself.

The ethnological accuracy of a fictional text

RNA is not an ethnological document, but it operates with ethnological precision. The text's contribution to cultural studies can be described in several dimensions. First, it documents a pre-state social order: the basic unit is not the individual or the nation, but the primary circle—family, parrain, village, piève. Above these circles, there is no neutral authority, only competing powers. This structure, which the ethnology of Mediterranean mountain peoples has described as "acéphalie" (headlessness), appears in the novel not as backwardness, but as an adaptive achievement: a community without a reliable external order organizes itself through close personal bonds, codes of honor, and ritual practices.

Secondly, the novel presents transhumance and the vertical use of space as a cultural matrix. Movement between different altitudes is the characters' fundamental spatial system of thought; transhuman knowledge ("invistita") is uncodified, unteachable except through practice, and it is the same knowledge that becomes crucial in times of war. Thirdly, the novel reconstructs with ethnological precision the island's parallel system of religion: bone divination ("scapulomancy"), the "culpadori" as intermediaries between worlds, the nocturnal processions of the deceased along the rivers – this is a complete syncretic cosmos system that exists alongside and overlays Christian church life.

Fourth, the novel portrays Corsica as an Atlantic crossroads, not as an isolated insular entity. Filippone travels to Algiers and Constantinople; six thousand Corsicans live in Algiers—the largest Corsican city in the world is a North African port city. The Barbary leader Mami Pacha is himself Corsican. Catalina's journey takes her to America. This interconnectedness corresponds to what early modern historians have described as a creolized Mediterranean zone: a space where identities are constantly renegotiated through capture, conversion, mercenary service, and migration.

Finally, the novel offers a cultural-anthropological analysis of the shame mechanism. What Catalina experiences after returning to the village is the regular function of a society that treats female sexuality as communal property: the village collectively produces shame—through glances, silence, rumors, and the nickname "Catalinaccia." The honor system presupposes that the victim is still anchored within it; Catalina has long since left it: "After examining the matter from all sides and realizing that she could not overcome the insurmountable stupidity of her small world, Catalina one day left Catalinaccia on the quays of Bastia and set sail into the unknown." ⁹

The island's sediment: layers beneath the present

One of the novel's most powerful cultural-historical achievements lies in its portrayal of the prehistoric, ancient, and early medieval influences on Corsica as active and present—not as past stages that have been overcome, but as sediment that lives on in the body, in language, and in ritual. Biancarelli explicitly describes the villagers' ancestors as bearers of a Ligurian-Etruscan-Celtiberian substrate: "They slept there quite carefree, accustomed to the forest spirits and all the pagan spells they had inherited from their distant and mysterious Etruscan, Ligurian, and Celtiberian ancestors." ¹⁰ This syncretic layer of depth is not just historical color, but an epistemological statement: The inhabitants of Terres know things that are not recorded in any written tradition because they are contained in practices and sounds, not in texts.

The archaic quality of the novel is created through several literary techniques. The first is the etymological principle: place names like Carbini, Calacuccia, Tafonu, and Tavagna are described as unetymologizable—they point to a linguistic layer that predates Latin and cannot be definitively assigned to any known Mediterranean language. The second technique is that of ritual continuity: the "culpadori," the nocturnal processions of the dead, and the bone divination are not literary inventions of Biancarelli, but are documented in Corsican ethnology. By describing them not as relics, but as active practices that the characters use naturally, he creates an impression of timelessness that constitutes the very essence of the island. The third method is the linguistic sediment model, which is developed in detail in the second chapter: The further one is from the Tuscan center, the older the language layer – “cavallo” (Tuscany), “cavallu” (North Corsican), “cavaddu” (South Corsican), “caddu” (Sardinian) – and Corsican positions itself as an intermediate stage, which knows both and is neither one nor the other entirely.

Corsica as an object of foreign power calculations

The novel presents Corsica's relationship with France in a way that deliberately defies easy interpretation. On the one hand, the French crown appears in its historical context as a protecting power against Genoa: Sampieru is financed by the king, Filippone serves in French armies, and Filippini owes his survival to his role as mediator between the powers. From this perspective, France is the external resource without which the uprising would not have been possible. On the other hand, in the Cateau-Cambrésis (1559), the French crown is the very power that returns Corsica to Genoa when it is politically expedient—the rebels who fought for France become commodities in the peace of the powerful. Filippone is forced to flee; his loyalty goes unrewarded.

Biancarelli thus reveals a fundamental pattern that transcends the historical context: Corsica as an object of foreign power calculations, sacrificed whenever external support loses its strategic value. The novel doesn't explicitly name this in relation to the present—it's not a political allegory—but it writes the story in such a way that the structure remains visible. When Fioravante says in the epilogue that there is no essential difference between the yoke of the Genoese and the arrogance of the local "principali," this is a statement about the principle of external control that cannot be confined to a single historical period. "Between the yoke of the Genoese and the treachery of the principalali, for whom they had tilled the land and tended the flocks, he saw hardly any difference." ¹¹ The island has always learned to operate with external powers, but has never learned to break free from this dependence – because the internal turmoil that Biancarelli so vividly describes undermines any collective sovereignty from within before it can emerge.

For the present day—Corsica as an autonomous territory of France with a strong regionalist movement and a policy of promoting the Corsican language—this is an implicit question that the novel raises without answering: Under what conditions could a community that understands language as its true homeland find a political form that corresponds to it? Biancarelli's novel provides no answer, but it offers the tools with which the question can be posed: an analysis of the internal dynamics of loyalty and betrayal, of honor culture and institutional lack, of linguistic continuity and political discontinuity, extending far beyond the 16th century.

Foreign texts on Corsican soil

RNA is permeated with intertextual references that inscribe the Corsican locality into a European and Atlantic history of knowledge. Mundus Novus Amerigo Vespucci's (1503) is the most prominent reference: it first appears as an oral tale told by a wandering minstrel, then as Fioravante's fevered vision, and finally as a physical book in Filippini's library, from which aloud is read. This threefold appearance of the text—rumor, dream, writing—corresponds to the three forms of knowledge that the novel distinguishes: oral folk memory, visionary bodily knowledge, and codified written culture. That this very text becomes the key to Catalina's liberation is more than a narrative twist: Vespucci's account of foreign peoples and worlds offers her a model of self-transcendence that is unknown in any Corsican tradition.

The Royals of France (Andrea da Barberino, 14th century), after whom Fioravante is named, appear in the first chapter as an example of the island's cultural permeability from the outside – chivalric romances from continental France find their way into Corsican mountain valleys through oral tradition. This is a structural analogue to language itself: cultural material migrates, transforms, and becomes established in a new context without entirely losing its foreignness. That the hero, named after a paladin, ends up drunkenly weeping into the breasts of a landlady in a Bastia tavern is the most bitter irony of this intertextual framework.

The Bible and liturgical Latin appear as the language of ecclesiastical power, which, although it colonized Corsican – “undoubtedly imposed a thousand years earlier by the Roman legions and later by the Church” ¹² —but not repressed. Filippini's chronicle, written in a humanistic Latin-Italian and based on Marc'Antonio Ceccaldi, represents the island's written culture, which always took place in a foreign language—and thus always produced a gap between experience and record, which the novel attempts to close.

Conclusion: The archaic as a protest against the present

Ultimately, RNA is a novel about what holds a society together when external forces fail and internal bonds break. Biancarelli's answer is not a triumphant one: what remains is language, embodied knowledge, the first circles of loyalty—and the example of a woman who leaves the system because it offers her no place. The archaic, which the novel constructs with such care, is not a nostalgic look back at a better time, but a critique of the present: if language is the only form of continuity, then any politics that marginalizes languages ​​is a form of annihilation. If the community unites only against external enemies, then it is not protected against itself. And if national myths are written on the silence of women and the poor, then the literary project that makes this silence audible is itself a political act—even if, like Biancarelli, it chooses the form of the historical novel to conceal it.

This is a question that focuses on the reader themselves – and one that I, from my position as a textual analyst, can only partially answer. What I can say is: what specific scenes and stories the novel offers that resonate beyond Corsica.

There is Fioravante, the twelve-year-old, who leaps barefoot onto rocks, his red hair fluttering, and coaxes trout from beneath riverbanks with his bare hand—a gesture of such physicality and patience that it instantly transports the reader to a world that needs no explanation. There is Carrancione, who kills a stag at night and introduces his nephew to bone divination—the uncle as the transmitter of knowledge that knows no school, only fire, night, and the hand on the bone. There is the dilapidated sheepfold where Catalina rekindles a small fire and lets Fioravante speak of the Americas: two young people dreaming of a world they will never see, while the wood crackles. There is Baldassaru, who has to catch his dead son in the lowlands and watch him being torn apart by dogs – no, the other way around: the son who sees his father die, in a place where the novel offers no heroic pose, only a gunshot wound in the neck and two hands that can no longer hold anything.

There is the scene where, after returning to the village, Catalina goes to the spring, waits in line, and the man with the wine stain harasses her—and she smashes the clay jug over his head, then the iron sledgehammer, then again, until his face is the same violet color as the angioma he was born with. This is not a heroic scene, it is a raw one, and the novel leaves it uncommented upon. There is Fioravante, lying in a ditch after the defeat at Penta, who stabs a German mercenary in the temple with his stiletto because the man's hands are at his throat—and how he coughs afterward, no longer recognizing himself. There is Filippini, the chronicler, who entertains Sampieru in his own library, watches him eat, and inwardly prays that he survives the night—an intellectual at the mercy of history, ashamed and writing, knowing that both are insufficient.

And then there is the scene that will likely hold many readers' attention the longest: Filippini reads to the illiterate Catalina from the Mundus Novus Ahead, candles are burning, it is night in Vescovato, and she is crying—not out of sorrow, but out of joy that the world is bigger than what she has been allowed to know. This is the moment when the novel draws all its threads together: the book as object, the voice as bridge, the woman as listener who understands better than the reader—and behind it all, the quiet promise that one day she herself will open the page, even if she cannot decipher the symbols.

What bothers non-Corsicans about this is not the exoticism of this world, but the recognizable aspects of its foreignness: that loyalty destroys what it seeks to protect; that community is harshest on its own weakest members; that dreams don't respect borders, even if people do; and that sometimes it takes a woman to break free for a novel to claim to end with hope.

RNA is political in the sense that it names the conditions under which people are oppressed, abused, and silenced—and that it shows how these conditions reproduce themselves even when external power changes. Genoa leaves, the "principali" remain. The rapists fight on the right side. The woman who resists is ostracized by the village. This is political analysis in literary form—more precise than many essays because it is grounded in the individual case, not in abstraction.

But Biancarelli makes no explicit demands. He doesn't call for Corsican independence, he doesn't write a plea for feminism, he doesn't offer a program. What he does is more consistent: he makes visible what has been systematically rendered invisible. The bodies of the raped women. The names of the fallen, whose names are not recorded in any chronicle. The language that no school taught. The knowledge that is not found in any book. The story of the woman who leaves the country because the country offers her no place – and who ultimately achieves more than all those who stayed, fought, and died.

What the novel ultimately demands must be deduced from this very act of making visible. It demands that a society define itself not by its heroes, but by what it does to its most vulnerable members. It demands that language—specifically Corsican, but also any marginalized language—be treated for what it is: not folklore, not regional color, but the only medium in which a particular experience of the world can even exist. It demands that the national narrative include the Catalinas, not just the Sampierus—and that it be honest about the price the nameless pay for the triumphs of the named.

This is no small demand. It concerns Corsica and France, but it also concerns every society that tells its history as a heroic tale while forgetting to ask whose silence made this history possible. In this sense, RNA is committed without slogans; the text is political without a program—and perhaps for that reason harder to forget than a manifesto.