interesting article

France Today, September 2007
Far-Flung FranceThe French islands are strewn like confetti across the seven seas. By Mort Rosenblum
The sun set long ago on the British Empire. But when it rises anywhere around the globe, it lights up a piece of France. From fishy little Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon off Nova Scotia to La Réunion in the Indian Ocean, the confetti of empire is strewn across seven seas—More than 130 islands, each as French as gigot d’agneau.
In the 1980s, researching a book about how France civilized us all whether we wanted it to or not, I island-hopped across what the French call their DOM-TOM: départements and territoires that lie outre-mer (overseas). That first toe in the water was enough. Now I seize any excuse to keep going back.
Food, of course, is one thing. Classic French dishes are made with sun-splashed vegetables grown outside the back door. Fish still twitches when it reaches the kitchen. At open-air kitchens on beaches, cooks barbecue seafood and meats in bouquets of spices peculiar to their own islands. On the fanciest of menus, airlifted poulet de Bresse might share space with such Creole creations as blaff, a West Indies fish court-bouillon, or rougail, an Indian Ocean curry.
But even more fascinating are the islanders themselves, infinite varieties of cultural blends, who might quote Molière in a gentle, r-less lilt or wrap lava-lavas around their waists to go vote for the next occupant of the Élysée Palace. France’s islands are not melting pots but rather hot-wok stir-fries of ingredients from just about anywhere. Bourgeois bureaucrats from the métropole—mainland France—bump shoulders with almondeyed métis, Indians (East or West), Polynesians, Melanesians, Indonesians, Chinese and just about anything else. Mahogany skin can mean African roots or simply a good suntan.
For instance, Carole Michèle on Martinique is as much a mélange as the dishes that emerge from her eatery at the market in Fort de France, the capital of Martinique. She traces her halfdozen bloodlines across Africa, Europe, Asia and points in between. With all of this, the islands are an integral part of the metropolitan center, their cities complete with traffic jams, irascible traders and the rest. Road markings are those you find in Paris or Provence. If your car had pontoons and a real big gas tank, in fact, you could circumnavigate the globe without ever feeling you had left France.
The French began sinking flags into far-flung soil in the 16th century as European powers scrambled for strategic outposts and trading ports. They were late off the mark: Spain and Portugal had already persuaded a Pope to divide the world—freshly revealed to be not flat but round—between them. But in 1515, François Ier took the throne in Paris.
A 6-foot-6 monarch of large appetites for power and glory, François Ier equipped fleets to remake the map. Historians quote him as saying (he probably didn’t): “Show me the Act by which Adam excluded me from a share of the Earth.” French colonial policy evolved over the centuries. Slavery—the Caribbean was one corner of the “triangular trade”—was abolished in 1848, but as late as 1884 Jules Ferry, then prime minister, told the Chamber of Deputies that “superior races” had rights over “inferior” ones, “because they have…the duty to civilize the inferior races.”
France’s empire began crumbling after World War II. Indochina went first with a long bloody war. After 1960, when Charles de Gaulle gave up most of French Africa, most ex-colonies were independent.
But the confetti of empire held onto their tricolores. During that same momentous year, 1960, de Gaulle visited Martinique and told a cheering crowd of citizens: “Mon Dieu! Mon Dieu! How French you are!”
Today, island statuses vary widely. Corsica, some 200 kilometers off the French coast in the Mediterranean, is a département like any other on the mainland. The nonidentical twins in the Caribbean, Guadeloupe and Martinique, with a combined population of some 834,000, are DOMS (départements d’outre-mer)—the equivalent of states. Each is as French as Hawaii is American. So is the Ile de la Réunion (pop. 706,000), off Mozambique. And they are all considered part of the European Union.
French Polynesia, a necklace of coral reefs and atolls scattered across the South Pacific—118 islands with a total population of 245,000—is no longer a TOM (territoire d’outre-mer) but a COM, an overseas collectivité—and is not part of the EU. The same applies to nearby Wallis-et-Futuna (pop. 15,000); Mayotte (pop. 160,000), south of Réunion; Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon (7,000) nestled into Canada; and the posh Caribbean islands of Saint Barthélemy and Saint Martin (the northern, French half of the island, that is; the southern half, Sint Maarten, is Dutch).
New Caledonia, rich in nickel and with vast undersea coral gardens second only to Australia’s Great Barrier Reef, is something else entirely. With a population of just under 200,000, it was a TOM until a few decades ago, when an independence movement brought the place to the edge of a mouse-that-roared war. After much negotiation, it amounts to a COM but is officially known simply as La Nouvelle-Calédonie, without further specification. In 2014, New Caledonians are to vote on independence.
There are further bits, including Clipperton and a handful of islands that make up the TAAF (terres australes et antarctiques françaises), Southern Lands and French Antarctica. All together, France’s inhabited islands add up to 2,500,000 people, and no more than 29,500 square kilometers of dry land.
But, however small the number and however varied their inhabitants, most of them are as French as France gets. (One exception: Although the official language of Mayotte is French, a large majority of the people don’t speak it, preferring their indigenous languages.)
On the blizzardy day I arrived in Saint-Pierre-et-Miquelon, years back, a mob of angry fish packers had decided to defenestrate the préfet. Lacking windows of any height, they instead seized him by the armpits and frog-marched him along the frozen quai to his official launch and put him out to sea (which in effect meant a short ride to Canada). Gendarmes sat out the disturbances, looking on with thinly disguised amusement.
The issue for the demonstrators was who had the right to unload a new factory trawler that would be putting into port six times a year. But, as usual in any French manif, larger fears lurked in the background. If a wrong precedent was set, that might weaken the grasp of a French handhold on the North American continent where Jacques Cartier, the first French explorer to reach North America, planted a flag in 1535. Today, the island’s inhabitants, mainly descendants of cod fishermen from Brittany, Normandy and the Basque country, are French to the core.
My last trip to France outre-mer, just recently, was to Martinique. When the sun sparkles in the blue sky, and fresh breezes fan a rickety table piled high with spiny lobster that only minutes earlier were minding their own business under water, it is easy to forget where you are.
I splashed in the surf, emptied a few beer bottles with strange colorful labels, climbed into my rental car and headed to a dinner under a palm-frond lean-to. As I drove, I mused about visits to old forts and whether I wanted mango or guava flavor when I bought my next bottle of homemade rum punch. Such intrusions of modern life as watching a speedometer did not enter my head. Then I spotted that chilling sight so familiar to anyone who nears Auxerre on route A6 from Paris. A trio of gendarmes in stiff caps and polished shoes were fiddling with a camera on stilts, eager to shave points off the French driver’s license of anyone who forgot where he was.
Even broken up in odd-shaped little pieces, planted in lush vegetation, peopled by different cultures and sprinkled across the planet, les îles are still La France.
Mort Rosenblum is a journalist and educator as well as the author of several books, most recently Escaping Plato’s Cave: How America’s Blindness to the Rest of the World Threatens Our Survival, published this month by St. Martin’s Press.