Jean-Pierre Chevenement likes to quote The Irish Times. Over the past three weeks, France's favourite former cabinet minister and political maverick has mentioned this newspaper's August 26th interview with his bete noire, the Corsican nationalist leader, Jean-Guy Talamoni, on French radio and television and in an address to his Citizens' Movement (MDC) party retreat in Grasse.
"I'm doing your advertising for you," Mr Chevenement remarks when we meet at his headquarters halfway between the Prime Minister's office and the National Assembly. The mutual animosity between Mr Talamoni and himself reflects the deep rift in France over Corsica.
Mr Chevenement resigned as interior minister on August 28th in opposition to Prime Minister Lionel Jospin's autonomy plan for the island. Mr Talamoni - who calls Mr Chevenement "a dinosaur doomed to extinction" - maintains close links with underground extremists who want Corsica to be independent.
The quotation Mr Chevenement uses so often sums up everything the 61-year-old politician detests about Mr Talamoni and the Corsican nationalist movement. "We are for clandestinity," Mr Talamoni told The Irish Times last month. "It has been our strategy for 30 years. We haven't changed, because everything we obtained until now we got through political violence."
The nationalists' refusal to renounce violence was one of Mr Chevenement's chief reasons for resigning. At a time when Mr Jospin's popularity has fallen to record lows because of Corsica and high fuel prices, and when President Jacques Chirac has been embarrassed by a videotaped confession by a dead Gaullist fund-raiser, Mr Chevenement is riding high.
Mr Chevenement's denunciation of the Matignon accords revived a dormant nationalism in France. The tiny MDC is claiming a record number of new recruits and he has received hundreds of letters; he shows me one from a female Corsican police captain. "I am breaking all the rules of protocol and hierarchy to tell you of my gratitude and admiration," the letter says. "You are a Republican like 95 percent of Corsicans . . . You are a minister who has left his post in the name of an ideal. It is the state that has resigned . . ."
For an hour, we discuss Corsica, European integration - Mr Chevenement opposed the Maastricht Treaty - and the Yugoslav and Gulf wars, against which he also spoke out. The telephone keeps ringing; Mr Chevenement is weaving his web. He makes lunch dates with the former Mitterrand aide and writer Regis Debray and with Marie-Francoise Bechtel, the MDC member who has just become the first woman to head the Ecole Nationale d'Administration - a sort of incubator for future presidents and prime ministers. Mr Chevenement speaks with de Gaulle-like gravitas. When he smiles or makes one of his odd jokes, you can't help thinking of Mr Bean.
But it is Corsica that really gets him going. "How can such a small minority purport to impose its dictatorship on the majority, who want to remain French, and who know that Corsica has no future outside the Republic?" he asks. Mr Chevenement says the nationalists represent at most 10 per cent of people on the island; Mr Talamoni admits they are a minority but claims those who want autonomy or independence amount to a quarter of the population.
Mr Chevenement does not want to give law-making powers to the Corsican assembly from 2004. "This accord fulfilled the conditions set down by the nationalists," he says. "That is to say the demand of a transfer of legislative power - which in their minds means sovereignty."
When he presented his own plan to Mr Jospin last June, Mr Chevenement proposed an economic development programme, regulatory power for the Corsican assembly and the promotion of the Corsican language. The Matignon accords specifically make an exception for children whose parents do not want them to attend classes. "But this would be in a climate where the mere act of asking to opt out puts you on a blacklist," Mr Chevenement says. "You must understand that life in Corsica is dominated by fear . . . fear of those who plant bombs, who kill, who demand ransom, who racketeer, who have brought blackmail and fear into all social relations."
The former interior minister believes the three assassinations and half-a-dozen attacks on the island since August prove him right. "As long as the weapons have not been laid down, there is no reason why violence should not drag on," he says. Corsicans often draw a simplistic parallel with Ireland, in which Britain equals France and the IRA becomes the National Front for the Liberation of Corsica (FLNC). Many express great sympathy for Ireland, "the sister island". It is a comparison Mr Chevenement dismisses out of hand. "There is an Irish nation in Ireland," he says. "There is no Corsican nation."
In his mind, the French nation is one and indivisible; the Corsican nationalists' claim to a separate identity an affront. "A Frenchman is a French citizen," he says. "We don't ask whether he's Catholic, Protestant, Muslim, Flemish, Corsican, Alsatian or Basque, whether he's of North African or Vietnamese or Jewish or Armenian origin. France is a composite of all the peoples of Europe and the world. This is the definition of France that motivates me - definition by citizenship. Defining people by their origin would be a historic regression; it would mean going back to before [the French revolution in] 1789."
Mr Chevenement is the only French cabinet minister to have resigned three times in the past two decades on questions of principle. He prefers to emphasise the aggregate of 10 years he has spent in government as minister of research, industry, education, defence and the interior. "I am a very stable person," he says. "I just celebrated my 30th wedding anniversary. I have never divorced. How many wives did Henry VIII have? Six, I believe - that gives me some leeway!"
After each of his past resignations, Mr Chevenement has bounced back; his whole career seems a cycle of calamities and resurrections, of public spats with the Greens' Daniel Cohn-Bendit and Dominique Voynet, the justice minister Elisabeth Guigou, the German foreign minister Joschka Fischer, and now Mr Talamoni. For a long time, Mr Chevenement was considered a political curiosity - a former Marxist whose positions on defence, immigration and security were often more in tune with the right; a loner who seemed to take pleasure in bashing the US and defending Saddam Hussein. Until Corsica, none of this found much resonance.
Until Corsica, it was physical, not political, resurrection that most endeared Mr Chevenement to the French. In 1998 he fell into a three-week coma after an allergic reaction to an anaesthetic. When he regained consciousness, it was described as "a Republican miracle". Aware of his fierce secularism, I asked whether he believed in life beyond the grave. "I will not speak of what is beyond," he answered. "I think this experience taught me a lot about life itself. But not about the beyond. Today is the anniversary of my second birth after my first death. Not everyone can say that."