121 Pacific isles form France’s only overseas country
French Polynesia is a French overseas collectivity and its sole overseas country, listed by the UN as non-self-governing. Across five archipelagos it counts 121 islands and atolls—75 inhabited at the 2017 census—with Tahiti carrying the capital weight.
The groups are the Australs, Gambiers, Marquesas, Society Islands (Leeward and Windward), and Tuamotus. Austronesian voyagers of the Great Polynesian Migration, under way from about 1500 BCE, reached the Marquesas around 200 BCE. Magellan sighted Puka-Puka in 1521 and Pedro Fernandes de Queirós crossed the region in 1606; Wallis reached Tahiti in 1767, Bougainville in 1768, and Cook in 1769 to watch the transit of Venus. Peru’s viceroy sent Domingo de Bonechea in 1772, and a short-lived Spanish mission followed in 1774.
France declared a protectorate over Tahiti and Tahuata in 1842 and fought the Tahitians from 1844 to 1847. That year’s Jarnac Convention with Britain kept Raiatea, Huahine, and Bora Bora independent of both powers. In the 1880s France claimed the Tuamotus and treated all the Marquesas as French, appointing a governor in 1885.
In 1940 the colony backed the Free French, and many Polynesians fought in North Africa and Italy; unknown to them, Japan’s Konoe Cabinet listed the islands among its hoped-for possessions. Islanders gained French citizenship in 1946, when the Établissements français de l’Océanie became an overseas territory, renamed French Polynesia in 1957. After Algerian independence in 1962 ended testing there, France moved its nuclear programme to Polynesia; resuming tests at Fangataufa in September 1995 sparked wide protest, and the last blast came on 27 January 1996, just before France joined the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty.
Politics grew volatile from the mid-2000s. Gaston Flosse, in power since 1991, had backed the renewed tests, and in September 2007 pro-independence Oscar Temaru took the presidency once more, his third win in as many years, backed by 27 of the Assembly’s 44 members. The UN returned the territory to its decolonisation list in 2013.
Source: French Polynesia
