Vendetta e paci nell’etnografia storico-giuridica di Jacques Busquet

The interpretation of vendetta as a mere criminal practice, with no “legal” or “juridical” nature, has characterized several scientific studies on and literary approaches to Corsican folk-law. Such interpretation was explicitly dismissed by Jacques Busquet’s 1920 Le droit de la vendetta et les paci corses, almost overlooked by ethnographers and legal philosophers studying the notion of “vindicatory justice”. The present work illustrates the content of Busquet’s work and shows how, in several regards, Le droit de la vendetta et les paci corses anticipated Antonio Pigliaru’s well-known La vendetta barbaricina come ordinamento giuridico (1959), a ground-breaking study concerning the interpreta-tion of revenge folk-systems as legal regimes.