French Polynesia: History

Pre-20th-Century History

Just how the Polynesian peoples came to populate their islands was a subject of debate for many years. What was clear from the start, however, is that they were great sailors and navigators who traversed vast distances of open ocean to settle the Pacific from Papua New Guinea, through Fiji, Samoa and eventually to Tahiti, Hawaii, New Zealand and Easter Island. It's thought that the ancestors of today's Polynesians left southeast Asia around 3000 or 4000 years ago and began to arrive in present-day French Polynesia around 200 BC.

Islands were originally ruled by chieftains who commanded huge fleets of outrigger canoes; religious practices at this time included human sacrifices.

Some of the first European visitors, among them Samuel Wallis (1767), Louis-Antoine de Bougainville (1768) and James Cook (1769), returned with stories of a paradise on earth inhabited by 'noble savages' and Venus-like women whose sexual favours were freely offered to the visitors. This myth attracted the likes of Herman Melville, Robert Louis Stevenson and Paul Gauguin.

The most famous event in the region's history was the mutiny on the Bounty . It was on Tahiti and the Austral island of Tubuai that Fletcher Christian and his mutineers sought refuge after setting William Bligh and his faithful crew members adrift in a tiny open boat near the Tongan islands on 28 April 1789. And it was on Tahiti that the long arm of British law rounded up those mutineers who hadn't escaped to Pitcairn Island.

At the time of the mutiny, the Society islands were ruled locally by a few important families - there was no all-prevailing ruler. Quickly realising the power of European weaponry, the Polynesians had courted earlier visitors to make allegiances in regional power struggles. While Cook, Bougainville and others had resisted this, the Bounty mutineers offered themselves as mercenaries. The Pomares, one of the powerful Tahitian families, secured their services and, as a result, came to control most of the islands.

Soon whalers and traders were calling in at the islands, trading weapons for fresh food, introducing the notion of prostitution and spreading European diseases to which the islanders had no natural immunity. Protestant missionaries were deployed to put an end to all that nudity, erotic dancing, wanton sex and heathen religion, and traditional Polynesian culture rapidly fell apart. The islands' population plummeted and the tyrannical missionaries razed local temples ( marae ) to the ground, forbidding any activities that were not devoutly Christian.

And then the French came. They were already in control of the Marquesian archipelago to the northeast and after much filibustering and political browbeating, ousted the English and secured most of what would become French Polynesia in 1842. Queen Pomare IV, who had already done much to unify the islands under her rule, was forced to yield to the French and spent the rest of her 50-year reign as a figurehead.

Modern History

At the turn of the 20th century the Polynesian islands became part of the Établissements français d'Océanie (French Pacific Settlements) and a programme of rapid commercial expansion was introduced. Chinese labourers came to work on vanilla and cotton plantations, and copra and mother-of-pearl production became the cornerstone of the French Polynesian economy. Nearly 1000 islanders were sent to Europe to fight the Germans in WWI, and 5000 US soldiers landed on Bora Bora soon after the USA's entrance into WWII to thwart the Japanese advance in the Pacific.

The French had been testing weapons in the Sahara Desert, but Algerian independence caused General de Gaulle to announce in 1963 that the tiny atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa in the Tuamotus would serve as the new sites for weapons testing, and the Centre d'expérimentations du Pacifique was born. Due to continuing world opposition, the testing shifted underground in 1981. Of course the French claim the testing is perfectly safe but don't seem prepared to conduct it on French domestic soil.

In 1995 when President Chirac announced that a new series of underground tests were to be conducted, the world reverberated with protest and condemnation. Riots in the streets of Pape'ete saw hundreds of cars overturned and buildings set alight, and the Chilean and New Zealand ambassadors were recalled from Paris. The tests were completed in early 1996 and the French government has since stated that their nuclear-testing programme is over. After more than 150 separate tests of up to 200 kilotons (10 times more powerful than the bomb which levelled Hiroshima) the dust has settled around the atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa, though the longer-term effects remain to be seen. Recent tests on the structure of the atolls show cracking and some leakage of radioactive materials, but most tests are suppressed by the French government, so the true extent of the damage is unknown.

Recent History

The surprise election in June 2004 of a new pro-independence president, Oscar Temaru (ending the almost 20-year reign of Paris' toady, Gaston Flosse), was followed by a remarkable period of political unrest. Temaru was ousted within four short months but desperately tried to cling to power, bringing him into conflict with French president Jacques Chirac's government in Paris. In 2005 there was a new election in which Temaru increased his previous majority and claimed government. On 26 December 2006, Gaston Tong Sang was elected President by 31 votes to 26. On 18 January 2007 Tong Sang's new government survived a motion of no confidence brought by Oscar Temaru. Only 26 MPs showed up for the vote, which needed three additional MPs in order to pass.

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