In an extraordinary four-hour session in a judge's chambers at the Palais de Justice, Bernard Bonnet, fallen Prefect of Corsica, this week faced two former subordinates who accuse him of plotting vandalism and arson.
During the confrontation, Gerard Pardini, who was Mr Bonnet's cabinet director until the three men were arrested in early May, and Col Henri Mazeres - until his arrest the head of the gendarmerie in Corsica - told how, in concert with Mr Bonnet, the highest-ranking authority on the island, they drew up a plan for the destruction of nine illegally-built beach restaurants.
Messers Pardini and Mazeres say they acted on Mr Bonnet's orders on the night of March 7th when they put on black hoods and tried to burn down the Aria Marina restaurant near Ajaccio. That two such high-ranking officials donned the disguise worn by the Corsican separatists they were supposed to be fighting - and became failed arsonists - is only one of their mind-boggling revelations. The men entrusted their second mission to underlings, who on the night of April 19th burned down another beachfront restaurant, Chez Francis.
In what will go down in French history as "l'affaire de la paillote" (the affair of the straw hut), Mr Pardini and Col Mazeres dispatched five officers from an "elite" gendarmerie unit to burn down the popular fish restaurant. Their escapade, worthy of the Marx Brothers, has shaken the Jospin government, destroyed their own and Mr Bonnet's careers and revived the debate on Corsican independence.
The Chez Francis commandos proved particularly inept. During a pre-raid reconnaissance mission to the site, which can be reached only by boat or down a long dirt track, Capt Norbert Ambrosse could not restart his motorcycle and had to radio for help. To give the impression that the restaurant had been destroyed by Corsican nationalists rather than the forces of order, the gendarmes left tracts identifying the restaurant's owner, Yves Feraud, as a police informer at the scene of their crime - also on the instructions of Prefect Bonnet. Had the ploy worked, Mr Feraud's life would have been endangered by the pamphlet.
It was Capt Ambrosse who sprinkled the beach restaurant with petrol and set a match to it. He did not know what any Corsican arsonist might have told him; that fumes from petrol explode in a ball of fire that blows against the wind. Capt Ambrosse was severely burned on the face and hands. His four fellow officers panicked and rushed him back to their barracks, leaving their walkie-talkie beside the burning hut. Two of the gendarmes returned later to retrieve it, but gave up when they found a crowd of onlookers, firemen and gendarmes around the smouldering shack.
Back at the prefecture in Ajaccio, Mr Bonnet became intensely worried that the tract denouncing Mr Feraud as an informer could be traced to the photocopy machine in his office.
"Together we damaged the photocopier, at his insistence," Mr Bonnet's cabinet director, Mr Pardini, recalled under questioning. "We put a tiny quantity of alcohol on the hot part of the photocopier. I poured it, and the prefect stood next to me, holding the bottle." Mr Bonnet's partners in crime have all confessed, and so must pay their own legal fees. But the former prefect is sticking to his initial version of events - that his overzealous employees misunderstood remarks made in jest. "It is true that in our evening meetings, more as a joke than seriously, we may have said that to get rid of [the illegal restaurants] it would take a storm or a fire," Mr Bonnet told judges.
Because Mr Bonnet claims to be innocent, the state is paying for his counsel, Mr Georges Kiejman - the same high-flying Paris lawyer hired by Mohamed Al-Fayed after the death of Princess Diana and his son Dodi. After nearly two months in Paris's La Sante prison, Mr Pardini and Col Mazeres were freed on Tuesday, and Mr Bonnet could be released soon. But all three men face trial - and up to 20 years in prison if convicted.
While some French people are deeply shocked by Mr Bonnet's decision to fight crime with crime, opinion polls show that a majority support him. This reflects the prevalent French view of Corsica as a sublimely beautiful but ungovernable island. The average Frenchman sees 250,000 Corsicans as an indolent, spoiled but ungrateful population living on hand-outs from Paris. The separatists who first surfaced in 1976 are viewed as "terrorists" using woolly political grievances as an excuse for gangsterism.
Two decades of French governments negotiated with Corsican separatists rather than combat them. Since 1996, the governments of prime ministers Alain Juppe and Lionel Jospin have arrested dozens of nationalists. To show their displeasure with Mr Juppe, the FLNC (National Front for the Liberation of Corsica) bombed the Bordeaux town hall - of which he is mayor - in October 1996. Some politicians, such as the former prime minister Raymond Barre, have concluded that the island is more trouble than it is worth. Although at most 20 per cent of Corsicans want independence, the idea is probably more popular among mainland French people.
In the 23 years since the FLNC was founded, extremists from the group and its myriad splinters have planted more than 10,000 explosive devices - mostly in Corsica but more recently on the mainland - in treasury buildings, gendarmerie posts and the property of individuals who refused to pay protection money. The material damage in Corsica has been enormous. Dozens of Corsicans have been murdered in internecine feuds between separatists.
Television viewers on the mainland are regularly treated to footage of night-time "press conferences" in which hooded gunmen read off demands. There were two such clandestine meetings last weekend alone, one of them staged by a new group calling itself "Armata Corsa" and vowing to fight property speculation on the island.
Mr Bonnet was hand-picked by the Interior Minister, Jean-Pierre Chevenement to impose order after his predecessor as prefect, Claude Erignac, was assassinated by Corsican nationalists in February 1998. Mr Erignac's killing marked the first murder of a prefect in French history, and Mr Bonnet's arrest was the first ever of a prefect. The French are beginning to wonder if the job isn't cursed.
Braving death threats and under the protection of dozens of body guards, Mr Bonnet launched a "clean hands" operation that was meant to extinguish corruption, tax evasion and racketeering. For a year he was a media star, portrayed as the fearless representative of The State, at last wrestling with a problem that French governments had evaded. His steam-roller methods angered not only the separatists, but old family clans who dominate the island. Last autumn, members of the Corsican assembly asked Mr Bonnet bluntly when he was leaving. "I shall leave when your friends stop racketeering, when your friends stop assassinating in the midst of village feasts, when your friends stop setting off explosives," the prefect snapped back.
Mr Bonnet's first obsession was to find the men who killed Mr Erignac. But the investigation was entrusted to the police, who did not fall under his orders. On the pretext that the murder weapon had been stolen from the gendarmerie barracks at Pietrosella, Mr Bonnet conducted his own, parallel investigation using the gendarmerie, which was under his authority. Almost by chance, he learned the identity of the fringe group of separatists who killed Mr Erignac. But when he reported the information to Paris, Mr Bonnet's report was shelved for months and he was told not to meddle in the investigation.
The shunned prefect's bitterness was immense. Then Francois Leotard, a former defence minister, put a stop to Mr Bonnet's use of French army equipment to - legally - raze illegal constructions. Mr Leotard was on holiday in Corsica in April when during a morning jog he came across army bulldozers knocking down his favourite restaurant. The affront was unbearable to Mr Bonnet. "If it goes on like this, I'm going to burn them down myself," Col Mazeres recalls Mr Bonnet saying.
Just a few days after Mr Bonnet's incarceration, French police announced they had identified and arrested five of the six Corsican separatists who plotted Prefect Erignac's murder. The police hierarchy had finally woken up to Mr Bonnet's report, and feared he would ridicule them from his prison cell if they did not act. The police nonetheless managed to botch their dragnet.
French journalists arrived in Carges, the home town of Yvan Colonna - who is charged with pulling the trigger - before the police did. Mr Colonna gave an interview to TF1 television, then vanished. And if Mr Bonnet was not miserable enough in his prison cell, Chez Francis restaurant has been rebuilt, in front of the television cameras.
