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18th century Corsica was an agricultural society based largely on small-scale subsistence farming. The primary crops were cereals, chiefly wheat, rye, barley, oats, and millet. Crop rotation was simple and primitive, with fields usually left fallow on alternate years (less often in good soil). When additional land was needed, farmers would burn the macchia (shrubland) and plant crops there. Such land was marginal, and after being used for a few years it would be abandoned and left to recover for years, sometimes for a decade. Chestnut culture was widespread, but only in the Castagniccia did it largely displace cereals; in this district more than half the available land was used for chestnut production, but in most other regions of Corsica chestnuts were a complement to grains rather than a primary source of calories. Small-scale production of wine and olive oil was spread throughout the island, typically intended for consumption or local trade rather than sale abroad. Only in the far north - particularly in the Balagna, Nebbio, and Capo Corso - were there large estates geared to the production of wine and oil for export, which prior to independence serviced the Genoese market exclusively.

Despite the singular importance of agricultural production, agricultural technology was extremely primitive. The farmers used light plows which only scratched the soil, milled grain with inefficient horizontal waterwheels, and produced oil in simple lever and twist presses. Although the Early Modern period had brought new crops to Corsica—a Genoese agricultural development plan in the 16th century forced the locals to adopt not only the chestnut, but figs, grapes, olives, and mulberry—the modes of production and cultivation practiced in Theodore’s day had hardly changed since the Middle Ages.

The Farmers

Of the farmers who made up the vast bulk of the Corsican population, the highest stratum was that of the so-called proprietari, the “propertied” class. This term, however, was not synonymous with “property owner.” Rather, to be a proprietario meant that a man lived exclusively off his own property and did not need to supplement his income with sharecropping, wage labor, or the exploitation of common land. The majority of Corsican farmers, known as lavatori or paesani, did not possess enough land to meet this ideal and were compelled to seek other sources of income in addition to farming their own property. Even at the lowest levels of this class, however, to be truly without property was rare—even the poorest lavatore typically possessed some property, even if it was just a garden plot and a cottage (or even a share of a cottage). Dedicated shepherds, known as pastori or caprai, occupied a comparable social tier to the lavatori despite the fact that their property was predominantly in livestock rather than in land.

Property ownership, no matter how minor, was considered the sine qua non of citizenship and social respectability in Corsica. The Marquis de Crussol commented that “the Corsican would rather starve than sell land.” Property anchored a person in a community; a man without property was little better than a vagrant, and thus could neither participate in political life nor enjoy any rights to the village commons. A man without property was considered to be servile and fully dependent upon others, a position too horrible to contemplate for most Corsicans.

At the very bottom of the social ladder were the so-called lucchesi, seasonal workers from mainland Italy, who despite their name were from many places besides Lucca. The typical lucchese sailed from Livorno to Corsica in the early autumn to perform hard labor or agricultural work (primarily in the Genoese plantations in northeast Corsica) and returned to Italy in the spring. They were held in utter contempt by the Corsicans, not just because of their foreign origin but because their nature as landless contract workers suggested a contemptible servile status. They were men without family and without property, and thus not really men at all. The Corsicans accordingly treated them as the scum of the earth, used lucchese as an insult to mean an insignificant and honorless man, and joked that even a very ugly or dishonored woman could, as a last resort, always marry a lucchese.

The Commons

The most notable feature of Corsican agricultural and pastoral society was the great extent of lands held in common. While common ownership was hardly unique to Corsica, it was particularly widespread on the island, with approximately a third of all arable land being held in common. The modes of common land ownership and exploitation varied from place to place. Most commons were owned by villages, some were shared between several villages, controlled by a pieve, shared among several pievi, or—in the case of some small parcels—shared among just a few families. Some commons, particularly at the village level, were essentially corporate property of the village and could be leased by the village leaders.

Even private land was not fully private. “Private” lands were often possessed by a family (which could be quite large) rather than an individual landowner, and private ownership did not abrogate all communal ties and obligations. Cottage gardens, for instance, were privately owned, but often watered by irrigation systems built and maintained collectively by the village. Villagers enjoyed the pascolatico, or right of grazing, which gave them the right to graze their animals on the village’s fields after the harvest regardless of whether those fields were held in common or privately owned.

Common lands formed an important component of the livelihood of the average farmer, as unless he was among the proprietari his private lands alone were insufficient for subsistence. Even the poorest lavatore, so long as he owned some property, enjoyed rights to common land which were not afforded to outsiders or landless farm laborers. These rights, along with various lease relationships, constituted the surprisingly diverse economic activity of the lavatori. Village common lands would be leased to individual villagers for a fee, usually on an annual basis. To plow their lands, farmers relied on oxen, which they leased from neighboring herders if they were not prosperous enough to have their own. Farmers could usually thresh their grain for free at a village-owned threshing floor and could pay a small fee to use a private watermill. If a peasant lived in an area where chestnut culture dominated, he might possess a grove on his own private land, but more typically he would own one or more trees on common land. Most farmers owned some livestock, and grazed their dairy goats (or, less commonly, cattle) on common pasture while poultry foraged in the garden. Pigs were turned loose in common forests of oak and chestnut to feast on fallen nuts and acorns. Farmers would supplement all this, as needed, with sharecropping or wage labor on a private farm or orchard, usually owned by a local notabile.

Thus, despite their notorious love of independence and hatred of servility, Corsican farmers were highly dependent on a wide array of common rights and lease agreements which were only occasionally committed to writing. Particularly in the interior, many leases were paid in kind, and some villages in the mountains scarcely ever used money except to pay their taxes.




Common lands were even more important for the dedicated pastoralists who lived in the mountains of central Corsica, for whom livestock were not merely a supplement to farming but the sum total of their livelihood. Such shepherds generally practiced seasonal transhumance, in which they moved between mountain pastures in the summer and coastal pastures in the winter. Rarely was any of this land privately owned by individual shepherds. The mountain pastures were typically commons held as corporate property by a pastoral village or several villages together. In the villages of the Niolo, in which the pastoral economy was dominant, the proportion of land held in common frequently exceeded two thirds and sometimes approached 80%, and what private land did exist was generally used for agriculture, horticulture, and chestnut groves rather than pasture. On the coast, pastureland might constitute a free commons in some lightly-inhabited areas or a commons owned by the mountaineers themselves (despite being absent from it most of the year), but more typically the shepherds leased land belonging to coastal villagers and landowners.

Change and Resistance

Since at least the 17th century, common lands had come under threat from steady encroachment on the part of great landowners who were encouraged and abetted by the Genoese government. This was most prevalent in the Dila, which had a tradition of powerful signori and lacked the strong communal organization of the Terra di Commune, as well as in the rich agricultural provinces of the far north where Genoese landowners had consolidated properties to produce cash crops for export. In the jurisdiction of Calvi, the proportion of common land was only about 10%; in the jurisdiction of Bastia it was less than 5%.

Predictably, the most ardent foes of the loss of common lands were those who were most dependent on them, the shepherds of the interior. Large landowners fenced in their lands to prevent degradation from swarming herds of livestock, or converted fields of wheat and rye to more lucrative plantations of vines and olive trees which made the land useless to the shepherds. Other landowners kept their fields open but steadily raised the fees they demanded for grazing rights. For the shepherds, who had been using the same coastal grazing lands for generations, these developments were perceived as an attack on their way of life motivated by greed. “If Jesus Christ had been born in the Balagna,” went one Niolesi proverb, “he too would have been a robber.” Even before the outbreak of rebellion, disputes over the enclosure of common land had sometimes led to trouble, with shepherds tearing down fences and confronting landowners with loaded muskets. Not without cause had the Niolesi and other highland pastoralists rallied early on to the banner of the Revolution, which they perceived as an uprising against a rotten system of greedy landowners, corrupt courts, and callous officials who trampled upon the shepherds’ traditional rights and destroyed their livelihoods.




The view of the Corsica’s farmers was more varied and nuanced. As mentioned, the loss of common lands was geographically uneven. In the Castagniccia, the strength of communal governance and the unsuitability of the land for cash crops meant that privatization and enclosure gained relatively little headway, and Genoese taxation was far more galling than the rather remote threat of expropriation. The effects were more strongly felt in the Dila and the far north, but the means of expropriation differed; in the Dila the class of lavatori had been substantially converted into sharecroppers on consolidated estates owned by local notables and absentee Genoese landlords, while in the north the shift in emphasis to vineyards and orchards meant that wage labor was more prevalent than sharecropping. One Corsican writer lamented the state of certain peasants in the jurisdiction of Bastia, who picked grapes in Capo Corso in the summer and in winter subsisted on a “thin soup of wild herbs.” With little or no property of their own and no common land to take advantage of (as it had largely vanished from that region), they were hardly better than the lucchesi, a source of real indignity.

Yet despite the threat posed to some agriculturalists by the loss of the commons, the farmers were not necessarily allies of the pastoralists. While farming and grazing had traditionally been complementary activities in Corsica, the traditional rights of shepherds impinged upon the full exercise of a farmer’s control over his property. The customary rights of pastoralists, whether dedicated shepherds or merely other farmers with their own flocks, often prevented a farmer from fencing his land to keep out potentially destructive free-roaming herds, gleaning from his own fields after the harvest, or converting his grain fields to orchards or vineyards that might potentially yield more profit. Moreover, the lavatori were not necessarily opposed to privatization. While farmers universally opposed the expropriation of common lands by large landowners, some advocated for the partition of common lands among smallholders like themselves in the hope that this additional land would allow them to ascend to the ranks of the self-sufficient proprietari.

This conflict between the landowning notables, the middling farmers, and the mountain shepherds over land in general and common land in particular would remain one of the defining issues of Corsican politics long after Theodore’s reign. The king knew the value of his support among the farmers and shepherds who together made up the vast majority of Corsica’s population, and had often stated his intent to drive out the Genoese exploiters and institute land reform that would benefit the people. None could forget that in the darkest days of the rebellion, when Theodore had been driven from the kingdom by the French, it was the Niolesi and their fellow pastoralists in the mountains who alone continued to bear the torch of resistance.

Theodore, however, was also an enthusiast of modernization and commerce. His vision for Corsica was not a romantic idyll of rustic shepherds and peasants frozen in time, but a booming commercial hub fueled by exports of cash crops that would fund national development. Thus, while he desired to improve the lot of the common Corsican farmer, the efficient production of wine, oil, citrus, and other such exportable commodities required capital, labor, and land which small farmers simply could not provide. The Genoese had meant to exploit Corsica rather than enrich it, but their methods of consolidation and enclosure (however fitfully they were attempted) were not without economic merit. Moreover, a government policy of protecting the commons and curbing the ability of great landowners to further expand their holdings was unlikely to gain the support of the important landowning notabili who had directly benefited from Genoese policy.