Could this Island be Europe’s Newest Country?

Will Corsica become the next European nation?

@HistoryMatters

Some sources:

[manuelacosta]

It would be quite ironic given the island's most famous resident, Napoleon, created the first French empire and became that nation's go to historic figure but who knows.

[MarcFalferia]

Corsican here, very nice of you to make a video about our small island. I work in the tourism industry and all my colleagues are from "Le continent" (mainland france). Young corsicans are not very interested in the tourism business. I live in Aiacciu (Ajaccio) and the tourist influx is bigger sometimes than the entire population of the island which is crazy. Adding to that the giant cruise boats that spew out massive amount of people and the pollution it generates... each passing years i'm more and more keen on leaving the tourism industry.

Avvèdeci !

[luigifranceschi]

The language spoken in Corsica is a variant of the Italian spoken in Tuscany long time ago. The Tuscan Italian is the base for the standard Italian. So if you speak standard Italian, but not French, you can still have a quite normal conversation with Corsican people speaking Corsican, unlike with Sardinians. I tried myself.

[status_quo_post]

Pasquale Paoli was an underrated genius. He just casually wrote the first democratic constitution of the modern age (that was more democratic than the US one). He just did it.

[informitas]

I wouldn't call the island "small" it's pretty damn large for an island I think.
I always thought Corsica and Sandinia looks very cool on a map. Uniquely beautiful.

[flavioscollo]

I live in Sicily (Italy's deep south), and I can really easily understand Corsican, it is very similar to the dialect spoken in my region

[victorkreig]

You actually got a part wrong hoser.
The Genoa didn't sell Corsica to France because they were tired of the civil war, they gave them to France because they owed France war reparations and they didn't exactly have the money to pay it off so instead they gave them Corsica instead.
It's also important to note that both of Napoleon's parents were Italian and hadn't been on the island too long when they made and gave birth to Napoleon

[legueux]

Great video but there is a mistake, most Corsicans speak french as their first langage, in fact only 20% of the population of the island speak corsican on a daily basis

[asyln]

holy shit hoser making a video about the country I live in, incredible

[aidenpearse]

I am french and I went in Corsica once, the thing is everything is incredibly beautiful there, literally mind blowing me all the time.

[Mrkabrat]

Problem is, if France lets Corsica become independent, other groups within its borders may wanna start leaving. And even if they let them, I don't think spain would accept it as a country, since that would get ethnic groups like basques (on both sides of the pyrenees, cause some are in south-western France) and catalans to start pushing for their own independence even more.

[martinomasolo]

Bullets on road signs are just local hunters rehearsing their aiming skills, you see a lot of those in Italy

[Idk-tljq]

Fun fact: I can draw my ancestry back to a Corsican boxer that would go on to fight in the revolutionary war and eventually settle in North Carolina.

[KhAnubis]

Can't believe you went to Corsica and almost didn't make a video there! I do totally get wanting to make it count as a business trip though

[grimnir]

As a British person, Corsica has quite an influencial if subtle role in our History because it encouraged greater cooperation between monarchist and Parliamentary forces, leading to the Parliamentary-Monarchy the UK has which is so strong.

[Yodog]

I wish you could do more videos on Africa but this was equally as entertaining, informative, and captivating

[Iridescent_Astraea]

I'm pretty doubtful. Small, split up population with little way to really organize and it's so reliant on the aid of others. For it to be independent, it would either have to live with all the repercussions it already deals with on it's own before some other nation bails it out or 100's of years of history, especially in the lack of fields and jobs, would need to change drastically.

[stewartgames]

Imagine Corsica (or any Mediterranean Island) 5 Million years ago. It would have been a lonely, desert mountain in the middle of the deepest, driest region on Earth - the vast salt pans of the Mediterranean basin. The shores of what is the Mediterranean sea today would have been huge cliffs, dropping down almost 5 km deep, and at the bottom the temperature would have reached nearly 80 Celsius - a cauldron of hot air that only extremophile bacteria could survive in. The vast rivers of North Africa and Southern Europe - the Po, the Rhone, the Nile - all would have evaporated before reaching the bottom of this, the deepest canyon in the Solar system. Whatever life clung to Monte Corsica would have been completely isolated from the mainland, either leftovers from the last time that basin had been a sea or descendants of flying animals. Island dwarfism and gigantism were also at play: giant flightless geese up to 3 meters tall with club-like bones set in their wings for slapping other males to chase them off during the breeding season, dormice the size of housecats, a hedgehog relative turned pursuit carnivore the size of a puma, elephants the size of donkeys, the isolated mountains of this vast salt pan were host to some of the strangest species, long cut off from the mainland and left to occupy niches undisturbed for millions of years.

And then came the flood - a large earthquake shook the Straights of Gibraltar, opening at first a tiny crack in the land, but it was enough for the Atlantic Ocean to start pouring through. The resulting flow must have been the most powerful movement of water in Earth's history, with water being shot into the salt pan close to the speed of sound and falling for over a kilometer down to the valley floor below. The native species of Corsica must have seen a vast plume of mist rising on the horizon, and heard the thunder of the greatest waterfall to have ever existed, even from hundreds of kilometers away. Some estimate that the entire basin filled in under a century - one century, to fill the entire sea!

[habbyhouse]

Love your humor. Keep up the good and original work.

[flvin]

wow hoser really went on vacation and said fuck it i’ll drop a banger about this place