The contrast couldn’t be more black and white: inside the competition room at the Corsica Chess Club in Bastia, a handful of players are locked in monastic silence and iron-clad concentration over the boards. Outside in the waiting room on a Sunday in early February, 15 or so young faces are squashed against the glass of the partition doors, with dozens more children and parents behind them; they’re yakking, laughing, mucking about, but above all, they are desperate to get back into the room for the next round and play more chess.
The clamour is proof of what amounts to a Corsican chess revolution. There are now almost 7,000 licensed chess players on the island with a population of 340,000; more than 25 times the rate in mainland France. Corsica welcomed its first international master, Michaël Massoni, in 2013, and first grandmaster, Marc’Andria Maurizzi – France’s youngest ever at 14 years old – in 2021.
These successes are a byproduct of a concerted programme, now running for 25 years, of teaching the game in Corsica’s schools. Akkhavanh Vilaisarn, the president of the Corsica Chess League, says its true purpose is “to contribute in our way to creating the citizens of tomorrow. Whether or not the kids are strong in chess is secondary for us. It’s really about using chess as a kind of spine to teach children respect: for the rules and for others.”
It may be bedlam outside the game zone for this qualifying round of the Corsican youth championships. But it’s true to the democratic ethos of i scacchi (chess) here, a riposte to the often elitist reputation of the sport (as the International Olympic Committee has classified it since 1999).
Marc’Andria’s mother, Lucie, is behind the bar serving slices of pizza, while Fares, seven, tells me: “I like chess because you have the pawn and the king, just like in real life.” Children and adults intermingle freely; weaker players are encouraged to take on stronger ones. On the wall is a painting of a white tiger mauling a chessboard; a tribute to the former world champion Viswanathan Anand, the “tiger of Madras”, who has visited the club.
Back inside the competition space for the next round, Vilaisarn, 49, tells everyone to pipe down, in French and Corsican. The rhythmic clatter of plastic pieces commences.
The league’s employees and volunteers circulate, scoping out the unfolding games; most came up through the programme themselves. In the 14- to 16-year-old category, where many of the players are in the 12-strong school of excellence, all the matches quickly become cagey affairs, with tense ructions over every piece taken.
This is the Corsican style, says Vilaisarn, favouring improvisational tactics over strategy. “There’s the classic method of learning,” he says. “Which is to say: the grandmasters played like this, so you learn the variations by heart and play like that. With us, it’s the reverse: we play with the child first, look at their style, and the moves they want to make. Theory might say there’s a best move, but if they want to make a good move somewhere else, that’s enough because they will be playing their way.”
Fostering individual flexibility like this makes for hardier players than the academic approach. “If you’re losing and you’re tactically strong, you’ll have the energy to turn things around,” says Vilaisarn. “Conversely, with theoretical training, from a strong position at a given point you have to go it alone. You’ll have nothing to help you, no books or anything. And if you’re not used to boxing on the chessboard, you’ll lose.”
Another local innovation that facilitated this streetwise style was the Corsican rule, introduced in 2003 to forbid draws by agreement between players, a convention that allows both parties to avoid losing matches and ranking points.
Corsican players give no quarter while abroad, either, giving them a certain reputation. Vilaisarn remembers the dismayed faces of the opposing team at a French national championship a few years ago: “They said: ‘Oh no, we’re playing the Corsicans.’ That’s the best kind of compliment.”
But the programme is tied into Corsican culture in an even more fundamental way. Two days earlier, Vilaisarn was in front of a classroom of eight- to 10-year-olds, the Mediterranean filling the window behind him, at the Cardo primary school above Bastia. He was doing a one-hour stint of the chess tuition the league offers to 6,000 children a year in 75 schools across the island as part of its “socio-educative” mission.
The majority of lessons are in French, but just over 10% are in Corsu; part of an effort to keep the island’s language – spoken by 42% of the population, around half the 1970s figure – as a living language. “A dama prudetta da une pezza s’incolla contr’à un rè nemicu,” (The queen sticks to the enemy king) intones Vilaisarn – and gets them to repeat it.
To perform this castling of chess and the Corsican language, the league had to invent much game vocabulary from scratch, where French had previously dominated. The queen became la dama, rather the more obvious la regina, to avoid confusion in chess notation with the king (u rè); the bishop l’alfieru, inspired by the Italian for ensign.
When he came to Corsica in 2002, Vilaisarn had his own catching up to do: a refugee from communist Laos, he learnt Corsican when he arrived. As a polyglot – he already spoke Laotian, Thai, Spanish, some Russian and English (he thinks in the last when he plays chess) – he saw parallels between language-learning and his beloved game. “In itself, chess is almost a language. If you learn young, you’re stronger. I see it when people learn late: they have a bit of an accent. An accent in chess terms is leaving pieces in danger.”
‘Little school of citizenship’
Léo Battesti was in a perilous position when he picked up the game again in 1978. The one-time Corsican militant was in Paris’s maximum security prison La Santé, on the first night of a nine-year sentence for his part in a thwarted terrorist attack on a Bastia tax office. “It was extraordinary,” the 69-year-old remembers, “I was trying to sleep, and there was this tapping noise all around: tak-tak-tak!” Breton political prisoners later explained that he was hearing two KGB spies playing chess in morse code between their cells. Battesti ordered himself a chessboard immediately and began playing with other prisoners by correspondence.
Burly and ruddy, Battesti stands regaling Vilaisarn and me in his kitchen with an espresso in hand; his house sits in the shadow of a lofty, snow-laden ridge in Venaco .
He was present, shotgun in hand, at the 1975 hijacking of a winery in Aléria on the east coast; two police officers died, marking the start of the radical Corsican independence movement. A year later, Battesti helped found the militant FLNC (Fronte di Liberazione Naziunale Corsu) group. But even then, he says, he was ill at ease with the organisation’s dogma, it being named after the Algerian FLN and in thrall to Maoist and Gaddafist anti-colonialism: “We were in the grip of that kind of morbid logic that came from those political ideas.”
Pardoned by the then French president, François Mitterand, in 1981, Battesti began to see armed struggle as incompatible with the civic development he wanted to see in Corsica, which rested on representative democracy. “When you’re in a system of clandestine action and violence, you can only ever be monstrous. And the more political you are, the more monstrous,” he says.
In favour of self-determination rather than independence, he sat as a member of the Corsican parliament from 1986 to 1992. And he realised that chess, which he had continued playing in the intervening years, was the ideal “little school of citizenship”. It taught something radical for a “clannist system” such as Corsica’s: “The capacity to take responsibility for yourself. When citizens take it upon themselves to do something, the solutions are more worthwhile than if they came from the outside.”
Leaving politics in the late 90s, Battesti galvanised the Corsica Chess Club in Bastia, then a smoky den of old-timers. He created the Corsica Chess League and the school outreach programme in 1998. The first lessons were at the city’s Toga school, which Battesti had attended, opposite where his explosive-loaded Renault 12 was picked up during the attempted 1978 bombing.
The structure and curriculum were later formalised by Vilaisarn, who took over from Battesti as president in 2020. Now they want to expand further, by training teachers to make the programme a part of the curriculum. It would be an extraordinary reversal from the stalemate Battesti found himself in the 1970s, languishing in a Parisian prison and beholden to the law of the gun to envisage a future for his island.
Battesti has moved on to a campaign against the island’s mafia, but he remains wedded to chess’s moral clarity. He talks about Yvan Colonna, the militant whose death in custody last year at the hands of another inmate caused riots in Corsica.
“The thing that traumatised me was that his killer was his chess partner in prison all that time,” says Battesti. “For me, it’s inconceivable that people who play chess together, who make a certain kind of spiritual and strategic love, could kill one another. On the contrary, it’s distance that permits people to kill.”
‘Less hatred, more fraternity’
“Cinq, quatre, trois … ” Ganged up on by four whippersnappers, I am dying a thousand deaths on the practice board in the club waiting room. Mercilessly counting down to stop my dithering, they spark a set of panic moves that quickly result in checkmate. One of my tormentors, eight-year-old Lazare, lets me in on a secret: “I like playing black, so I can mirror my opponent if I can’t think of a move.”
We’re waiting for the final two rounds of qualifying, and the atmosphere is festive. High on soft drinks and camaraderie, some kids are flipping plastic bottles, trying to get them to stand on end. Calypso, Vilaisarn’s 15-year-old niece, has absorbed her uncle’s lessons. She likes strategy; “the fact it’s up to you to make a good game. I want to become a better player and reach the level of 2,000 Elo.” (At 1,875 in chess’s international ratings system, she isn’t far off.)
There are Ukrainians and Russians here too, some of them recent refugees. Nine-year-old Ukrainian Ivan is being chaperoned by his friend’s father, Mikael, who is Russian. “We don’t have so many friends in Bastia, so it’s a good place to meet people.”
No one is a better advertisement for the inclusiveness of Corsican chess than Vilaisarn, who was transported by people-smugglers across the Mekong river in 1978 with his grandparents, then later chose to come to the Mediterranean island by tossing a coin on to a map. “I knew I would find good people wherever I go.”
He doesn’t like the word “integration”, and discreetly lets the league speak for a more progressive version of Corsican identity than the often-insular traditional kind. The great young hope of Corsican chess, Marc’Andria seems to be emerging from the latter world. His father, Dumè – a professional bridge coach – questions me with a bone-dry gaze as we wait for the prodigy to show up. He corrects me when I enthuse about the league’s egalitarian ethos: “My son’s in the elite. He was No 1 grandmaster in the under-14 age group.”
We finally do the interview in a gap between football training for SC Bastia – where Marc’Andria plays midfield for the under-16 team – and online chess tuition with Garry Kasparov’s former trainer. With his dark-blonde curls and a placid gaze, Marc’Andria seems like a completely normal unforthcoming teenager.
What was it about chess that hooked him? “The reflection and all that.” Does he feel extra pressure because of his age? “Not really.” Who’s his favourite player? “Kasparov.” And his favourite footballer? “Messi.”
But here is a brilliant mind; potentially “one of the best ever in the history of chess”, according to Vilaisarn. Marc’Andria asserts himself just once when we speak, to confirm that he doesn’t like travelling: “Not especially.” His father explains that while, like other chess professionals, Marc’Andria has the right to play for money for a club in Corsica and in France (he also plays for Chartres), he does not want to at the moment.
However, there is international interest in the Corsican chess model and its social benefits: the programme has been replicated on the island of La Réunion, only using it as a gateway to teaching French. Turkey and Azerbaijan instituted similar national chess development programmes in 2005 and 2009 respectively. If Marc’Andria chooses to be its ambassador, i scacchi corsu could go even further globally.
Vilaisarn and Battesti are proud of Marc’Andria’s progress, but their revolution has never really been about champions – or maybe even, fundamentally, about chess. If the approach spreads, Battesti refuses to undersell its possible ethical impact: “I was speaking at a big inter-sports meeting a while ago, and whether it was rugby or basketball or whatever, they were all facing the same failure. They only think about matches, about competition. It’s a fundamental error, especially given the society we live in, to forget the socio-educational. The world is in need of a cultural revolution, so people are more at ease, so there’s less hatred and more fraternity.”
• This article was amended on 4 May 2023 to refer to Corsican as a language, rather than a dialect.
