French Polynesia historical timeline

Origins

Polynesian voyagers reached these islands in a series of deliberate expeditions, navigating by star paths, swell patterns and bird flight over distances no other people attempted at the time. The Marquesas were settled first, perhaps around 200 AD, and the Society Islands after; from here canoes went on to Hawaii, Easter Island and New Zealand. Taputapuātea on Ra’iātea, the great marae where those voyages were consecrated, is a UNESCO site and is understood across Polynesia as a common ancestral centre.

Turning points

European contact from 1767 was catastrophic in the usual way: introduced disease reduced some island populations by ninety per cent within a few generations. The Pomare dynasty unified Tahiti with missionary support, and France imposed a protectorate in 1842 and annexation in 1880. From 1966 to 1996 France conducted 193 nuclear tests at Moruroa and Fangataufa, which transformed the economy through military spending, poisoned the politics permanently, and left health and contamination questions that are still in litigation. Autonomy was granted in stages from 1977, and French Polynesia was returned to the United Nations list of non-self-governing territories in 2013 over French objections.

Influential people

Queen Pomare IV, who resisted the protectorate for decades. Paul Gauguin, whose paintings fixed an image of these islands in European minds that says more about him than about Tahiti. Oscar Temaru, the pro-independence leader who took the territory back to the UN. And the navigators themselves, whose methods were reconstructed and proved seaworthy by Pacific voyaging societies from the 1970s.

Cultural evolution

Tahitian and the other Polynesian languages of the territory were suppressed in schools for generations and are now taught again. Heiva, the July festival of dance, chant and canoe racing, began as a permitted remnant of banned practices and is now the cultural centre of the year. Tattooing — the word tatau is Polynesian — was outlawed by missionaries and revived from the 1980s. And the black pearl, farmed in the Tuamotu lagoons since the 1960s, is the one export that is genuinely local.

Present-day significance

An overseas collectivity of France with wide internal autonomy, spread across an ocean area the size of Europe with a population under three hundred thousand. Tourism and pearls carry the economy, supported by French transfers. Sea-level rise threatens the low atolls directly, and the unresolved legacy of the tests remains the dominant political question.