The Corsicans and the Great War

On the occasion of the Centenary, the museum of Corsica presents an exhibition dedicated to the Corsicans and the Great War.

This event highlights this conflict which marks a turning point in the contemporary European and regional history: if it did not generate any military operation on the territory, it is often denounced as marking the end of the traditional Corsican island society.

This exhibition evokes the men and women involved in various degrees in this conflict as witnesses and actors of this period of history and the upheavals in the short, medium and long term, that the Great War has led as well as the inevitable socio-economic changes that it has driven in Corsican society and this until today, feeding the collective memory and social and political imagination.

This exhibition is a place of reflection and understanding that speaks to us of singularity and uniformity, linking individual trajectories to regional history and major international events founding the entry of Europe in the twentieth century.

This exhibition project is an opportunity to propose a new reading of the Great War by reporting on the latest scientific advances on this subject and to provoke reflection on the notions of memory, representation and political construction around a founding event.

The multiplicity of media presented (photographs, paintings, drawings, sculptures, audiovisuals, newspapers, posters, personal effects, uniforms, weapons, scores, notebooks, toys, weapons …) are all vectors to illustrate the global dimensions, both economic, political, social, cultural and anthropological, of this conflict.

The course is organized in four main sequences, intended to link the global history with the “small history” of Corsican communities within the first world conflict.

Sequence I : Corsica on the eve of the conflict, a periphery in crisis

Sequence II : The Corsicans in war, mobilized men

Sequence III : An insular society in war

Sequence IV : From mourning to memories, consequences and memory of the Great War

Curator of the exhibition:

Sylvain GREGORI, Attaché de conservation du patrimoine, Doctor in history from the University of Provence, Associate researcher at the CMMC-University of Nice and President and co-founder of the Corsican military history association Sintinelle.

Jean-Paul Pellegrinetti, University Professor, Head of the ANR ICEM (Center of the Modern and Contemporary Mediterranean University of Nice-Sophia Antipolis).