New societies in the south Pacific: An ethnography of French sovereignty in New Caledonia

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THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO

NEW SOCIETIES IN THE SOUTH PACIFIC: AN ETHNOGRAPHY OF FRENCH SOVEREIGNTY IN NEW CALEDONIA

A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE DIVISION OF THE SOCIAL SCIENCES IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY DEPARTMENT OF ANTHROPOLOGY

BY MARSTON HUNT MORGAN

CHICAGO, ILLINOIS DECEMBER 2009

UMI Number: 3387010

All rights reserved INFORMATION TO ALL USERS The quality of this reproduction is dependent upon the quality of the copy submitted. In the unlikely event that the author did not send a complete manuscript and there are missing pages, these will be noted. Also, if material had to be removed, a note will indicate the deletion.

UMI 3387010 Copyright 2010 by ProQuest LLC. All rights reserved. This edition of the work is protected against unauthorized copying under Title 17, United States Code.

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Copyright
2009 by Marston Hunt Morgan All Rights Reserved

To the memory of Paul de Deckker

TABLE OF CONTENTS List of Illustrations

v

Acknowledgements

vi

Preface

xiii

Introduction: A Dialectics of Civilization and Custom

1

1. Civilizations

(circa 1804)

33

2. Protections

(1836-1843)

76

3. Possessions

(1843-1848)

113

4. Annexations

(1848-1870)

153

5. Colonizations

(1870-1897)

205

6. Alienations

(1880-1904)

249

7. Non Decolonizations

(1945-1988)

305

8. New Constitutions

(1988-2006)

335

Conclusion: Predictions, Economies, Conjunctures, and Other Perspectives

375

References

392

iv

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS

FIGURES 1. Detail of itinerary for a walking tour of Noumea

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2. Interpretive station sixteen “The Reformed Church”

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3. Detail of “La Bible” in station sixteen

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4. View of Noumea from the perspective of the Saint-Joseph Cathedral

xxx

5. Exiting the Northern Province Government

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6. Entrance to the Koniambo Project’s Vavouto Industrial Area

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v

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

As a child in Egypt I had a globe with a light inside that, when illuminated, showed the major currents of the world’s oceans. Combined with a Times Atlas of the World which showed small Pacific atolls in remarkable detail, I developed an elaborate and recurrent daydream complete with a logbook containing diagrams of my homebuilt vessel and proposed itinerary: I imagined setting off from the Red Sea port of Al-Qusayr, and by dint of prevailing winds and seasonal currents being able to reach the Phoenix Islands in as little as three months. My actual trip to distant Oceania went via Portland, Oregon and Chicago, Illinois and not only took significantly longer than I had initially expected, but I also accrued social debts which I had entirely unanticipated as a juvenile. My childhood escapist idealism was replaced by a real network of people and institutions who humored my interests and actually helped me get there. In place of a short list of acknowledgements, here I will offer a brief narrative of my research trajectory as a way to both 1) thank the people and institutions who made it possible with certain crucial interventions, and 2) show how it came into being, as a plausible academic endeavor and personal interest that took up the better part of the last decade. While writing my senior thesis at Reed College on the Touareg of Southern Algeria, I was continually piqued by the Melanesian worlds presented in courses offered by Professors Gail Kelly and Joel Robbins. I wondered in humorous conversation with Spencer Fisher if by some sort of historical accident, a small band of Muslims might have found themselves lost in vi

Highland Papua New Guinea, veritably existing for the sole purpose of offering me a uniquely appropriate group among whom I could conduct graduate research. This strange conjuncture actually presented itself in a close by Melanesian country, in somewhat more serious circumstances. In thesis reading about a historical account of a Berber insurgency against the French in 1870s Algeria, one writer mentioned in a passing footnote that three Kabyle leaders of the insurgency were deported to the French South Pacific penal colony of New Caledonia. I filed this tidbit away in my memory, and well after finishing my thesis and moving first to Fez Morocco and then New York City, I periodically wondered how I might find out more of what became of these three men—an eminently historical and individual focused and therefore unanthropological subject, but compelling to me nonetheless. The opportunity to pursue this interest was offered during my first year of graduate work at the University of Chicago, in the context of John Kelly’s winter 2002 course, Capitalism, Colonialism and Nationalism in the Pacific. The University’s Regenstein Library offered more than adequate historical and reproduced archival materials to fill a 10-15 page paper on the Kabyle revolt and what it turns out were not three, but rather something in the order of 100 Kabyle leaders deported to New Caledonia in the 1870s. While I had previously planned on conducting field research on language shift and urbanization in Papua New Guinea, this historical diversion seemed more promising as a subject of study—particularly if I could connect the historical deportation with a contemporary population of descendants (which I now know is not possible). As my anxiety mounted in Fall 2002 over how to proceed with fellowship applications, one day during Methods I asked John Comaroff if I might simply skip two weeks of class in order to go see what New Caledonia was like. He replied, “Do what you need to do!” so

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I bought a ticket leaving the following Friday, and found a Lonely Planet guide to New Caledonia at 57th Street Books. Armed with a guide and a barely passable reading knowledge of French, I was lucky enough to have bee in contact with Kathy Creely, a librarian at the University of California San Diego who in the early 1980s had worked at the Noumea Headquarters of the Secretariat of the Pacific Community. She gave me the name of the director of the Territorial Archives of New Caledonia, Ismet Kurtovich, who was the son of a close friend, and suggested he might be able to help orient me. I deplaned at Tontouta Airport, 50 kilometers from Noumea, and took a minibus to the Youth Hostel which overlooks the town (the view is shown in figure 4). The next day I went to the Territorial Archives and met Ismet. He informed me a fair amount of work had already been done of the Kabyle deportees, but since I was an anthropologist it might be a good idea for me to meet with the current President of the University of New Caledonia, Dr. Paul de Deckker, who like me was an anthropologist. Ismet gave a call, and instructed me to exit the Archives, duck through a hole in a cyclone fence, walk down a steep hill, and knock on the door at the Administration building. Paul de Deckker is perhaps the single most crucial individual who made my research in New Caledonia possible. From the time we first met in his modest presidential office at UNC (what he once described to me as “the youngest and smallest university in the French, if not the entire European university system”), under the gaze of a giant photo blowup of historian Patrick O’Reilly, he offered me any assistance I might require. Over the years this included many letters of reference, personal introductions, housing and dinners, and reflecting his commitment he was a full member of my Dissertation Committee until the time of his death in 2009. With his viii

support, I was able to secure a short pre-field fellowship from the U of C department of Anthropology which allowed me to spend three months in New Caledonia during the southern hemisphere summer of 2003-2004. With this preliminary research experience plus a letter of support from Paul indicating that he would act as my fieldwork supervisor, I was able to secure a Fulbright-Hays Doctoral Dissertation Research Abroad Fellowship from the United Stated Department of Education for 2006 (award number P022A050005). Thanks for this award are also due to Madeline Hamblin for her years of successfully shepherding me and dozens of other students through the federal application process and administering the program. In mid December 2005 I left Chicago for New Caledonia, and stayed until October 2006. Paul and his wife Francine, and two (grown) children Thomas and Catherine offered me unexpected kindness and warmth during my fieldwork and subsequent visits. Paul and Francine half-joked that I was now a member of their family (the “half” is that they did actual extend to me the kind of help I have only previously received from my own parents). I am extremely happy they were able to meet my full parents, James Marston and Lotus Paloma as well as my brother Donald Lloyd when they visited me in New Caledonia in August 2006. I am grateful that Paul and Francine later extended their hospitality to my committee chair John Kelly and had him to dinner in Paris during his short academic visit for the Rugby World Cup. I was very proud in September 2008 to introduce the de Deckker family, over brunch at their lovely house in Faubourg Blanchot in Noumea, to my then fiancé and now wife Margaret Mattson. At the time in 2008 Paul had already undergone months of treatment for cancer of the esophagus in Paris, and was only on a brief trip home between treatments to manage a conference proceeding. Paul had lost weight. He looked excellent and was typically boisterous—claiming that cancer was great for the physique. I am thankful to Francine, Catherine, and Thomas for allowing Meg ix

and me to share this important and happy time with their clan. I am regretful that I took too long to produce this document, large sections of which I wrote with Paul in mind as a first reader and critical audience. It would have greatly benefited from a final read through by Paul. I developed other debt in New Caledonia as well. During my first extended stay in New Caledonia in 2003 I enrolled in an intensive language program in Nouville across from the University dormitory (where Paul had secured me cheap, affordable housing). One of my fellow students was a South African named Eustace who had just moved to New Caledonia with his French wife—a geologist named Camille. Aside from the de Deckkers, Camille and Eustace offered me all those forms of assistance and friendship without which fieldwork would have been a sad and lonely time. They also offered their own interpretations of many things which I encountered, and offered help with translation of archival documents, and they insisted on taking me out to dinner on a regular basis ( calling me a “poor student”). Importantly, after they moved from Noumea to Koumac I always had a place to stay in the North Province. Through their friends and colleagues, and Adeline and Regis is particular, I was supported in my fieldwork with material assistance as I constantly traveled around the island, living out of my suitcase for ten months as I put 16,000 kilometers on my Toyota Hilux. Others in New Caledonia materially and intellectually aided my project. Inès de Pirey as the exterior relations officer of the University of New Caledonia secured housing at the University’s studios in the Ateliers for the first few weeks after my arrival. Historian Frederic Angleviel offered a warm welcome with a lunch of litchi-infused rum and rousette soup at his home. Academics and scholars who know the locale much better than me, such as Louis José Barbançon, Ismet Kurtovich, Hamid Mokaddem, and Christophe Sand, humored my periodic inquiries beginning in 2002, and the very long process in which I am only just now learning to x

ask a few right questions. I look forward to continuing these conversations to improve this dissertation. At Chicago, a few faculty members have given sustained support to my project(s), beginning with Michael Silverstein and Danilyn Rutherford welcoming me into the program in 2001. Later they were joined by John Kelly who became chair of my dissertation committee. I am indebted to the members of dissertation committee who heard the defense on October 19th 2009 (Chair John Kelly, Michael Silverstein, and François Richard) as well as two other faculty in the department who made quorum . They were Nitzan Shoshan who was also in my incoming cohort in 2001, and Ray Fogelson who has participated in not only my dissertation defense, but also my proposal defense in 2005, every single one of my year-end interviews between 2002 and 2005, as well as my incoming interview in 2001: I deeply appreciate his willingness to offer his service, and this document will benefit in revision from his specific interjections. At the University of Guam, I was helped to finish writing this document thanks to a teaching load allotment for Fall 2009. I am grateful to my colleagues who took over my courses for the full week of Thursday October 15th to Thursday October 22nd while I was traveling for the defense. They are Mike Carson, Doug Farrer, John Peterson, and Dominica Tolentino. As with every other dissertation written and defended in Anthropology at the University of Chicago since the early 1990s, a special thanks is owed to Anne Chien. My parents have also patiently waited for this process to be over, and offered encouragement and engaged interest in this strange project I decided to undertake. I believe they are uncompromisingly proud of what I have done. I thank my father for a piece of sound advice based on his career working as an architect in the Middle East which I sadly could not follow in the last few weeks of this project: “Never do anything important while you’re jetlagged.” xi

Final thanks go to Margaret Mattson, who met me during a short but happy time in 2007 after my fieldwork was over but before I had actually started writing the dissertation. She has patiently sat through this whole process, losing me for weeks on end as I tried to write, telling me that I am a good writer whenever possible, even as I refuse to believe her. In the long and trying time since we first met, she was happy to get married to me, and willing to move to Guam with me, all the while looking forward to a time when I would be finished with this document and she would have me entirely to herself. That time has come.

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PREFACE

Anthropology would encompass ethnography and ethnology, which an 1878 entry in the Oxford English Dictionary distinguishes in the following way: “Ethnography embraces the descriptive details, and ethnology the rational exposition, of the human aggregates and organizations.” —Yumna Siddiqi (2007:44)

Neo-Ethnology and Plausible Expositions of Liberal Aggregates and Institutions The title of this dissertation is a misnomer. My original thought two years ago was to entitle it An Ethnology or “rational exposition” of French sovereignty in New Caledonia. I was drawing on a quote from not Yumna Siddiqi, which I use above because the distinction between ethnology and ethnography and its historical context is stated very cleanly, but from a statement in Jean Jacques Elisée Reclus’ entry entitled “Ethnography” in the 9th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (Reclus1878), on which the OED definition above is apparently based. As drafts of the dissertation came and went, the less conventional “ethnology” shifted out of the title to a less remarkable “ethnography,” and I eventually filed papers to graduate with the latter as part of the dissertation’s title. This mistake is now veritably set in stone, and I have already been taken to task for calling this an “ethnography” in the oral defense. I will explain here that an ethnology is a different sort of work in intention than an ethnography. I presently intend for this work to be seen as a political ethnology of New Caledonia, perhaps embodying a method for conducting a political neo-ethnology of liberalism. How does ethnology differently treat data than ethnography? Much of what follows might be considered historical ethnography in the sense of Marshall Sahlins’ detailed treatment of 1800s Oahu in Anahulu (1992), or Shannon Dawdy’s account of New Orleans in Building the xiii

Devil’s Empire (2008). For example, Dawdy defined her work as a “historical ethnography” of New Orleans in terms of her aspiration to make “the characters, smells, struggles, and banter of this eighteenth-century community come alive in the imagination”(2008:3). In this sense her work captures the past subjectivities and experiences of the residents of the city she studied, and constitutes “ethnography.” In contrast, this work documents the social historical networks of French sovereignty in New Caledonia. The subjectivities and experiences which I document best and most thoroughly are of a political and administrative sort which often are not necessarily located in New Caledonia at all. As with Dawdy’s work, “characters” and their interactions are still a central element of my representation (readers will find ample biographical individuals in the text whose passions and motives are graphically described), but in the place of reproducing smells and banter of a place in the past, my objectives or intentions are different from ethnography in at least two ways . First, I attempt offer those empirically rigorous details which make various eras of French colonial involvements seem like plausible endeavors: I seek to understand the shape of colonial projects in their particular details and seen from their own internal logics and argumentations. Second, I attempt to explain how the material and intellectual legacies of these projects and policies of the colonial era matter for New Caledonian politics in the present: these are the conditions of possibility for contemporary politics, but not in any mechanistic way. I propose that these intentions for description constitute a bridge between ethnography as a descriptively graphic art of representation, and ethnology in the classic sense of a “rational” rather than religious of mythic account for historical differences and similarities between human populations. By inserting ethnographic subject positions into historical accounts as the perspective from which specific era-dependant rationalities are constituted, inclusion of policy xiv

makers’ intentions and structural agencies and unintended consequences provides for a model of historical change. What I offer below is in this sense an ethnology in intention, rather than an ethnography, but ethnology fell out of fashion for a reason: it was bad empirics. Ethnology of the late1800s was legitimately concerned with how physical and linguistic traits differ and correlate between groups over time, it should be remembered that it was deployed by scholars with the intent of providing a history of humankind. I propose that this intent can be salvaged even if their comparative methods based on conjectures and assumptions without empirical data and decontextualized presentations with no room for subject positions should be discarded. I offer a more empirically and subjectivity grounded “neo-ethnology” of the political institutions of New Caledonia, since this method of presentation explain how colonialism matters as an instance in the creation of historical similarities and differences of humankind. I do not attempt to bring the past to life, although this is a pleasing artifact of some small parts of my ethnographic history. Instead I attempt to make an exposition of history and the present, rendering its specific details as plausible, by a method of presentation which incorporates the ethnography of New Caledonia (historical or otherwise) into a narrative contextualized by globalized trends and influences. As my materials show, there is nothing simple or mechanistic in the history of how New Caledonia becomes French, and why it matters for the present, offered from the perspective of an ethnologic instantiation of how liberal governance was extended world-wide and with what consequences. In the place of comparative method which might decontextualize Metropolitan France and New Caledonia, this neoethnology prefers to seek out empirical vectors of policy and social interaction that simultaneously connect and divide these two places under the single umbrella of French sovereignty. As a matter of scientific historical method, this dissertation looks for the connective xv

tissue that grows between two very distant places. As an artifact of this scientific method, sometimes the lines simply do not connect. With these concerns in mind, the type of data and argumentation I present below might be easily called a “political history,” or as was suggested in the dissertation defense a “political ethnohistory.” In short, my answer in this dissertation for what it means to be French in the South Pacific focuses on issues of governance and civilization in the context of French political institutions and ideologies, and their forms of modes of extension and incorporation of New Caledonia. There are other perspectives which might also offer rational or rather “plausible expositions” of what it means and how it matters that New Caledonia is French, including one that might focus on the political economy of this sovereign relationship. The exposition that I present here is not the whole truth, and is very far from being the only type of truth. While it is incomplete, this ethnology of politics and governance is an absolutely necessary component of a fully adequate answer to the question: “What does it mean to be French in the South Pacific?”

Intellectual context and primary audience I am the first American to write a dissertation in anthropology based on “ethnographic” fieldwork in New Caledonia. I should point out, not only to avoid consequences of such hubris but to situate my research, that many other social scientists who write in English have worked in New Caledonia or have examined subjects directly pertaining to the island. Mike Carson, currently my colleague at the University of Guam, conducted archaeological research in Uvea in the late 1990s for his dissertation at the University of Hawaii. Tate LeFevre, a graduate student in cultural anthropology at New York University is at this very moment beginning on her own year of fieldwork. The three of us have in common the fact that we came to the island under our xvi

own direction, arriving at Tontouta airport with little more than a guidebook, and out of nothing constructed the social world necessary to support our research projects (I describe my own process in the Acknowledgements section of this document). Other scholars who have recently written on New Caledonia in English tend to be historians, such as Alice Bullard (2000), Kim Munholland (2005), and David Chappel (1997), and Dorothy Shineberg (1999). The motive behind their writing and publication seems oriented towards understanding other places and other issues besides New Caledonia itself: Second Republic France, the American experience of World War Two, Euro-American voyages of exploration and discovery, or the pan-pacific trade in islanders as plantation workers in Australia. In some ways, this present work is an inversion of their intentions and methods: to better understand New Caledonia, a robust understanding of French law is necessary. Some older publications by historians such as R.K. Howe on culture contact in the Loyalty Islands (1977) and earlier work by Shineberg on the sandalwood trade (1966) offers historical details from particular periods of New Caledonia’s past which carry significant ethnographic interest. Many scholars of New Caledonia walk the edge that separates anthropology from other disciplines, for example James Clifford’s intellectual biography of anthropologist and missionary Maurice Leenhardt (1982), historian Bronwen Douglas’ work on “traditional” Kanak society (e.g. 1970), and linguist J.K. Hollyman’s many years of work in New Caledonia (e.g. Haudricourt and Hollyman 1960). In this sea of historically oriented English-language work, I cast the present dissertation like a net with the hope of catching an English reading audience. This dissertation is full of historical content like the works that contextualize it, however it is an attempt to span the entire history of the French presence in New Caledonia and bring historical details to light as they bear xvii

on the development of present—offering a narrative neo-ethnology or “plausible exposition” of the development of similarity and difference in the social world of New Caledonia. As I argue below, the working social distinctions between indigenous “customary” and French “civil” societies in New Caledonia need to be contextualized within the history that produces them. I do not have a Marxist intent to use history to show that these distinctions are artifacts of historical processes and thereby illegitimate, but to understand them as outcomes that emerge or are made possible in relation to plausible subjectivities and subject positions—which retains the Marxist like perspective that alternatives to the present are possible. I imply that historical change can be best understood on its own terms, suggesting that attention to subjectivities, intentions, and possibilities for agentive action as well as their unanticipated failures are not the making of a particularistic micro-history or ethno-history, but are instead the very material from which master narratives and global or world histories which aspire to describe human lives and their connections should be constructed.

Introducing the Civil, Customary and Religious Institutions of New Caledonia in 2006 My starting point in the ethnologic narrative in the body of the dissertation is early 1800s France, so in this preface I will begin with the ethnographic present of 2006 to show where this narrative leads, with a short introduction to the institutions of governance in present day New Caledonia. In New Caledonia, when people talk about the “State” they are usually referring to the French High Commissioner and other official French State representatives and their offices both in Noumea and Paris. The State is locally locatable on a green hillside just north of downtown Noumea, behind an imposing yet beautiful wrought-iron fence. Some of the buildings in the large corner lot date to the late 1800s and early 1900s with wrap-around verandas with quaint xviii

provincial shutters, interspersed with more modern structures in the High Commissioner’s gardens. Some of the buildings are domiciles for functionaries posted to the island for a few years or months, but most are professional workspaces. People with grievances regularly use protests and strikes as a means to coerce the State to address their concerns, the entry gates of the High Commissariat becomes a center of activity—in 2005 to 2006 I witness this otherwise quiet section of downtown transformed by a series of short-lived events. Roadblocks made of pallets and manned by what appear to be masked Rastafarians was a union’s means to protest a legal decision upholding the firing of a welder. A few months later a convoy of private-operator owned dump trucks drove around downtown blaring their horns to protest that the State has not used its powers of law and order to break an “illegal” union strike at a mine that was impeding their right to earn a living. The largest event of the year was a “march against the high cost of living,” a three hour parade of six thousand persons and pickups with twelve-foot speakers blaring dance music: it ended at the High Commissariat, laying blame for the costs of daily needs like bread and gasoline at the feet of State policy. In New Caledonia, when people talk about the “Government” they are referring to the ministerial Government of New Caledonia, which is appointed from among members of the Congress of New Caledonia (votes for congress are cast for party slates, and party alliances working on an undefined principle called “collegiality” then constitutes a majority which names the members of Government; the elected Congress and its predecessor the Territorial Assembly have existed in some form since the late 1940s). Starting at the gates of the High Commissariat, it takes fifteen minutes to walk across downtown towards the yacht marina where one will find a cluster of buildings with shiny blue tiled roofs that date to the 1990s (note: only ethnographers and tourists walk in Noumea). One of these buildings house the offices of the elected ministerial xix

Government of New Caledonia, while the other houses the Southern Provincial representative government: the “State” and the “Government” and the “Province” are formally nested institutions of governance, one a subset of the next. However in terms of hierarchy of Government and Province, these two multi-story public buildings look very similar, with matching blue roofs. Most people say that the Province Sud building is much nicer—pointing to its furnishings, overall design and waterfront location while the Government building is set back into the hillside and gives less of a presentation in its reception area and public spaces. These qualitative comparisons contrasts, clearly aided by close proximity and shared features of buildings, offers grist for commentators who suggest that the Caledonian Government is a mere “extension” of the pragmatically more powerful Province Sud. However, Province Sud is a relatively new institution: its borders were created in 1988, and institutionalized in 1998 under an organic foundational law based on the Noumea Accords. The Noumea Accords also institutionalized the Northern Province and the Islands Province. All together, the French State, the Government of New Caledonia, and the Provincial Governments constitute the sovereign and civil governments of New Caledonia as defined in 1998.1 The “Customary Senate” is located in Nouville across the bay from downtown Noumea and was established in its current location and vocation in 1998 according to the organic law of the Noumea Accords. Each of the eight “customary areas” has two members who represent the non-civil status lands and peoples of New Caledonia. The members of the senate are officially selected based on tribal and traditional mechanisms of selections, which means in practice that the methods of selection are often legally undefined. The eight “Customary Areas” can be most concretely described as language groups (the names of customary areas are names of languages, 1

For a general readership unfamiliar with New Caledonia, the final published work will include maps which are currently not included due to copyright issues.

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although other indigenous languages are spoken within each area), rendered by law as territories with distinct borders and institutions for self governance which parallel civil collectivity of New Caledonia. All territory of New Caledonia falls within one of the three Provinces, and all territory of New Caledonia falls within one of the eight Customary Areas: neither hierarchically subsumes the other in formal design. The Customary Senate and the numerous tribal chiefs of each of 2the eight Customary Areas all together constitute the customary governments of New Caledonia as defined in 1998. The location of the customary senate in Nouville is somewhat isolated from other islandwide bodies of government which are all in Noumea proper. Nouville is a peninsula. It used to be a separate island called île Nou before tailings from nickel mining were used to connect it to the mainland in the 1950s. It takes fifteen minute to drive to Nouville from the High Commissariat, and twenty minutes from the Government. passing by the international port where Tahitian transvestites stand on the corner most evenings. Nouville’s earlier disconnection results in its relative underdevelopment, which might seem surprising given its place in the colonization of New Caledonia as I describe in Chapter Three. According to materials presented by the Museum of Païta, a Briton from Lincolnshire or Portsmouth named James Paddon who was involved in the Sandalwood trade “bought” the island from Chef Kuindo de Païta in 1851—two full years before the French claimed New Caledonia. By this act of purchase, Paddon is sometimes talked about as an “original” colonist of the island (e.g. Shineberg 1964). Paddon leased île Nou to the French State from 1853 until 1858, and then received an acreage on the mainland north of Noumea in the area called Païta in exchange for the island. One of Paddon’s descendants, 2

The Customary Senate was initially one single-level building with a guardian’s residence. It has now expanded into a modest set of single-level buildings which included a traditional chief’s case or house until it was burned in the mid 2000s.

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Harold Martin, as a teenager was pushed out of his university foyer housing in Paris during a strike by “Kanak” students in the 1970s some of whom now serve on the Customary Senate. By 2006 Harold Martin was himself President of the Government of New Caledonia. That year, one of the houses Paddon built in Païta was burned under suspicious circumstances. After securing Isle Nou from Paddon, the French government used it as the location for the incarceration of penal colonists starting in 1864. Many of the old penal administration buildings lay dormant after the Bagne was slowly closed beginning in 1897, with the head Penal Administrator’s resident serving in 1940 as a hotel for Pan Am flying boat passengers on layovers between Auckland and Honolulu. During World War II, thousands of U.S. soldiers were barracked on île Nou which—still as island across the bay from Noumea— kept them under isolated control. With this history in mind, it seems important that Nouville was chosen in 1998 as the location for the Customary Senate, where two unelected and traditionally selected representatives from each of the eight “customary” areas of New Caledonia meet as an organ of tribal governance (related to issues such as extent of traditional legal jurisdictions: individuals accused of a crime sometimes have an option of prosecution under customary or civil law) . While Nouville is in my opinion one of the most beautiful location in Noumea and where I personally prefer to live, the peninsula features the only penitentiary in the French Southwestern Pacific, an enormous satellite dish through which all phone and internet connections pass (note: this was removed by 2008 with the laying of a communications cable), an industrial trade school, and an decommissioned military observation post. The old penitentiary buildings now house a psychiatric hospital, a French language school, and the new Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie (established1999). From the new University, the new Territorial Archives and a somewhat older xxii

five star hotel are a short walk up the road. The observation post used up to the “events” surrounding independence disturbances in the 1980s has now reverted or “revindicated” to its original “Tribal” or “clan” ownership, but the hilltop structures were destroyed by a cyclone in 2005 and suffer vandalism.3 Because almost all of the land of the peninsula was in the State Domain (“domains of the dominion” per 1855) it escaped private housing development schemes which populated most of the hills and suburbs of Noumea with villas in the 1990s and 2000s. However, since the land was left unoccupied, according to the land laws of the French Napoléonic Code, it was possible for anyone to “squat” on the land without immediate threat of forced removal by state, civil, municipal, or customary authorities. Nouville in today a combination of relatively pristine brush covered hillsides (an invasive species), plus a scattering of new government buildings and institutions primarily built after 1998 as measures to fulfill the transfer of governing competences from the French State to the New Caledonia Government. In this landscape there are several large opportunistic squatter settlements. They are bricolaged together in what the local paper describes as a flavela like fashion. Its population includes individuals released from prison or from the hospital who often make the “squat” their home, as well as more socially secure individuals who do not want to pay the high market prices for land and rent. For instance, in 2006 an academic colleague of mine has a terraced garden and small house in the Nouville Squat where his wife and children live. Nouville was also my home for two southern hemisphere summers: while the University was out on break I was able to live in the dorm on the deserted 80

3

In 2002 a somewhat well maintained set of oil drums filled with concrete served as a barrier blocking the road up to the decommissioned post, whereas after the cyclone passed and the buildings largely destroyed, there was no consistent attempt to secure the premises, aside from painted notices identifying the land as victoriously “revindicated to the “Chamba Clan” and enjoining the reader not the vandalize the premises.

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acre campus, entirely alone in the enormous unsecured buildings except for the daily interlopers (children, I assumed, but I never caught more than a fleeting glimpse of one in a third floor breezeway as he made his escape) who entered campus from the squat to steal my clothes out of the washing machine, to take my food out of the commons-area refrigerator, and on one truly memorable occasion to shoot a bottle rocket at me as I napped on a picnic table outside the canteen. In this urban landscape of government institutions, yachts, and squats the municipal authority call the Ville de Nouméa, the City of Noumea, is itself a consequential player in the institutionalization of the Noumea Accords even if it is never named as having agency in the text. As a matter of ethnographic practicalities, in early 2006, I needed to locate some members of a French loyalist political party the Rassemblement Pour la Calédonie dans la Republique which was voted out of majority control of the Government in 2004 elections for the first time since the late 1970s. I passed by the small villa that houses the RPCR party headquarters in Noumea. Not even a secretary was present. I saw through the sliding glass door that the office appeared in disarray and a calendar on the wall was from the previous year. A friend offered the helpful suggestion that I should pass by the Mayor’s offices of Hotel de Ville of the City of Noumea, located in the center of downtown on the city’s central square called Place de Cocotiers (coconut palm square). Passing by the Hotel de Ville, I quickly recognized that much of the membership of the old RPCR was running the city government and following their original loyalist policy agendas at the level of city or “commune” government. One site where this is visible is in monuments erected by the City government which memorialize their own positive evaluation of New Caledonia’s historical connection with France.

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Along with the French State, the Caledonian Government, and the three Provinces (Nord, Sud, and Iles), the City of Nouméa is an institution of civil governance through which ideas about the future of New Caledonia and its relationship France are being actualized and (to use an 1980s-90s cliché keyword for anthropology) actively contested by the old RPCR regime through its municipal authority. In part this observation about the Ville de Nouméa helps me argue that the Noumea Accords thereby have multiple institutional instantiations which in intentional design sometimes work at cross purposes. Outside of these “governance” institutions of a civil or customary character in Noumea, there are two4 corollary religious institutions: the catholic cathedral Satin-Joseph built slowly between 1887 and 1897 which overlooks the downtown and the port, and the “Old Temple” of the protestant Reformed Church of France located a short distance down the which was built almost simultaneously between 1884 and 1893. Both building are veritably invisible from the downtown area today due to multilevel constructions dating to the 1960s and later, but this was not the case during their early lives when they dominated the colonial town’s rugged skyline. A sense of the history of Noumea’s built environment and the place of these civil and religious institutions is recaptured by a interpretive walking tour designed by the City of Noumea. The suggested itinerary for the pedestrian tour (figure 1) is located on the side of each of the sixteen interpretive stations located along the walk (figure 2). It took me two hours to complete the walk from the starting point at the old Mayor’s office located at number one, past the Cathedral at number four, to the end point at the Reformed church located at number sixteen. All of the stations are high quality in design and execution, although many are vandalized and

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There are other religious institutions and sects present in New Caledonia, but only the French Reformed Temple and the Roman Catholic Cathedral occupy dominating positions over the downtown area.

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prove to be fragile, the city has regularly repairs damaged items. Each station presents an interpretive text in French, with a gloss translation in English and Japanese with accompanying photos that describes the history of a nearby building or the neighborhood area. Every station has a small inserted display box that contains an item related to the location. One curious feature of this itinerary is the unequal treatment it gives to the Catholic and Reformed Churches which are very close to one another. The Reformed Church is the terminus, where in the interpretive aid (figure 2) the tourist will find a bible on display (figure 3), as though the new testament was the culminating destination of the entire walk.

Figure 1. Detail of itinerary for a walking tour of Noumea. Photo of a vinyl sticker adhered to the left-hand support of the sixteenth and final stop in the walking tour. Stop sixteen is shown in full in figure 2. Note Rue Jules Ferry and honorary Avenue Henri Lafleur. (Photo by author).

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Figure 2. Interpretive station sixteen “The Reformed Church.” This station is located on the street. The view from the doorway of the church gives a clear line of sight down Rue D’Alma to the ocean. (Photo by author)

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Figure 3. Detail of “La Bible” in station sixteen. (Photo by author)

From this perspective the Catholic Cathedral at the fourth stop might appear as one among the other historical curiosities along the way. However, in the spontaneous interpretation given to me by a city tour guide, this apparent pride of place given to the Reformed church by the city places it at the end of a long and often uninteresting walk down Noumea’s sides streets. The only interactive locations along the walk where the tourist might actually be able to enter xxviii

any historic buildings to spend any time are numbers one, four, ten, and sixteen: 1) the old mayor’s office which has been converted into a museum; 4) the Catholic Cathedral; 10) the Bernheim Library which features a building displayed in Paris during the Universal Exposition of 1900; and finally after a very long trek 16) the Reformed Church. The Saint-Joseph Cathedral is actually more centrally located both to the city as an element of its built environment, and within the itinerary of the proposed historical promenade. It should be pointed out that both these houses of worship were built with the intention to be used by the French population of a French city, and originate not in missionization activities but instead to provide religious services to a French civil population divided between the Catholic and Protestant sects.. The people with whom I attended Réveillon at the Cathedral the day before Christmas in 2003 were largely Europeans and Polynesians from Wallis, and Kanak although a series of prayers were given by representatives speaking in the name of all the self identified ethnic communities in attendance (Kanak, Metropolitan French, Vietnamese, “Creole” [French Caribbean], and Wallisian is the list I remember). Catholic mass is not a segregated meeting, and neither are services at the French Reformed Church Temple down the street—even as the latter claims that roughly two-thirds of the indigenous Kanak population attends a protestant congregation, implying that there is a indigenous European divide. While members of the Reformed church might at some times selfpresent itself as the “indigenous” church of revindication, and cast the Catholic faith as the “European” church of colonization, actual attendance is not as crisply defined—reflecting a religious history of missionization of the native population by both groups, plus a political history that two political parties composed of indigenous Melanesians formed after 1947 (one Protestant and one Catholic) and later merged into the Union Calédonienne from which the xxix

independence movement is traced. As I will argue below, while neither church can accurately be described as housing the independence movement, the shape which individual activists hope independence and self government might take is religiously inflected and informed. I will argue that the historical relationship between these churches and the French government in New Caledonia is a necessary component for any understanding the particular shape of the independence movement.

Figure 4. View of Noumea from the perspective of the Saint-Joseph Cathedral (taken from the youth hostel balcony: released into the Public Domain by its author, L. Entriken).

The itinerary (figure 1) and cityscape seen from the perspective of the Catholic Cathedral (figure 4) helps offer an introduction to the downtown area of Noumea as I describe above. The xxx

French High Commissariat, (“The State”) is not numbered, but is located just North of Rue de la République next to the black staccato arrow and East of Avenue Maréchal Foch. The current mayor’s office is located under the “VILLE” of Centre Ville, while the offices of the Government of New Caledonia and the Southern Province are both just to the southwest of Rue de Austerlitz just off the Marina. Seen from the Cathedral’s roof, the marina and the South Province buildings are in the far upper left of the frame and the Government offices are barely outside the frame. The present mayoral office complex downtown is beyond the middle right of the frame (an exceptionally wide angle lens would have captured it). In both the itinerary and the view of downtown every major institution of island wide and local governance, except the customary senate, is shown to be very close at hand. The Northern Province Government is located 250 kilometers to the North of Nouméa. As I discuss in Chapter Eight, the border between the Northern and Southern Provinces was designed to electorally represent different ethno-historical “communities” of New Caledonia and their interests, empowering the indigenous Kanak population in the North by making them a majority within the boundaries of the Province and incorporating some of the most significant global nickel reserves within its territory as basis from which to develop economic self sufficiency. The objective of sustainability is intended according to the text of the Noumea Accords to correct for historical grievances of the indigenous peoples of New Caledonia as 1) having been deprived of their right to self rule as a people through colonial settlement programs that made them a minority in their own country, and 2) a policy of land delimitation and relocation into indigenous customary réserves that deprived the original inhabitants of their lands and its mineral wealth. The Northern province appears to be the location of choice for this

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project of change, as selected not by the free will of the Kanak people, but by the French State and its managers. This new government for the Northern Province is housed in a small cluster of buildings with green tiled roofs that sit amongst hundreds of rolling hectares of cattle pasture, off an enormous ellipse where the main North-South two lane highway meets one of the island’s four East-West transversals. In 2005 at the time of my first visit that far North, there were no other buildings within eye-sight of the Government. However, there was a very nice brand-new twolane bicycle path. The Province Nord’s official intention is that a city of small residential developments will grow up in the open space around the ellipse. City planners intend to fill the rolling pastures with people and businesses, developing outwards from the ellipse to fill the two kilometers radius of open road and pasture that currently separate the Government from the nearest town to the North and to the South.

Figure 5. Exiting the Northern Province Government. USTKE is a an acronym for a large union syndicate with a socialist party affiliation (Photo by author).

This new center for Province-level self government—located at the intersection of the two major North-South and East West arteries in the Northern Province— is talked about as a xxxii

counterbalance to the Capital city and center of Noumea and the Southern Province: In the perspective of the picture above, taken from my car as I exited the complex, the Northern Province Government building is behind me. The graffiti “USTKE” and the hammer and sickle are plausibly left as a message for the elected members provincial level government, exiting the complex as the finished work for the day. The graffiti was not cleaned off during the eight months that I periodically stopped to check and see if they were still there (at the Southern Province government building they would not have lasted even a few days). USTKE stands for Union Syndicale des Travailleurs Kanak et Exploités, whose motto is “Usines Tribus, Même Combat” (Factories and Tribes, Same Fight).

Figure 6. Entrance to the Koniambo Project’s Vavouto Industrial Area. The main signboard depicts a planned nickel processing factory. The panel to the left says access to the industrial area is restricted, and that hunting and fires are not permitted. (Photo by author).

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The economic motor that is planned to sustain and attract this development to Koné— build the houses, shops and roads by bringing in a population from the south and the countryside— is a 2.2 billion USD nickel extraction and processing plant that was authorized by the Noumea Accords as a means to undo economic disequilibrium and land losses suffered by the indigenous population of the island in the colonial era. This is how “tribes” and “factories” become entailed in the “same fight.” The plant haltingly started construction in 2006 after title was transferred to the Koniambo Project in December 2005 by orders of the French state to a joint venture of the Northern Province’s SMSP mining company and Falconbridge Nickel Inc, a Canadian multinational. At the time of writing in late 2009 is still not yet ready for operation. At the time of my field research in 2005 and 2006, the location for the planned factory was formally christened in a ceremony attended by French Overseas Minister Baroin. While work at the actual factory location seemed glacial and at times manifest as little more than a picture of the planned building by the side of the main road (figure 5), the promise of the factory and the transfer of the rights to the mineral concession spawned a building boom which made a significant dent in the empty Koné landscape by the time of my most recent visit in 2008.

New Societies in the French South Pacific in Historical Perspective While this dissertation could have tracked the Koniambo project and the Northern Province government plans, I argue instead that it is important to realize that this is only the most recent in a long series of projects beginning in the 1840s which planned to transform New Caledonia into a “new society” of some sort. This dissertation stops just short of engaging the governance plans at Koné in the Northern Province and the Koniambo Nickel project that is supposed to finance it, and instead seeks to contextualize it historically and ethnographically. In xxxiv

brief, since the Koniambo project seems to embody an idea that if the whole of New Caledonia never becomes fully independent from France, governance in and by indigenous self interest and designed according to socialist ideas of communal resource ownership can be institutionalized at the Provincial level. While this new nickel project and government town is not a central concern of this dissertation, this project and nickel mining in general would be the next logical volume. This dissertation instead examines the historical and contemporary institutional context out of which this project emerges, context which provides the motivation behind the project which needs clarification before it can be adequately described. I intend to take a broader approach, and ask another question: “What does it mean to be French in the South Pacific?” To answer this question the dissertation begins by taking an historical perspective , reflecting my understanding that meanings are historically constituted even as they are also contextually shift and grounded in particular embodied perspectives . While what it “means” to be French might easily suggest that I will offer readers an account of feeling and beliefs and sentiments related to frenchness, I think it is far more interesting and of far greater consequences to instead describe the institutional implications of being French as opposed to the ways it manifests in interior subjectivities. In this way, what it “means” to be French can be presented through examination of the motives and intentions behind policies that engineered the organization of settlement, land, labor, and indigenous life. I focus fully onto the intentions and intellectual assumptions contained in policies to build what administrators and politicians recurrently describe as a “new society” in New Caledonia. While New Caledonia is French, not all places are French in the same ways: some are not assimilated to the same regimes of taxation, to the same monetary instruments, or to the same overall projects of government. As Peter Redfield points out for French Guiana as both a 19th xxxv

century penal colony and 20th century space rocket launching center (2000), the “colonies” of France are always used as a means to an ends of particular sort: I conclude that they are no simple way merely extensions of Metropolitan France, and are instead territories that are put to particular uses ways that seem strange without accounting for the nuance and intentions contained in the plans. Depending on the imagined end-use (which is often never met), this dissertation demonstrates that places like New Caledonia are today differently incorporated by the French State into its national body in terms of population management, regimes and possibilities of land ownership and alienation, and economic integration. As a type of ethnographic project, I therefore endeavor to capture the perspectives of French agents of government who design and implement the incorporation of New Caledonia into French sovereignty. In a word, this incorporation is conceived by them as a process of “civilization” whether by that term they are referring to civil and civic incorporation as most politicians and administrators do, or to religious incorporation into Christianity as all missionaries as most politicians do. This dissertation focus on the modes of incorporation of New Caledonia into French sovereignty, and the motives and theories specific modules. I track articulations of the concept of “civilization” as employed in concrete policy as a means to situate it in terms of the political sociology of French Metropole: who favors what methods and how, with what ends in mind? In this sense of “meaning” as not oriented towards subjective interior states of feeling and sentiment, the perspective of this dissertation departs radically from the actual language of the Noumea Accords. The document articulates what it means to be French or New Caledonian with equally interior-looking language about “identifying oneself in the Common Destiny” and overcoming feeling of disunity and communal difference that hamper “the construction of a xxxvi

Caledonian Citizenship.” As a policy objective, I have no idea how its success can be measured or substantiated: if this is the project, how can its success be judged? How can its failure be declared? Since the perspective of this dissertation offers a critique of this language, I should clarify that my intent is not to attack the Accords, but to offer a perspective of the consequences of governance and sovereignty in a way that steps away from the language of identity politics. In this way, the Noumea Accords suggest that ethnic and community pluralities must be overcome to allow for civil co-identification and co-sentiment in a Caledonian Citizenship. The language of identifying in a “Common Destiny” is then presented as a subjective and sentimental ideal for overcoming uncommon origins and historical complaints. This sounds nearly identical to a 1960s ideology that decolonization will bring about national unity, embodied academically by M.G. Smith’s assessment (1974 [1965]) that the only thing holding a plural colonial nation back from unity is the presence of a colonial government: decolonize and unity will follow. While compelling as theory, Smith’s hypothesis is supported only by his hopeful idealism rather than by his empirical case studies in the Caribbean. However, in my own field research I initially took the geological space of new Caledonia as an interactional field, similar to what M.G. Smith called a “social field.” Smith’s thesis, following the work of Furnivall (1944, 1948), was that in colonial societies composed of multiple ethnic groups, the invocation of social solidarity and other tropes of togetherness and sameness were inaccurate, since in his work in the Caribbean the “glue” that held British colonial societies was less sentiment and collective conscience than the brute authority of the British Imperial government. With his model of the colonial social field, Smith proposed that common material interests are not realized across ethnic groups, an opposed to nation-state contexts of self-rule where they would become apparent, resulting in what he calls xxxvii

the “plural society.” The solution he suggests: decolonize and your problems of sentiment are solved through realization of shared interests. Were Smith to have studied New Caledonia, I feel fairly confident that he would have concluded that it nicely fit his definition of plurality—in part because many residents, policy makers, and scholars of New Caledonia have voiced opinions remarkably consistent with his analysis (e.g. De Deckker and Fauberon 2003; Bastogi 2008). Where I depart from Smith is that I take his model of plurality as an ideology. It actually motivates policy agendas embodied in the Noumea Accords that seek to construct common sentiment. I will argue below that if “communal” differences and schisms need to be overcome, as the Noumea Accords propose, perhaps its writers should examine the actual field of social interaction. Unlike a hypothetical plural society in which communities live side by side and never interact except in the exchange of wages for labor or cash for commodities, New Caledonia’s “communities” are sexually integrated in their own self representations. A métis or ethno-racially mixed society is locally valorized as an ideal as well as an everyday fact of kinship. Thereby, the policy project to build up a sentiment of unity among residents is redundant: the various “communities” are already saliently interconnected by pervasive and omnipresent kinship networks. They just do not think this means that as plural communities they have a homogeneity of interests, or a shared experience of colonial history. Building a sense of togetherness and working towards its realization through social policy and rhetoric misrecognized the problem: instead, the historical conditions by which lands and property and rights were distributed in the colonial period remain a point of contention, and like in many kinship systems land and resources are not evenly distributed within the family under the law of the land—leading to schisms and lasting resentments, and the need to articulate both rightful xxxviii

claims against siblings and serious grievances against law and policy in the form of precise and nuanced arguments. Pointing out that catholic and protestant congregations are both mixed likely leads to an observation that they are not mixed in the same way, and that political history accounts for why certain families attend a particular church. In short, the political problem is historical— in the courte durée religious sectarianism which was once the devidiing opposition in New Caledonian politics has given its place to racial and ethnic origins, in a political logic which requires a solution that engages present tense historical grievances. The political problems of New Caledonia thereby are not presently a sentimental problem at root, whose successful working out will be measurable in terms of subjective feelings of an entire population (will it be measured at the polls, or by psychologists?). I argue that a working solution to the problem of the historical nature of the plural society is manifest in the creation of an autonomous Northern Province, as a space effectively separated from the Southern Province. I do not necessarily agree or disagree with this direction of autonomist policy, but I argue that it manifests as the local practical critique of the rhetoric of sentimental togetherness called for in the Noumea Accords—even as its segregation is authorized by the Noumea Accords. This dissertation seeks to present the ethnologic details necessary to understand where these institutions come from, and what historical dynamics shape their range of present day possibilities. This requires exiting the short view perspective that gives the present day concerns of race and identity politics pride of place and the expense of older religious conflicts, and entering a long view frame of reference that engages the phenomena of liberalism as applied to New Caledonia beginning in 1843.

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INTRODUCTION A DIALECTICS OF CIVILIZATION AND CUSTOM In complicated civilizations like those of Europe… years of study are necessary before the student can begin to understand the forces at work within them. A study of the French family alone would involve a preliminary study of French history, of French law, of the Catholic and Protestant attitudes towards sex and personal relations. A primitive people without a written language present a much less elaborate problem and a trained student can master the fundamental structures of a primitive society within a few months. …[W]e do not choose a simple peasant community in Europe or an isolated group of Mountain whites in the American South, for these people’s ways of life, though simple, belong essentially to the historical tradition to which the complex parts of European or American civilization belong. Instead we choose primitive groups who have had thousands of years of historical development along completely different lines from out own…. —Margaret Mead Coming of Age in Samoa (1974 [1928]: 4-5)

Locating History in a Colonial Context: towards a new ethnology This dissertation seeks out the historical origins of complexities of social life in New Caledonia, particularly those born of colonial encounters beginning in December 1843 when a group of French Marist Fathers stepped off a French navy vessel at the bay called Balade. This dissertation is not an attempt to build a body of data to represent the incredible differences of a primitive people on a historically isolated Pacific island as Margaret Mead does. This is also not a presentation of details like what Marshall Sahlins calls the “structure of the conjuncture” which depicts how post-contact social dynamics unfold via a more balanced account of indigenous and outsider roles and cultural ideas which inform how these interactions take place, for instance in the death of Captain Cook (Sahlins 1985). I instead try to document how in different eras, agents of the French state went about incorporating Pacific peoples and places into what they called French “civilization” and why their structuring decisions, methods, and techniques matter for New Caledonian politics today. This focus on the colonial agents and their institutions is not the whole story of New Caledonia’s history as a French place, but it is a necessary part of the whole story. Presently 1

while most anthropologists of Oceania endeavor to develop an astute understanding of the indigenous peoples they study, it often entails a curious outcome: “The paucity of anthropological studies of another variety of …people in the Pacific is clearly underscored: We know very little of the colonizers themselves”(Silverman 1977 :4). Silverman writes these words in the 1970s to point out how anthropologists have missed the opportunity to document what in his terms are ‘macro-micro’ connections: how colonial situations offer occasions to see how something which might be called the World System is actually brought to bear on island societies in an empirically detailed exposition. Thirty years later anthropologists might have a more adequate appreciation of colonialism as a vector of change, even as we tend not to study colonists in the non-colonial contexts from which they come: the metropole. We note that colonialists bring intentions for producing change, without adequately examining the structure of colonialism or its agents’ models and assumptions about how change can be accomplished. Anthropologists stereotypically leave aside the types of ethnohistorical and ethnographic information on which empirical vectors of connection globally might be built: the particular and nuanced culturally and historically specific categories, motives, missions, assumptions, intentions, ideologies and agencies which constitute the colonizers’ contribution to any structure of the conjuncture which might then unfold with native society. The details that I present here demonstrate that the ways such conjunctures unfold will not be mechanistic (for which Sahlins’ work is sometimes criticized), as seen from my data taken from the European side of crosscultural vectors of connections. With this inclusion of plausible historical details which show empirically demonstrable vectors of policy connection and the subjectivities through which they operate, anthropologists can tie the whole story together. The new “elementary structure,” to

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borrow Durkheim from Lévi-Strauss, is liberal governance and this new human form is historical in its origins and contents. The colonialism I describe here is a type of political agency exercised through specific policy agendas: I examine the structures and shifts of these agencies, the origins and selections of a specific policy out of a range of possible policies, the subjectivities through which they are chosen and applied, and the ideologies or cultural beliefs and categories for classification which support the details of the projects. Even if working the earth had no redemptive consequence for penal colonists brought to New Caledonia, and private property failed to elevate the native Kanak to civil status, the strange assumptions and beliefs which defined the goals of these policies were factual in their results. People were nonetheless forcibly moved to the South Pacific from Europe, and natives had their lands taken away and turned into a market commodity as regularly alienable property trades for the benefit of others. I extend the same perspective to French colonizers which Robert Brightman articulates in his analysis of Rock Cree beliefs about human animal interactions: “So much is consistent with the anthropological premise that cultural conceptions taken to be factual are factual in their consequences”(Brightman 1993 :3). These cultural beliefs and their institutional agencies and authority structures are the smallest meaningful units upon which an ethnology can show how colonialism is able to sometimes work as a vector of world history—never mechanistically, and only in specific ways which need to be empirically demonstrable rather than assumed or conjectured about. The concepts which I spend most of the dissertation examining are concepts of civilization as they relate to land. Rather than cultural delusions, these concepts are meaningful for analysis both as 1) motivation for the content of particular policies of governance, and 2) the factual and often unintended or unanticipated results of the application of these policies. This 3

dissertation, for lack of space, tends to focus on the neglected cultural origins and transformations of the colonial policies designed for New Caledonia. There are other processes at work, which this piece of writing promises to help orient and clarify. My research perspective required a study of exactly those historical things Mead says can over-complicate the ethnographic present, which leads her away from “civilizations” in Europe and to Samoa: French history, French law, and Catholic and Protestant attitudes toward things like the relationship between indigenous customary peoples and the legitimacy of civil government. I found I also need to become better acquainted with things like a lingering 19th century nostalgia for a stereotype of 17th century French peasant life, a dialogic consciousness of the pre-revolutionary past which was apparently common among State Ministers and Roman Catholic Clergy. With this data I document a set of cultural conceptions which begin to emerge in the early 1800s in certain refined social networks in Europe that “civilization” is an organization (civil or religious) which encounters “cultures” or “customs” and incorporated them into their more expansive body. To what extent do these policies for incorporation reflect anything “traditionally European” in an empirical sense? This dissertation seeks to document how France and New Caledonia are empirically connected in the past in a way that makes the island’s current bisection into the governmentally separate domains of customary and civil society seem plausible under the universal umbrella of French State Sovereignty. What this data shows is that while Europe is supposed by many to provide the origins and content of “civilization,” policy makers actually only find the leeway to try and attain their ideal concepts of civilization in places like New Caledonia. This is not a recreation of Europe: these are places without history in the colonial

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perspective, which is liberating for the perspective of settlement. In this sense they are New Societies. The details, motives and methods for separation and unification of customary and civil domains under French sovereignty are each unique to particular ideologies embraced by French politicians in the Metropole and residents of New Caledonia at particular moments. For purposes of analysis, the dissertation presents policies in the context of their intellectual backing and political deployment, which includes attention to policy makers such as Francois Guizot and Alexis de Tocqueville and trans-imperial conversations over land regimes and indigenous reservation policy in France, Australia, and the United States. Using this framework for analysis which accounts for the actual intent of policy as well as its unintended results, the dissertation tracks how specific social projects and policies related to land and people co-resident on the island were historically implemented between 1843 and the time of my fieldwork in 2006. Ethnographic data from the 2000s helps outline how older policies continue to structure the daily lives of residents while providing the possibilities for their political futures as they face a referendum on independence from France scheduled for 2014. Using this historical and ethnographic material, the dissertation offers a critique of liberal ideologies of governance via the dialectic alternatives that empirically emerge in the wake of their institutionalization as concrete policy—for example the creation of customary societies in the South Pacific.

Question of the Dissertation: What it ‘Means’ to be French “What does it mean to be French in the South Pacific?” While this question might suggest that I will present data about internal subjective sensibilities and feelings about Frenchness as articulated by residents of Pacific islands currently under French sovereignty, instead the 5

dissertation takes an analytic perspective on non-subjective meanings in historical context. The dissertation works to present precise details and description of how French status is significant in the social lives of New Caledonia’s residents over the longue durée by focusing on historical transformations in how and why the State governs local populations in particular ways. What I mean by “longue durée” is not synonymous with Ferdinand Braudel’s specific use of the phrase, but it is similar in intent: I look for tectonic shifts in significance, suggesting that concepts which inform policy occur in historical social contexts. In the narrative of the dissertation I show that shifts often happen within a short term perspective, such as regime changes which redefine the source of political authority and often empower a preceding opposition position. There are other less socially salient shifts in the short term content and opposing dialogic content of difference which I will also document (for example a politics oriented by religious difference gives way to a politics oriented by racial difference). This dissertation focuses on historical transformations in how the French State governs local populations in New Caledonia, both indigenous and settler, via a series of “civilizational” techniques for incorporation of others. In a subjective world apparently structured according to a practical policy belief in which the world of possibility of governance is limited to the tripartite ‘thesis, antithesis, synthesis’ the techniques policy uses to dialectically separate “customary” and “civil” domains as opposite contain a flipside, suggesting that the two domains it just declared separate and discrete might be unified through methods such as Christianization (1836), creation of private property (1856), inter-racial marriage (1868), democratic majority rule (1947), and most recently by encouraging a sentiment of “self-identity” in a “common destiny” which eclipses ethno-racial differences (1998). The research for this dissertation did not set out with an intent to locate and query a 6

dialectical relation between customary and civil domains, and how their relations and resolutions shift over time. Instead, presentation of this history as dialectic is what made the historical and ethnographic materials I collected sensible and plausible. It shows not merely that a dialectic or set of dialectics exist which provide the explanation for how vectors of policy connect New Caledonia and France historically, it shows how arguments and ideologies and accidents make these policy directives plausible and the dialectics seem reasonable to the narrow set of people who design them. From this perspective, plausibility shown in the details is taken to demonstrate the condition of possibility for empirically consequential vectors of connection. While an older ethnological study of connections between two distant places and their residents might look for outcomes that create similarities, instead I look at the details of how and why particular differences are emergent in the processes by which New Caledonia becomes incorporated into France. As I suggest in this introduction, disagreements among Frenchmen about liberalist governance and its legitimate form allow administrators and politicians to concretely create alternatives to liberalism in the newly colonized South Pacific. I argue that the dialectic oppositions of customary and civil domains in the context of “civilization” projects are differently designed by French regimes according to their support of Catholics, Royalists, Liberalist, or Democratic agendas. Over the longue durée, the politics on which customary and civil differentiation were built in the 19th century are no longer salient in the 21st, replaced with an ethnohistorical normalization or naturalization of the present as an unremarkable reflection of natural categories of social difference. In this sense, liberal categories of governance with a particular history such as the distinction between custom and civil are presently apprehended in New Caledonia as natural categories of social distinction, as though they do not have a history and are not products 7

of political processes and dialectics which began in Europe with particular politicians and administrators. Even in critiques of colonialist interventions, it is rarely pointed out that the foundational categories of customary institutions are French administrative creations. What it means to be French in the South Pacific is answerable in part by examining when and why specific policies of liberalism were brought to bear on the island, before examining how they are integrated with the local context and indigenous populations. Without these details, the governing classification of “customary” society cannot be recognized as a historical artifact of liberalist incorporative logics of colonization. Once re-contextualized in New Caledonia, I recognize that this category of governance takes on a local trajectory and shape all its own in conjuncture with the “human terrain” (to use a term fashionable with military anthropologists). Yet the category is still genetically tied to the processes and meanings I describe here which can be used to render its overall career of use and impact plausible. This builds me to a corresponding point of argumentation: civilization is not historically found in Europe and is instead manifest through policies enacted in the colonies. From this perspective, both the thesis (civil society) and the historical antithesis (customary society) of civilization concepts as developed by Frenchmen are best found in the institutions their government attempted to build in the colonies—those places without history, filled with people without history (Wolf 1982), where anything is possible. This dissertation documents myriad attempts to build new societies in New Caledonia, which seem to all lead to a very conventional present-day set of institutions built according to the dialogics and dialectics of liberalism as I describe in chapter one. In this apparent default to liberal forms, my work helps point towards something different in anthropological interest: how, on an empirical basis of vectors of connection, New Caledonia is governmentally cast for the longue durée in the same liberalist 8

forge that produced the indigenous/civil policy dialectics of the settler states of Australia, New Zealand, Brazil, and the United States which likewise create the possibilities for the similarities of indigenous politics of cultural revindication encountered today. An example of a courte durée or short term concern is how within the liberal regimes of France, in New Caledonia in 1947 one’s politics were predictably based on a contrast of Catholicism and Protestantism, which now has shifted to a politics predictably based on contrasts of skin color and family origin.

Dialectic Alternatives to Liberalism: Custom and Kinship I model “custom” similarly to how Lévi-Strauss (1987), David Schneider (1980, 1984), and Elizabeth Povinelli (2002) understand the relationship between kinship and “modern” liberal states. Rather than the modern constitutional nation having freeing us from the binds of family clan based kin units allowing us to escape the constraints of old kin-based society in favor of voluntary associations and electoral institutions of the nation-state, the institutions of liberal government reify blood-based kinship and contracted kinship (marriage alliance) as the definitive and most important social relationship which might define an individual and their rights to the exclusion of all other possibilities of meaningful but non-legally recognized social relations. As David Schneider nicely shows in his study of the islanders of Yap in Micronesia (1984), residence can be a primary social relationship constituting descent in a way largely independent from blood and paternity. Lévi-Strauss points out that legal fixity is created by state defined limits and requirements of kinship which make particular statuses almost impossible to escape (in precisely the way he argues that lives in House Societies are not subjected). We are all subjects in a now globalized legal regime in which relatedness is governed in relation to a regime of “legitimacy” which actually narrows the possibilities of relatedness possible within non9

liberal definitions of family (see my treatment of Laplanche 1925 in chapter one). I say “in relation to” because these liberalist conventions can made room for their opposites to a certain degree in special circumstances for particular types of people: Beth Povinelli argues using examples from Australian aboriginal land claims (2002) that there are very significant benefits to be had in convincing state authorities to rethink their liberal categories and officially recognize that myriad social relations besides biological kinship can be used to constitute standing and rights—and that there are hard limits in the Australian public to accept these sort of “multicultural” concessions to their core values. Schneider proposes that (like social relations in Yap which confound anthropologists expectations to find an idiom of blood kinship) there are prevalent non-blood and non-contract kinship taxonomies and ideals which exist in folk categories employed by everyday people in the United States (1980). Therefore, he argues, kinship is something that perhaps only exists in the minds of anthropologists and does not reflect the lived categories and classifications of any real people anywhere, particularly as an “idiom” of their daily lives. Povinelli counters that what matters now is how state institutions recognize relatedness, and if blood and contract are the only form of relatedness which officials are authorized to recognize, then blood and contract are what gets enforced (Povinelli, paraphrase of personal communication May 2002). What I argue is definitely lacking from Schneider’s work on land and relatedness in Yap, in its original and his later rethinking of the material (1984), is an account of how the U.S. Naval Admiralty administered the island. As a lived environment, the island was officially closed and islanders were kept separate from interaction with the rest of the world until the 1960s apparently for their own “protection.” Administrators likely developed and applied ideas of what constituted land ownership and relatedness, or applied similarly informed policies created in Washington 10

D.C. presumably in dialogic and dialectic relation to ideas of liberalism and civilization of the sort I show in this text for France. Without an account of these ideas and their application, these cultural conceptions, depictions of what constitutes “traditional” Yapese culture is in danger of being rendered a-historical when it may more accurately be seen as a product of a more complex historical interaction with colonial agencies—for example a structure of the conjuncture I would conjecture that exists between indigenous value systems and capitalist production which produces the exceptionally large size of rai or “stone money” after the start of colonial trading. More dangerously for the accuracy of his analysis, Schneider does not indicate that the forms of relatedness thought to be meaningful by his Yapese informants likely failed to register entirely with their Naval administrators: the administrator’s belief in a state structure is what has agency not to change Yapese internalized self conceptions and socialized values, but the agency to build their political possibilities and institutionalize them in their own asylum (the medical puns is intentional) as a “traditional” pacific culture structurally removed from civil society and interaction with outsiders. This mode of dealing with others is an outcome only plausible if contextualized within the categories of the liberal longue durée and their shifts. Rather than emulating how Schneider starts his analysis in Yap with indigenous terms and contexts, in New Caledonia I started instead with administrative terms and contexts of the origin of beliefs not only locally to the island but in Paris, Sydney, the Vatican, and Washington D.C.. Without these details I cannot answer the following question: How is liberalism brought to bear on New Caledonia, particularly as seen through policies which seek to alternatively insulate the islanders from its effects or attempt to expose them, and what accounts for the minute details of policy directives?

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These liberal forms of state government actually creates and institutionalizes its own dialectic opposites. In the narratives they tell themselves, these opposites are a predecessor in a Bakhtinian dialogic narrative of history in which the present recasts the past resembling the chronotope of time used in novels in which narrative significance of events presented in the text comes through their often significantly later context (Bakhtin 1981). From this perspective, the present is the mid point in the narrative, in which civil and customary society are separate entities but before the end of the story, there will be a synthesis: a horizon of unity. Outside this narrative of history, analytically no “traditional” customary blood kinship obsessed society was ever a predecessor of the current and globally hegemonic form of self identified “modern” government: yet in terms of measures of good governance, kinship and blood relations should have no place in modern government since its presence is invariably described as either a reversion to monarchy or a perversion by old time nepotism. In this way, I argue with French data that an old kinship based customary society which never existed is dialogically hypothesized by social theorists as the opposite of liberalism. This is the type of situated ethnohistorical perspective which colonial technicians (administrators, clergy and politicians) deployed to cause real historical change in overseas societies. The results of these interventions from the other side of the globe contribute to the shape of and possibilities for civil and customary institutions of governance in New Caledonia today. Kinship and customary society are creations dialogic to modern states rather than their empirical precursors or competitors. Kinship in its present state has little resemblance to its precursor before the modernist movement, just as custom I will argue is not a precursor to civil order, even as both are regularly discussed in dialogical narration as though they are the preexisting default condition of stateless social order. Customary society and kinship should be 12

analytically seen as the products of a dialectic with modernity and civilization, and they only occur within the ideational framework of civil social orders.

Short Term Shifts: From Religion to Race as a Politics of Identity or Ascription Kinship networks and métissage or racial mixing stands invisibly in the face of thirty years of sustained descriptions of New Caledonia as though it were a “plural society” segregated and torn apart by intercommunal ethno-racial disagreements (a recent example is Bastogi 2008 which described both Fiji and New Caledonia as equally “plural”). In light of these shallow conflicts participants in an international conference in Noumea in the 1990s declared it fortunate that at least there were no religious schisms that needed to be overcome like those in the settler colonies of Northern Ireland and Israel. The present allowed them to ignore that in 1947 coming out of World War II there were two new indigenous political parties on the island, one Protestant and one Catholic. Going back further, in the 1890s there was a fight between white French Catholic and Protestant administrators and clergy over the secular future of New Caledonia. Politics on this island used to be oriented by religion, and in the short term this situation has changed to a new obsession with blood manifest in terms of the super-familial and proto-national classifications of race, ethnicity, and place of origin which pit the “settlers” presumed to be European but usually far more complex in familial composition against the “indigenous” population presumed to be dark and oppressed but usually far more nuanced in their political savvy. The conclusion I draw is that race as politics and the politics of race is a post-war situation which should be contextualized in a wider and deeper long term perspective. My method for short term clarification will be to examine in detail how religion enters this equation of New Caledonian politics in the mid 1800s, and then indicate how and on what terms it is 13

superceded by ethic and racial politics in the latter 1900s, all within the possibilities provided by liberal frames of politics and governance.

Directions for Future Research and Preemptive Critiques of the Thesis I will return to the following points in the conclusions which follow the eight chapters of the text. The majority of the closing pages of the document construct a prospectus for future research directions outlining what which this text does not adequately account for and how it might be improved. These conclusions reflect discussions held during the dissertation defense on October 19th 2009, as well as my own pre-existing ideas of what types of historical and ethnographic data are absent from the manuscript, and what kinds of data can be illuminated by the partial account of New Caledonia under French sovereignty which I present here. 1) A History of the Political Economy First, there needs to be an accounting of the political economy of New Caledonia’s relation to France in addition to the civil and religious political history of its governing institutions and policies. As pointed out in discussion during the defense, inclusion of this data at the same level of detail is worthwhile but would likely take an additional volume of the same size presented here. For future research I need to perform a triage or prioritization of the extant materials to make room for the new materials coming in. For example, while I present the dialogics of customary and civil society and the ways they play out in “civilizational” policy, at each failure of the French state to support the colony (often due to a bust cycle in global markets for nickel) the clergy, administration, and politicians each turned towards a non-civil and nonreligious alternative: the private sector of colonial companies, coffee markets, and multinational mining joint ventures. The extant governing or organizational alternative to liberalism this points 14

to is corporate privatism which warrants a similar treatment of its ideologies as customary society. The political history, ethnology and ethnography presented here needs to be made more robust and turned into an ethnology of the political economy of New Caledonia. 2) A History of Conjunctures Second, the document demonstrates a near absence of conjunctures in Sahlins’ sense of a “structure of the conjuncture” (1985) which would include significant attention to what me be called “native” voices. I see this as a valuable analytic perspective from which native subjectivities, voices, and agencies are make visible and historically consequential, taking a monopoly of agency away from Europeans. In the way history of contact in pacific islands is regularly narrated as history this is often not recognized (and globally as well, considering Eric Wolf’s Europe and the People Without History [1982]). In part this absence of effort to reconstruct “conjunctures” comes from my dissatisfaction with my M.A. thesis entitled Towards an anthropological model of the ‘House’: historicizing residential forms in Europe and Highland Papua New Guinea (Morgan N.D.). In this early graduate effort, I took extreme care to document how the Mae Enga people of Highland Papua New Guinea constitute meaningful relations to the land and one another through house form and co-residence. I then conjectured that extensions of European law and standardization of types of ownership and land tenure are the mechanism by which residential forms and practices change post 1970s. As I indicated in this introduction using the example of Schneider and Yap, this type of approach does not by itself get to the types of data which help us understand the tools of institution building in colonies where centralized states did not pre-exist contact with the agents of liberalism (and in Catholic examples, agents of anti-liberalism).

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While this dissertation tracks the logics of the colonizers and the arguments and subjectivities they embrace and inhabit, I realized that this is not the whole story. In this document I follow a methodological line of inquiry: anthropologists need to develop a better understanding of European and American forms of ownership and ideas about land tenure with the same degree of scrutiny we usually reserve for the practices of non-western and indigenous people. That does not mean that I deny the latter agency, or deny conjunctures their evident opportunity to produce something new. I propose here the kind of empirical work that needs to happen before we start talking about conjunctures in colonial setting and settler states like New Caledonia, least these conjunctures be built upon enthohistorical assumptions we often unreflexively hold about ourselves and out past. 3) Why Land? Third, the dissertation focuses on land and ideologies related to land—focusing on those held by Europeans. During the defense I was asked if there were not other modes or concerns of the civil or civilization incorporation advocated by French administrators and politicians, for example projects to develop value through production and processing know as mise en valeur? My answer is yes, and my reasons for focusing on land in particular—my argument of what land policy makes visible which other lines of attention might not—lies at the very center of the social world produced by the extension of liberal institutions. Political units of governance as custom, the indigenous polity so to speak, is defined in terms of land relations in what I take to be a curious elision of people, land, and culture. I say “curious” because it is a commonplace fetishization of liberal regimes to treat people and their property as though they are synonymous. Returning to Thomas Hobbes’ ideology, the Leviathan of social contract exists for one purpose only, and people consent for one purpose: the protection of personal property (of which their 16

bodily security can be counted), and all social bands are similarly hypothesized as grounded on contractual relations that create a monopoly of force for the common protection of property broadly defined. Land is a narrow definition of property, yet I argue that it is an ideologically unique type of property in French colonial context. Not only is land an easy way to tell an Anahulu type narrative (Sahlins 1992) of how indigenous islanders lost control of their lands, their government, and their sovereignty over time. Similarly, in terms of land in New Caledonia only 10% was in indigenous customary regimes by 1978. However, the "why land" question I think has another answer more to the tune of this thesis and its focus on French policy. There is an important and recurring fetishization of land as a thing with a special relationship to people: policies dealing with land are the administrative leverage which makes ideologies about peoples visible. Land policy uniquely gives an inroad to the logics which inform and institutionalize the classic land-people-culture conflation, and points to the liberalist origin of content for postcolonial nations. Attention to this ideology about land also captures the curious agricultural component in de Tocqueville’s ideas about frontier cultivation and forced agricultural labor in the mid 1800s, and the pied-noir agriculturalist resettlement program meant to preempt a majority politics of indigenous independence in the 1960s. With acknowledgement gained by this perspective of how land policy informs and instantiates the late 20th century concept of “national” units (one people, one culture, one place), the easy substitution of lands for peoples via the conflation of property with its owners points towards not just the issue of how alienability of lands are defined and established as I do in the body of this dissertation, it point to further fertile research directions which contextualize this 17

dissertation’s core concerns with land alienation. First, policies regulating land and defining land ownership and its nature are proxies for policies about people. Second, with the leverage supplied by recognizing this substitution and fetishization of land for people, the dissertation can expand and incorporate other alienations in New Caledonia relative to the historical shaping of everyday life on liberal models: money as fetish which makes the alienation of one’s labor not only possible but plausible, and as the fetish instrument which makes the alienation of one’s land occur within a market defined value: alternative contexts of alienation other than in market and money modes are imaginable—but this is the form that is wrought by capitalism and civilization as artifacts of liberal ideologies of governance, in terms of which customary groups are carefully managed as an exception to the regime and thereby a derivative of it.

Outline of Chapters 1. Civilizations: 19th century theories and definitions in French Statecraft In Chapter One “Civilizations” I present a world of political argumentation and social theory making from the 1800s, with which I argue that institutions of liberal civil society are conceived as the opposite of earlier “customary” social orders. For example, I argue that social theory presented by Hegel and Durkheim actually describe centralizations of France and Europe made under Napoléon I, in which his civil regimes instituted new legal and administrative order which took agency away from older local units of law making and government. In this sense “civilization” has its very first and historically specific meaning: it described a legal and historical process of incorporation of peoples and territories into a civil society. In future versions of this manuscript, the introduction and first chapter will be consolidated into a single unit. 18

As a dialectic consciousness which mistakes an emergent opposite for an historical antecedent, from the French revolution of 1789 forward I argue that in French contexts “custom” is always understood to describe a social world which pre-dates the “civil” authority of modern States. Those areas of the world which were not yet colonized were perceived to be living under customary law from all French political perspectives. From a catholic and aristocratic perspective, wherever such “custom” appeared to exist in the eye of the beholder, it needed to be protected from illegitimate incursions and expansions of civil governments. 2. Protections: France, Catholicism, and the Pacific in the 1830s-1840s This is precisely the perspective articulated and enacted by Francois Guizot, as I describe in Chapter Two “Protections.” In the late 1820s Guizot articulated his own concept of “civilization” as descriptive of the process of France’s incorporation into Christianity in the medieval period and how this spawned a “new society” of aristocratic customary societies out of which modern state forms really emerged (not the revolution of peasants in 1789) .After Guizot entered French government via election by male property owners in 1830, he advanced in political power to serve as Minister of the Kingdom of Louis-Philippe until 1848. While many scholars point out that he favored a points d’appui method of French strategic expansions, which calls for claiming ports and controlling sea lanes rather than annexing vast territories, I argue that the overall goals for French colonial project are shown in the policies he created which supported French Catholic expansions in the Pacific. Specifically, Guizot employed a “protectorate” system: French Catholic Bishops were assigned the entirety of the Pacific as their domain by the Vatican in the 1830s apparently in conversation and cooperation with the French state. Guizot then inserted the French navy as a military and strategic enabler to the missions. This created a geographical space in which the French State and its military power were marginal actors, but 19

could come to the defense of missionaries who would manage the internal affairs of each island via an autonomous domain of “customary” native government entirely free from the interference of civil governments. This shape of empire supported what was by Guizot’s definition the extension of French “civilization” into the Pacific: missionaries incorporated islanders into Christianity, and since the territories were “protectorates” and not fully annexed territories, the French civil code was not promulgated those places: Christian law or “civilization” could exist without illegitimate civil liberal interference or corruption. As evidence of how Guizot’s points d’appui strategy was designed and implemented as a Christian civilizational tool that was in no way civil project, he was happy when Tahiti was unexpected made a French possession by an act of fiat by a French officer, but was furious when later that same officer decided to fully annex Tahiti. Protectorates are Guizot’s professed form of civilization incorporation because of the room they allow for an active Christian role in governance In this context this chapter presents the actual historical narratives of how French missionary and French naval expedition into the Pacific cooperated from 1836-1843 to set up a series of protectorates. This entails an account of French missionary and naval expansions to Nuku-Hiva, Tahiti, Wallis, and Futuna, and examines how and why a French expansion to New Zealand under French Bishop Pompallier did not achieve its goals. This involves an examination of how Marists and Catholics were involved in the drafting and implementation of treaties between France and Pacific island “governments” which established them as protectorates, cast in the context of Bishop Pompallier’s intervention at the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 to guarantee liberal toleration of Roman Catholicism within The British colony of New Zealand. This political material is also my chance to demonstrates that the Marist missionaries and Minister Guizot 20

likewise understood French “civilization” as diametrically opposed to civil government. I then offer evidence that their shared project was to keep Pacific islanders and islands outside French civil jurisdictions while inside the protective envelope of French sovereignty. The historical narrative of this chapter ends in 1843 as a French battleship sets sail from Wallis island to New Caledonia with its captain holding explicit orders to set up a mission on the island and, if possible, lead the natives to recognize the sovereignty of his Majesty Louis-Philippe, King of the French. 3.Possessions: The French Presence in New Caledonia 1843-1848 Chapter Three “Possessions” presents details about the first French protectorate declared over New Caledonia in 1843 which was later retracted by Guizot in the context of Franco-Anglo diplomatic conflicts in 1847. Under Guizot’s “protectorates” plan, a new Marist mission was established on the island and then left almost entirely to its own devises, save periodic visits by state supply ships. The chapter starts with describing the conditions of the French arrival, in the genre of a “first contact” history, which includes an account of how the mission was established and the nuts and bolts of how representatives of the local population were led to signing of a treaty of protection with France “which after a fashion made them and the French a single people.” As a means to contextualize these events the chapter presents a brief outline of social conditions at time of arrival: what ships were known to have previously visited, and what social life on the island likely entailed in terms of size of population, linguistic diversity, and interisland contacts which early scholars sometimes described as “tributary.” I then go on to present how the Marist Fathers resident on the island from 1843-1848 felt that they could accurately describe the New Caledonian social world as being composed of chiefly nobles “not unlike those 21

of France” whose life and land are governed according to “Salic Law” based on principles of agnatic property ownership and agnatic political descent. In short, the Marist believed New Caledonia was a land of a pre-civil customary society of aristocratic chiefs and nobles identical to that of France. The chapter closes by considering how the relationship between the French State and members of the Catholic clergy in the Pacific changed with the advent of anti-clerical but short lived Second Republic (1848-1850), as exemplified by decision by French Bishops in New Zealand to adopt British citizenship, and by the French Marists in New Caledonia to set up their own stock company to finance and revitalize their mission projects through Asia-to-Europe oceanic trade, instead of relying French State ships. The status of missionaries as official agents of the true and real non-civil French “civilization” ended with Guizot’s era. 4. Annexation: The French Return to New Caledonia under Napoléon III 1853-1870 Chapter Four “Annexation” outlines the definitive prise de possession of New Caledonia by French officers, this time without a stated intent to aid Christian missionary efforts and instead to set up a place for penal colonization. It tracks the establishment of sovereignty in 1853 through annexation as analytically separate from extension of the Code Napoléon over the commune of Nouméa in 1855 which turned it into a civil jurisdiction, and examines the politics by which penal colonists would be removed from French prisons and sent to the antipodes of the new Napoléonic Second Empire. Crucial to the plan is the idea that if convicts worked the earth, benefited from their labor, and the owned land themselves they would be reformed. This ideology as policy entailed the formation of parallel forms of government and land law for the “customary” indigenous population of communal tribes as separate from “civil” populations enjoying rights of fully private property, with an officially hoped for horizon beyond which the two populations were fully merge. The instrument of their union into a single collectivity was 22

planned to be the creation among the indigenous customary people institutions for individual private property ownership and alienability of land, plus intermarriage of State functionaries with indigenous women. Together, marriage and property would lead to a horizon of integration of the indigenous population into French “civilization. Governor Guillain in 1868 imagined that the indigenous population and the European population would merge into a single métis population born of the marriages of indigenous women and European men. The creation of individual property through delimitation of lands and relocation of natives to reserves would not only slowly bring the indigenous population into civil society, but it would open up vast tracts of land for outside settlement. In this sense, the official objective is to “assimilate” the native population to French “civilization” through the method of private property and marriage. The actual result was the seizure of native lands for the needs of penal colonization, even as very few penal or free settlers had arrived. 5. Colonization: The French Third Republic and Penal Colonization 1871-1897 Chapter Five, “Colonizations” presents in detail the intentions and theories of penal colonization as applied in New Caledonia. It casts the settlement program as an uptake in policy one specific aspect of Alexis de Tocqueville’s concept that civilization is born from working the earth and benefiting from the fruits of ones own labor. His committee on penal reform in the 1840s strongly approved of “Forced Agricultural Colonies” that reformed criminals through agricultural work until they are ready to rejoin civil society. One particular member of this committee later implemented in New Caledonia a program to reform 4000 Parisian Communards of 1871 through deporting them to New Caledonia, where they would be placed on plots of land, and the sign of their moral reform would be seen in increased levels of church attendance. While this project failed almost in its entirety when the deportees were pardoned and could return to 23

Paris, the example helps me draw out how the penal colonization project in general was ideologically motivated and pragmatically complicated. Careful archival research by other scholars demonstrates that large number of penal colonists in the 1800s were North African in origin. I then try to explain how this fits into the objectives of a colonization project by way of likening the favoritism given to North Africans in New Caledonia to a contemporary idea in Parisian theory, identified by Paul Silverstein (2004) that Kabyles were thought of as being very apt to “assimilate” to European society and hence made good penal colonists. This observation then helps me re-cast the society of the penal colony as less white than is often assumed, through a close reading of archival data plus close reading of internment policies shows that the penal colonization project was far less European in content than is often recognized. I point out that this has consequences in the way it provides latent ethnic communities that in the 1970s and 1980s begin to de-assimilate from their unitary European status into plurality of communities of identity, claiming distinctness based on original origins of ancestors. This history is the raw material for the plural communities which are supposed to come together under in a “common destiny” as prescribed by the Noumea Accords. The chapter ends with a brief summary of how the failure of penal colonization to provide labor for state and industrial projects led to the importation of huge numbers of Asian contract labors, who by design could temporarily reside in the colony under significant civil restrictions until they could be repatriated at the end of their contract. With addition of this large population from Indonesia, Indochina, Vietnam, and Japan this chapter presents a historical case of how non-Europeans from North Africa can be assimilated to European status in the context of the penal colony, while offering an origin story of some of the many self identified ethnonational communities that constitute the plural communities of New Caledonia today. 24

6. Alienations: Land Schemes and their design 1890-1905 Chapter Six “Alienations” makes a significant contribution to studies of regimes of land alienation in colonial situations through tracking policies to build a France Australe in New Caledonia through the sequestering of natives lands for the use of free French settlement. I first examine the ways in which communal tribal property was recognized to exist in New Caledonia, via State policies that created the legal fictions and administrative realities identified as indigenous reserves and customary tribes, with the original administrative intention in 1868 of converting this communal land into individual holdings as one of the methods for incorporating the indigenous population into “civilization”. I attempt to see if any empirical connections existed between this réserve policy as deployed in New Caledonia, and the U.S. reservation or “Dawes” general allotment act of 1887. My conclusion is that the New Caledonian policy comes from Algeria, and the parallels with U.S. policy are coincidental artifacts of policy created by two liberal forms of government trying to deal with what they equally perceive as the problems posed native institutions of communal property. I see no evidence of a trans-empire conversation between U.S. and French policy makers. However, through examination of the Australian Torrens Act, I show quite conclusively that individually owned and easily alienable property only existed as a wish through most of the 1800s. Civil government possessed no regular devise for individual ownership, even though policy makers clearly wished one existed. After The Torrens Real Property Registry of “Title” Act was passed for New South Wales in 1857, it was quickly taken up by myriad other colonial and European governments as a means to establish definitive unitary and uncomplicated ownership of property, allowing for land to be sold in the same easy way that stocks and ships are sold. The Torrens Act allows property to be easily sold by a process it baptizes as “Fee 25

Simple,” which avoids all complications typical of “quiet” titles. This public civil devise fully outside common law and customary forms of land ownership allows owners to easily use their property as collateral for lines of credit such as mortgages. Around this innovation of a registered “Torrens” fee-simple title for easy sales and credit, there is a tremendous amount of policy talk in US, French, and European Colonial legislative publications. This includes a directive from Paris in the late 1880s for the governor of New Caledonia to travel to Australia to investigate the new land system first hand. He returned to Paris with a proposal for how the Napoléonic Code could be modified to allow for a Torrens Title system of state mediated ownership of land, a proposal which curiously was subsequently promulgated in almost every major French colony with the glaring exception of the place for which it was designed: New Caledonia. I then attempt to understand how and why this devise for land alienation was not used in the place for which it was designed: Why not make land in New Caledonia easily rendered into credit for loans? Why not make it easy to perform quick and easy sales and have unencumbered individual titles? I arrive at an answer by examining another Anglo land policy the “Wakefield Plan for Systematic Colonization” which was actually instituted in New Caledonia in a modified form known as Feillet Colonization beginning in 1894. This involved only giving small concessions, offered only to settlers from France who would work the land themselves and could demonstrated they had enough capital to finance their own project. Within this scheme the land supply was tightly controlled, and structured so that former penal convicts and the indigenous population would have incentives of taxations and leases which would encourage them to offer their labor to the new French colonists in exchange for wages.

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As I show in the historical narrative of how Feillet colonization was instituted, this project was opposed by Catholic Marists who described governor Feillet’s proposal to push the indigenous population into wage labor through a modest capitation tax as “enslavement.” Out of the occasions offered by these struggles, Feillet can be shown to have been aligned with the interests of a rising Protestant elite in Parisian politics primarily though his marriage to the daughter of a prominent protestant pastor. I show through original archival research that this network connection is both what offers metropolitan support to Feillet colonization project in New Caledonia, and brought Maurice Leenhardt to the island as the first French protestant missionary allowed to work in the main island of New Caledonia. I then am able to argue conclusively that Feillet’s plans for New Caledonia were part of a “secularization” movement in France, whose proponents (principally Senator Jules Siegfried) hoped that New Caledonia would become its own autonomous country which would “self rule” within the French Empire modeled on the relationship between New Zealand and the British Empire at the time. As empirical materials from France show, the French Republican government from 1871-1917 can easily be interpreted as a kinship-based system through which the policies and administrators sent to New Caledonia can be understood as a system in which politically powerful Catholic men married protestant women, and through the network of affines thus created, their vision of what France can and should be was instituted in New Caledonia via family employees in the colonial government and voluntary associations headed by prominent protestants. Governor Feillet and Pastor Maurice Leenhardt are related through Maurice’s wife Jeanne—a woman who also happens to be the granddaughter of a French Catholic named Charles-Victor Crosnier de Varigny. In 1863 Charles started working for the government of the Kingdom of Hawaii, first as the minister for Education, then Finance Minister, and finally as 27

Foreign Minister to King Kamehameha V from 1865 to 1870-—a post described as the equivalent to “Prime Minister” and from which he encouraged the King to revoke the constitution of the Kingdom and withhold the power of organic law for the Hawaiian monarchy. Even when this French liberal government presents itself as having removed kinship and religion from the affairs of government, I argue that my materials show that religion is present all the way down in French colonial projects in New Caledonia, even those that present themselves as secular in character, and kinship is present in those that present themselves as being run from association and other non-kinship based interest groups. With the details above constituting the metropolitan support for plan for making New Caledonia into its own “white” and perhaps even protestant France Austral civilization through settlement of self-financed agricultural landowners, in a speech in 1901 Feillet clarifies his stance that there are multiple indigenous civilizations waiting to emerge in New Caledonia, and that he intendeds to both help them develop civil government and keep them separated from European civilization—only allowing them to meet in the marketplace of wage labor and modest luxuries—until laws and civil regulations on their own terms can be established. 0. Intermission: Rise of French Nationalism and Scientism (1900-1940) Between Chapters Five and Six, a more complete manuscript would include an additional chapter entitled “Nations,” which will outline the development of the French concept of nationality in the 1900-1940 period, and its manifestations in policy dealing with New Caledonia particularly after World War I. This period also saw the rise of new medicinal techniques which render tropical places both commodious but healthfully inhabitable to the European agricultural worker: this entailed a change in conception of possibilities of colonial settlement. It seems no accident that Jules Siegfried, the proponent of colonial expansion and autonomization and enemy 28

of Catholicism and agent of secularization, was an active government agent in a process which Bruno Latour calls the “Pasteurization of France”(1988). Of course this was a pasteurization of not only French sociality, and creative of settlement possibilities in the colonies, but also called for hygienic interventions into colonial customary societies: science can enter where civil authorities were ideologically blocked. In short, the period left out of this dissertation between 1900-1940 sees the emergence of a nationalist discourse in French contexts, and a universalized scientific jurisdiction for hygienic interventions. At present these early 20th century development are unaccounted for in the dissertation, not because they do not matter but because it would have expanded this document beyond the reasonable limits of a dissertation which takes as its primary focus issues of land and governance. In future reformulations, this project will be recast in a frame that better incorporates these important developments. 7. (Non) Decolonizations: Majority Rule and Multi-Racial Ethnicities 1940-1980 Chapter Seven “(Non)Decolonizations” then skips forward in the historical narrative to the 1940s and presents the changes wrought by the Second World War and the presence of large numbers of American troops in New Caledonia. In other colonies, the post war experience often led to implementation of national independence based on a logic of ethno-national self rule by majority government, underwritten by the United Nations and often backed by the United States in an era regularly referred to as “Pax Americana.” The story of self rule in New Caledonia instead points to the ways in which the French State intervened in order to prevent a newly enfranchised majority of New Caledonians from opting for independence. Specifically, this chapter presents a 1963 effort by the French state to manipulate the future of majority rule and self determination on the island through secretly resettling displaced colonists from Algeria, called Pieds Noirs, on rural agricultural lands. While this process is 29

interesting for its own sake, the details revealed in archival documents help make sense of the close political relationship that emerged in the 1960s between the Lafleur family (who later spawned the Loyalist RPCR whose party platform independence), and Pied-Noir settlers: as shown in my original archival findings, Pied Noir families were apparently placed or expected to be placed on Lafleur’s family lands with the assistance of the State. This apparent attempt to manipulate majority politics through settlement of French loyalists was made at a time before any independence movement actually existed in New Caledonia, however in the views expressed in 1972 by French Prime Minister Pierre Messmer, the independence question in New Caledonia could be made moot through a final last chance settlement of large number of French loyalists. In the remainder of the chapter, I outline the origins of the “Kanak” independence movement, from its initial conception in the early1970s as a multi-racial multi-communal ethnicity of choice and self selection, to its late 1970s sedimentation as a increasingly limited sense as an ethnic term that refers to indigenous Melanesians and only indigenous Melanesians. I track this through the decision made by student activists in Paris of a variety of origins to self identify as “Canaques” a pejorative and frankified derivative of the Hawaiian word standardly written as Kanaka. Over the decade of the 1970s the French spelling “Canaque” was dropped as it was increasingly described in pamphlet writing as an orthographic error in favor of the more legitimate “Kanak.” In an iconic fashion the elimination of this French history from the word also wrote out the multi-racial concept originally contained in calls for “Canaque” self governance. When the non-violent movement for Kanak independence shifted into adoption of violent means to meet its demands in the 1980s, “Kanak” had becomes a standard indigenous movement for ethnic independence not unlike those seen globally in the 1950s and 1960s, and similarly locked in a battle for independence against a colonial state and a settler population. 30

8. Constitutions: The Noumea Accords and the Common Destiny 1998-2008 Chapter 8 “Constitutions” examines the legislative aftermath of the Kanak independence movement of the 1980s, which ended in a truce of sorts. This dissertation entirely skips over the turbulent and well documented events of the 1980s and jumps directly to 1998. In this chapter I examine the constitutional dis-incorporation from France that allows New Caledonia to legally operate under its own organic law while still being part of the French nation. Since the Noumea Accords of 1998 are the charter for these new laws and new institutions. This chapter examines a public ritual that claims to celebrate the unity of the various “communities” of New Caledonia as called for under the accords: the annual events on September 24th which each year recognize the date in 1853 when Febvrier Despoints took possession of New Caledonia in the name of France. In 2003 during my first extended period of fieldwork the 24th of September was marked by the unsolicited gift to the city of Noumea of an ornately carved house center post from the eight “Kanak” customary areas to “everyone who want to participate in the common destiny.” It was planted in the center square of the city. I explain how the center post is a potent indigenous land claim, recognizable as such to anyone who had lived through events in the 1980s when erections of similar house posts were used to contest settler ownership of land. As a gift received grudgingly by the city in 2003, I track how the New Caledonian government then over subsequent years not only accepted the house post on behalf of the Common Destiny, but then diligently worked to make it at once 1) a less volatile sign, and 2) the most central symbol of the common destiny. It was essentially refiguring into a less threatening symbol, transformed into the mast of a giant ocean-going canoe which now sits across from the Museum a few blocks from downtown, and where all communities of the Common Destiny are supposed to meet each year on the 24th of September to assess their progress towards of goal of “identifying oneself in 31

the common destiny” as one among several structurally equivalent groups of ethnic migrants of which the Kanaks are only the first. I them examine counter arguments to this vision of unity, including other monuments erected by the City of Noumea that emphasize the blood debts of the Second World War that tie New Caledonia to France. Conclusions Conclusion will include my overall expectations for what will happen at the end of the term of Noumea Accords (they expire in 2014). The possibilities for the future are concretely structured by the terms of the Noumea Accord and the possibilities it dictates: since a supermajority vote of 60% of the voting population is required for New Caledonia to gain independence from France, sheer ethnic numbers preclude this electoral possibility. The opportunity this creates is for New Caledonia to pursue something new, protected by its French status from the interventions of uniform United Nations rubrics of good government and legitimate constitutions, and International Monetary Fund and World Bank neo-liberalist mandated restructuring. In the short term, if they find a way to escape the ethno-nationalisms and identity politics that have typified all newly constituted civil societies for the past sixty years perhaps it will offer long term rewards: this is a structural moment of opportunity to escape the liberalist dialectics and dialogics outlined in this document, and they are equipped with the unique structural agency to choose their own form and charter the political future as an unincorporated territory of France benefiting from a “special” relation to the European Community.

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CHAPTER 1 CIVILIZATIONS (circa 1804)

Civilization Concepts as Data for Historical Ethnography: The historical origins and contextual definitions of a concept with wide application To imply that everything important about the social history of the world can be described via the tropes of civilization is plainly ethnocentric, and—of far greater analytic importance—blinded to the ways European categories of governance were extended elsewhere through colonial and imperial expansions which in turn transformed extant techniques of state-craft though the dynamics, strains, lapses, and creations such expansions necessarily entail. Despite earnest good intentions behind many pluralizations of the civilization concept to include non-European peoples, their literature, systems of governance and laws as equals or alternatives—not competitors or threats pace the “Clash of Civilizations” literature1—taking the whole of humanity as civilizational masks important features of civilization as an historically specific set of concepts, born in and deployed during a particular moment of European state centralization and imperial expansion circa 1800. This chapter works towards producing an ethnographically grounded concept of civilization, as deployable in the empirical study of New Caledonia as a place under French sovereignty. I will develop a perspective on civilization in general which can be used towards 1

Even as it gestures to the possibility of a genuine competition between East and West, the intellectual framing of the “Clash of Civilizations”(Lewis 1990, Huntington 1996), seems rigged in the West’s favor.

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building an ethnographic understanding of French civilization as it was brought to bear on New Caledonia and other islands in the South Pacific through the processes of their sovereign incorporation beginning in the 1830s. Specifically I will develop an understanding of French civilization as productive of a dialogic contrast of local customary law and French civil law after the implementation of the Napoleonic Code of 1804. I argue that this contrast informs the legal fiction that produced the “customary” indigenous societies in New Caledonia after annexation in 1853, and supplies the logics of the modes of their incorporation into the French sovereign state as social groups that officiously existed outside the boundaries of “civil” governing order, yet within the jurisdiction of the sovereign State. I will present this data in later chapters. Here I present an outline of how the logic and rhetoric of civil versus custom organizes French Metropolitan spaces via the French-eye-views of the process of civilization. In contrast to an ethnographic perspective on “civilization,” Norbert Elias writes about “the civilizing process as a change in human conduct and sentiment” which is not seen as “the result of long-term planning” or the “intentions” of individuals in the past (Elias 1994:443). For Elias, civilization describes the development of Western Europe after the medieval period in particular, as well as foundational pre-historic “civilizing” developments of speech, fire, tools, weapons, and the entire body of human knowledge as a whole (Mennell and Goudsblom 1998:17-18). This is precisely the a-historical analytic concept of civilization which I am working against in this chapter. Elias conceives and deploys civilization as a gloss to anachronistically describe the past, and although it allows him to expose to analysis some fascinating and subtle transformations in things like etiquette and virtue, these practices were never considered markers of something called “civilization” in their actual historical discursive context. The problem with an interpretive analysis like Elias’ is that it presents all human 34

civilizational history as though it culminates in civil societies organized on a liberal basis: that just happens to conveniently characterize our historical present? As a theorist who reads civilization into the past without accounting for its historical career as an intellectual and social concept, Elias uses the concept in ways necessarily at odds with a perspective which might focus fully on the historical study of civilization concepts, their origins, and their nuances on their own terms. While Elias’ concept of civilization is attuned to historically contingent developments, his own awareness of civilization-as-master-narrative seems strangely to justify an embrace of civilization as a device and category for building master narratives about human development and progress. In this dissertation I develop no analytic concept of civilization as a descriptor of progress or development or cumulative change, except in the occasions when I accidentally slip into the voice of the texts I present. Throughout the remainder of this chapter I will periodically calibrate the theorists of civil order like Hegel, Durkheim and others with an understanding of the concept which in context shows its historical contingency. This will help me show the various careers civilization has had as a trope of academic explanation and as a technique of governance in French territories. By ethnographic, I mean that my exposition takes into account the perspectives employed by actual people, and that it thereby necessarily depends on my presentation of historically specific sensibilities: where do ideas come from, how do they change, and with what intention, importance, and unexpected results? Historically speaking, an ante-bellum Alsatian2 by the name 2

It is no accident that I choose to use the Alsatian born Curtius as a commentator on French civilization. He yields from the famous disputed zone between Germany and France, which went to Louis XIV at the treaty of Westphalia in 1648, to Bismarck’s united German Empire at the close of the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, to the French Third Republic after the Versailles treaty in 1919, to Nazi Germany by conquest in 1940, and back to France as territorial integrity in 1945. Alsatian territorial transfers to-and-fro, entailed a simultaneous ‘de’ and ‘re’ centralization with regards the German and French territorial states and their particular regimes of governance—supporting a perspective of ‘civilization’ as historical artifact.

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of Earnst Curtius writes in the 1930s that in the not too distant past, “The word [civilization] was new. It appeared only toward the end of the 18th century”(1962: 18). The Oxford English Dictionary concurs with Curtius and specifies that by its measure, the earliest general use of “civilization” is specifically and narrowly legal in meaning, used in late 18th century French and English jurisprudence to describe a process of how local specificities of laws or customs are assimilated into a more general or centralized civil law. A shift from customary law to civil law is the process of civilization. In this process, civilization describes incorporation. It was thought by its Anglo Franco contemporaries to orient the territorial margins and its residents to the metropolitan center. In rhetorical debate they make it explicitly clear that Roman civil law is the precedent followed by programs of civilization, in the ways imperial centralizations overlaid a conquered people’s local customs with outside regulations and brought them into the civil sphere of the empire’s government. Politicians and clergy who opposed government expansions into private life and morality were opposed to civilization in this sense: a process of governing centralization, and is seen by all as an instrument for intentional change and agentive social transformation achieved through governing institutions. In its bare outlines civilization is all about centralized law and centralized administrative planning (hence why Elias is interesting to me, but acts more as a native informant). From the perspective of this early context and content, the ‘civil’ in civilization is identical to the ‘civil’ in civil society. To clarify for readers what the word “civilization” effectively describes in its early use, I offer the following as a working definition of civilization in its specifically legal sense around 1800, in the standard format of an OED definition: Civilization (noun) Law. A concept specific to Franco-British legal jurisprudence which distinguishes between domains of common law vs. civil law, domains of local custom vs. state jurisdiction, self-consciously used to describe a process by 36

which the former is enveloped by the latter through state-based centralization and territorial incorporation. To the extent that “civilization” denoted for some users superior social qualities of civility is evident in earlier French writing such as a 1757 work by Marquis de Mirabeau’s (Febvre 1930:8). John Nef points out that as civilization was taken up by figures like Walter Scott and François Guizot in the early 1800s, “for these writers civilization was a new achievement” and directly related to “the affairs of nations” (Nef 1967: 36-37). It was for these writers a marker of a new era and its qualities. Civilization in this qualitative sense was still regarded by these writers as a process related to unifications and centralizations, which went hand-in-hand with a self-consciously new type of centralized state governance whose domain is the civil society. For some writers and theorists the civil domain was indistinguishable from its allied qualities of civility, yet as I will show below for Guizot and French Catholics from the 1830s forward, the origin of French civilization is found in its Christian roots—not in its civil governing institutions or post-Napoléonic laws as others claim. The processual aspect of civilization as incorporation has evaporated from today’s standard terms of discourse about civilization, having been displaced by other non-jural phenomenologies of the agencies and legitimacies of socio-political group foundations. This new perspective where everything and everyone can be described as civilizational seems to forget that state units are presently constructed, managed, and imagined in national terms by administrators who naturalize the normative unity of nations, through their day to day work of institutional centralization (cf. Anderson 1991: xiv and Thongchai 1994). The “nation-state” conceived as the specifically “national” or “ethno-national” state was granted center stage in global effect as an

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historical artifact of the aftermath of World War II and the rise of the United Nations system (Kaplan and Kelly 2001). The marginalization of an 1800s focus on civil constituencies in place of (ethno)national units tends in everyday political rhetoric to either erase the incorporations of historical civilization processes (“We are all French”) or render those civil-incorporative processes illegitimate (for example Basque nationalism: “We have never been French”). Civilization has ceased to be regularly apprehended as a technical process of legal state-making or governmental incorporations of people and territory. The same shift in connotation away from the esoteric code of Franco-British legalese has likewise deracinated civilization from its meaning as a process which is directly and narrowly related to the expansion of civil laws and civil orders. As an ethnographic phenomena of consciousness of the past (historicity or ethnohistory) this is a fascinating shift in meaning. It leads to such things as my students’ at University of Chicago easily making a generalist declaration that if defined, “civilization” can denote any group of people in their cultural and institutional specificity. Yet in the past of French administrative categories of government, these students’ definition fits better with what administrators would call “custom,” describing a unique and specific group which lies outside “civilization.” These types of shifts in historical meanings should be taken contextually, and rigorously disambiguated from theory making about modernity, civilization, and civil order so that meanings of the past can be salvaged in their nuances and complexities not presently reflected upon. Ethnographically substantiated civilization concepts offer a means to force the analytic use of civilization into historical movement. My ethnography of the concept(s) is thereby related yet distinct from earlier anthropological mobilizations of civilization as analytic, for example 38

Marshall Sahlins’ 1968 statement, “I have tried to show you that civilizations differ from tribes by virtue of their specialized political institutions, their governments, which sovereignty assume the power and right to protect the citizenry and maintain peace within the state”(Sahlins1968:12). This law-and-order definition participates in a broader 60’s anthropological literature which claims to describe the development from primitive tribes to civil states—tribes being “a position in cultural evolution”(Sahlins 1968:4)—but Sahlins couches his version in a liberalist literature starting with Hobbes and ideas about the State of Nature out of which one can derive opposites such as tribe / state, primitive society / modern civilization, etc. Who then makes these distinctions and is in a position to institutionalize them? Sahlins says that from his analytic viewpoint, for the purposes of classification “the state differentiates civilization from tribal society”(1968:5 italics added). The state has agency and agents who make category differentiations that institutionalized civilization and tribes as though they were separate and opposite conditions in an evolutionary continuum, writ as administrative unit, and social theory that authorizes different and distinct treatments. Sahlins states very clearly that in the wake of Europeans’ colonial expansions, those Europeans develop a particular self conception or subjectivity of what follows next: “Having bit deeply into native custom, civilization allows itself the luxury of an intellectual digestion: the primitives are largely anthropologized. ... Anthropology… becomes an inquest into the corpse of one society presided over by members of another”(Sahlins 1968:2). Even as British ethnographic work in Africa in the 1950s and 1960s shows quite convincingly that “native custom” is largely a colonial artifact, a dialogic creation shaped by administrative fiats, so in a sense the civilization of Sahlins’ description above has actually taken a large bite out of itself. As Michel-Rolph Trouillot points out (2003), this anthropological vivisection tends to tell Europeans more about 39

themselves than it does about those primitive natives actually being studied. Trouillot might lead us to see these representations called “native custom” by colonial administrators as disconnected fictions. Instead I see them as part of a set of process that lead to the present, processes which produce not fictions, but rather the content and possibilities for political institutions established in colonized places, and their present-day political legacies. Native custom is something real. And as Salhins clearly tells us, the agents of civilization think their work is to eat away at native custom and incorporate it into their own body. Not to be coy, this then suggests an anthropological method: how does native custom get eaten? With a knife and fork, Elias might ask? Raw or cooked, Lévi-Strauss might query? These details matter intimately to the eater as these eminent theorist would tell us. From the perspective of a south sea islander whose history and culture purportedly sit on the platter, perhaps such details are moot. However, these details motivate the form of consumption and incorporation and are not merely functional or utilitarian means to an end. The methods for incorporating the native barbarian to French or Christian civilization are all important to administrators and missionaries, and it is largely their perspective on things which this dissertation pieces together for the reader. What kind of land tenure for the incorporated peoples? What kind of wage and labor scheme? What of marriage, residence, religion, and cultural contact can and should happen? The ends sought by these methods are carefully thought through in terms of expected results yet fraught with unexpected consequences. I attempt to present both intention and result in my presentation of the particulars of civilization and native custom in New Caledonia, I will therefore start with French armchair anthropology of the 19th century, presenting Dr. Emile Durkheim as a native informant with some informative ideas about French civilization. 40

What is meant by “Mechanical” and “Organic” solidarity? I interpret Emile Durkheim’s thesis on the social origins of law in The Division of Labor in Society (published in 18933) as a theorization of the process of France’s civilization through law, in which he uses concepts of “mechanical” and “organic” solidarity as a proxy for the received understanding that France had shifted from a plurality of customary laws to a singularity of civilized law with the promulgation of the Civil Code of 1804 under Napoleon. The first part of my argument about how to read Durkheim in context is that his use of “mechanical” would be recognized by a contemporary French reader as a synonym for “customary.” The second part of my argument is that his use of “organic” can be made more legible if it is recognized to refer to the French constitutional concepts about the organs of liberal government, defined by something called Organic Law: Organic Law is a form of constitutional and collectivity-making jurisprudence which strictly speaking defines public powers. For example, during Durkheim’s time, France was under the organic law or constitution of 1874 which established “organs” of French government and defined the range and responsibilities of public or state powers. Rousseau might recognize organic law as one manifestation of his famous Social Contract (Rousseau 1762), a device that claims the ability to both pre-date and define the social collectivity it creates, placing foundational import in the power of the “law giver” who designs the system and the legislators who enact it. In the organic law of 1874, the “law giver”

3

Cited below in a 1984 translation by Lewis Coser.

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and legislator were one in the same: the body of elected politicians who in debate and voting agreed to enact a liberal organic constitution to govern the republic.4 Organic Law is the contract that creates and defines the parts and powers of civil society, and thereby “Organic” is often synonym for “Civil.” For instance, when “civilian” governments were proclamated for New Caledonia under French sovereignty in 1856, and Guam under U.S. sovereignty in 1963, in both instances the legal form of government enacted was called an “organic” law, because in the act of replacing a military government of naval officers with a civil government of laws and organs of government, discrete powers and local jurisdictions were created. In both instance, the advent of Civilization in the strict sense is marked with an official and published decree. The Division of Labor in Society is similarly a theorization of the process of civilization. Durkheim described in general sociological terms applicable anywhere how customary forms of governance might shift into organic forms. He argues unequivocally that the division of labor and the trade it creates “is the source of civilization”(1984:12). For him, the centralizing process of civilization is an after-effect of changes in social organization. He argues that specialization in labor had integrative consequences that brought isolated segmentary societies into greater “moral density” with one another. Hence, the division of labor caused them to “come to merge into a centralized mechanism” which exercises the “organ of government” via “administrative law” (1984:169, 171). This retains the sense of “organic” as describing an integrated body of organs replacing a body of discrete segments (such is the difference between a dog and a worm).

4

The details of the 1874 organic law and terms like liberal will be presented in the body of later chapters of historical narrative. For now I mention it to “prime” the reader.

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In this argument, the division of labor gave birth to the centralized state governance via the co-operative reliance it created between previously discrete autonomous units, not through revolutionary genesis or the inventive work of great men. While Durkheim is clearly no royalist, his work tries to discount revolutionary acts as sudden moments out of which social change spontaneously originates, and he tries to show that great men did not change the world through agencies and ideas found within themselves: agents of change like revolutions and napoleons require a broader social explanation within a Durkheimian sociology. I argue that the full contextual meaning of Durkheim’s division of labor thesis is embedded in French politics and ideologies of governance. This context is made clearly apparent in his 1901 and 1902 university lectures on education, published posthumously as Moral Education (1961). In these lectures, Durkheim is faced with an audience of future teachers that were supposed to apply his sociology to classrooms across France. He offers them a model of agentive statecraft, which casts the “organ of governance” and its administrators at the central agents of an applied definition of civilization . By his meaning, which is fully in line with the ideology of the Napoleonic civil code as well as Hegel as we will see below, “civilization” (noun) is a domain distinct from and overriding family, ethnicity, and other primordial ascriptions which might socialize a child to moral order.5 To demonstrate this, Durkheim talks extensively about the socialization of children, and says that the state apparatus now has more agency compared to the past in forming young minds. He postulates that a major shift has happened: “the family is now becoming an agency secondary to the state” (1961:75). He

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In this sense, for Durkheim’s statecraft is a liberating process that frees civil society from the ‘ties that bind’ of ascribed family and other primordial solidarities. This notion of civilization sits oddly with the appeal his ideas of collective conscience later had as a justification for xenophobic and fascist movements in Europe, which defined civilization as founded on familial and racial nationalism.

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champions education as the tool of this new and growing primacy of state agency over all other organs, saying “school and civilization are concurrent things and closely connected”(1961: 192), proposing that as state-based civilization advances “uncivilized” practices like corporal punishment become less prevalent. There is one single line in Moral Education dealing with the transformative agency of one particular Great Man: Durkheim says it is wrong for the French curriculum to “tell the child that Napoleon created modern law”(1961: 275), and never again deigns to mention Napoléon I in any text I have been able to locate. Apparently this is exactly what teachers were doing in French schools at the time. Even though it is little more than an aside in Moral Education, the explicit statement about Napoleon stands out due to its singularity in the Durkheimian monographic corpus, and his tendency to stay away from specific figures in French political life in his academic writing. This offhanded dismissal of this fixed idea about where law comes and who makes it helps recast his division of labor thesis as motivated against a French narrative of history in which civilization starts with the legal changes imposed at Napoleon’s direction in 1804. Oblique references to the Napoleonic Code elsewhere in the Durkheimian corpus would be patent and obvious to his contemporary French readers. In a quote from Division of Labor in which Durkheim spells out the civilizing process, he states that segmentary societies “come to merge into a centralized mechanism” as an effect of the trade networks of the division of labor, producing a centralized state (1984:169). This process of incorporation of many into one was precisely the organizational work of the transition from a plurality of local Customary laws to the singular Napoleonic Code. Prior to the Napoleonic Code, there were throughout France collections of local jurisdictions which were described by jurists as regimes of “customary law” 44

based on aristocratic feudal prerogatives or localized communal codes. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 imposed legal conformity across France via codification of law and courtroom procedures. This institution of “civil society” took over functions of “customary societies”, which effectively means that the State took over many functions from families in general, and governing and lawgiving functions from aristocratic families in particular. Contained in this creation of French civil law is a new structure in which what might elsewhere be described as the “private” domain is really a “public” domain of local governance contrasted with a “super public” domain of state governance—a contrast between competing collective groupings, rather than a contrast between an individual and a broader social group. Durkheim does not deny this shape of the process, he simply denies that Napoleon I and his legislative powers created French modern law and its civil society, and similarly opposes other great man histories like that of Guizot who attributes modern France to barbaric pre-Christian Germanic Gauls and Feudalism coming out of the agencies of Clovis and Charlemagne. Durkheim’s late 1800s distinction between customary mechanically solidary family units and a civil organic collectivity is neither original nor unique, and is actually highly politicized in terms of its legitimacy as a process of and for social change. This is an innately political text when placed in social context. He tells us what his contemporaries know: that in French law from the Napoleonic Code forward, the State is able to administer “civilizational” law as explicitly contrasted with the jurisdiction of local “customs” which it blanketed over, but did not erase. In French law, the process of civilization—the liberalist constitutional acts which create a civil collective government as practiced in England and the United States—is by 1874 routinely referred to as Organic Law. Durkheim’s backstage argument with Napoleonism thereby outlines

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the key issues of French administrative practice related to populations, their governance, and agencies for change. In this reading Civil Law is the domain of co-operative society and the organ of centralized governance and its exoteric norms. Custom is something else, a predecessor containing sensibilities exoteric within a particular locality but esoteric to the broader collectivity. In a dry conceptual world of legal writing, “organic law” and “civilization” and “civil society” imply one other, all dialogically opposed to “custom.”

Dialectic Oppositions Manifest as Dialogic Perspectives of History: Civilization as a Theory of Modern States vs. Old Families The 1804 Napoleonic Civil Code by design was meant to institute something new and orderly in the wake of revolutionary civil wars: a common law for all of France. As a design for territorial integration via legal centralization, the code overwrote in a blanket-like process a plurality of local and regional legal regimes described as “customary law” which lay beneath the more general law relatively undisturbed. Ancestral French “civil” law was officially born under stamp and seal, even as a significant portion of its codes technically originate from the Custom of the commune of Paris. The custom of Paris was now the law of France via a process of legal centralization which was self-consciously explained as based on Roman precedent. 1804 is thereby taken as one among several mythic starting point of the French civilizing process. Napoleon I was a neo-Cesarean in the management of his empire in France, Germany, Europe and further afield, complete with the assignment of “Prefects” in the Roman style as his delegated representatives to the far-flung corners of his domain.

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Hegel’s 1821 “Transition From the Family to Civil Society” is worth considering as a description of the consequences of Napoleonic conquest of Germanic areas, part of warfare which installed French style civil orders throughout Europe in the early 19th century. Hegel tells us; The family disintegrates, in a natural manner and essentially through the principle of personality, into a plurality of families whose relation to one another is in general that of self-sufficient concrete persons…this gives the determination of particularity which is related to universality…this relation constitutes the world of appearance of the ethical, i.e. civil society (Hegel 1991:219, italics original) Hegel writing in the 1810s and Durkheim in the 1890s both describe the same shape of transformation, from familial dominance to civil dominance at the hand of Napoléonic law. The earlier family-based social orders continue to exist for both authors, and they would agree that the dominance of civil society is measurably on the rise in the 19th century as its agents take functions which were earlier the domain of family life and its political vocations. Hegel describes this napoleonistic reordering as though it were a natural transformation, Durkheim sees it as a motor of desirable social progress in which teachers and functionaries like himself can have an agentive role while denying one to the man Napoleon himself. A third figure who I will detail below named Jean de Laplanche (note the aristocratic name) who was writing in the 1920s sees this shift as an illegitimate usurpation of family domains by the state and in no way natural. The general shape of the shift is agreed upon: family to state. What is not agreed upon is the legitimacy of this historical shift, or what should be done about it. In this light our European social theorists can be reread as telling us not about mechanisms of abstract social dynamics of opposition, but rather reflecting a process in which they attempt to come to grips with the historical effects of Napoléonic legal reorganizations of basic social institutions.

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In the 1821 publication by Hegel discussed above, he presents an experiential dialectic through which perceived opposites of public/private and ethnical/unethical come out of a “Transition from Family to Civil Society” which presents these domains as mutually constitutive rather than exclusive separate things. However, from an ethnographic-eye view, distinctions between civility and custom or public and private are routinely supposed by their everyday users to denote two discrete spheres or two discrete domains. Durkheim is a good example of this type of perspective, where the agency of family versus state can be measured, rather than seeing the modern family as having been constituted by the State. In a system administered and inhabited by believers and practitioners of such perceived oppositions between civil society and its predecessors, people see themselves as moving in and out of civil order, and experience the crossing the boundaries between public and private domains, or political and domestic spheres as they go about their daily activities. In Hegel’s terms, from the perspective of a dialectic of experience, the “word of appearance” of civil society is customary society: one cannot do without the other. Mikhail Bakhtin’s concept of dialogic imagination (1981) offers nuance to the concept of the dialectic relation: the empirically later emergence of civil society refigures in imagination the earlier form of family society and its significance. Through dialogic reflection on the past in terms of the present, history is revalorized and made different in meaning and narrative focus. The French past becomes identifiable as “custom” even though it was never marked as such in the past. It has been refigured and transformed by what comes later. Analytically, civil society is the necessary condition or context for customary society—rather than the other way around. Civil society needed to first rear its head before custom was able to be identifiable to French and European theorists like Hegel and Durkheim: as Bakhtin can be used to explain, historical 48

narratives may be lineal and chronological, but the process of their formation as narrative is actually reverse chronological and the present serves as the context which gives meaning to the past in this instance. Hegel offers a means to describe the way historical narrative is brought to bear on daily life—the emergence of the civil sphere as on the one hand a historical event of history and on the other as an event of quotidian contrast, as something experientially entered into in daily life when leaving the domestic foyer. He clearly presents the family as an institution which precedes state and civil institutions, and in his presentation of actual historical and everyday fact these two domains appear to act as competing interests. Hegel is not alone in this analysis that family and civil society are in competition, and the advance of one comes at the expense of the other. Supporting this perspective as I discussed in the introduction, David Schneider and Beth Povinelli’s work can be used together to provide a theoretic and empirical starting point to demonstrate that families as kinship networks of descent and domesticity manifest through blood are in fact historical creations enveloped, enforced and co-emergent with the liberal state. The world of custom and family is not what the state and civilization replaced. These dialogically imagined predecessors are part of the newfangled creation of civil order—and provide its dialogic opposite. This is the shape of Liberal governance as it is defined structurally in terms of its opposites and competitive interests. What else is in competition with a civil framework? Civilization can describe the component cosmology and cosmogony of civil society, offering a totalizing account of the social universe, its origins, its limits, and its others—extendable to the non-social universe through the alliance of science with the civil sphere, since in historical narrative science has been successfully wrestled from the (for some) illegitimate grasp of non-disinterested religious sects such as Catholicism. If we agree for a moment that in the standard narrative, liberalist civil 49

society is born of revolutions, from this perspective, both science and civil society are born of dramatic change and modernizing secularizing revolutions. Bruno Latour argues We Have Never Been Modern (1993) attacking a similar dialogic imagination, by critiquing the conceit of the modernist narrative that the present era is a uniquely new regime, born of a revolutionary rupture with the ancients and the regular passage of time. He proposes that French events of 1789 and scientific revolutions operate similarly to the extent that the “revolutionary reading” is laminated onto events which unfolded as processes that were in no way revolutionary at the time, and only became revolutionary in hind-sight narration (1993:40) and after-the-fact metapragmatic categorization and typing of the event. Much as I argued about custom, revolution emerges in the later metanarrative about acts which render them revolutionary (although one might want to also account for how these events of revolutionary discourse were metadiscursively and self consciously discussed at the time: unlike the U.S. revolution which gained its name after the events it describes, the idea of revolution modeled on the U.S. provides an explanatory frame for 1789 for at least some of its participants and actors). Hence, Latour argued there is no empirical revolutionary rupture that segregates the moderns from the pre-moderns, or society from nature, or any of the other dialectic oppositions he argues are contained in the framing and practice of modernist liberal constitutions. Latour suggests instead that a new regime of non-modern constitution-making is in order since it will acknowledge that there is an integral character to these human and global units. His proposes that non-modern or a-modern constitutionalism will envelop the powers and subjects of nature and society which he argues are already unofficially a single collectivity under the regime of modernity, a connection that modern secularists have thrown out mistakenly with religious cosmologies (Latour 1993:141). 50

Latour shows a misunderstanding in his title for how civil liberal constitutional regimes work. I propose that rather than speaking back to the modernists by saying “we have never been modern,” perhaps instead he could say sometimes “we” are civilized and sometimes “we” are not. It would require that he abandon the exclusivity of the modern versus pre-modern divide which Latour seeks to destroy by critiquing the idea of revolutionary rupture as I discussed above. Latour could perhaps extract more analytic value by reading Hegel and Durkheim as “modernists”: they describe civil subjects who are regularly and legitimately engaged in private family or tribal matters, and then just as regularly and legitimately leave the house or the reserve and enter the public sphere of civil society. These constituted individual subjects are neither definitively modern nor premodern under the civil constitutional regime, but instead they are nominally either civil or non-civil depending on what they are up to and where they are doing it. For a U.S. example, consider Row vs. Wade as a judicial decision which hinges on a woman’s right to privacy, constructed as a domain beyond the sphere of civil interference. In U.S. political ideology, this ruling does not make women pre-modern (actually, this particular ruling is thought to do the precise opposite in folk explanations: recognition of their privacy and rights to their bodies emancipates the modern woman from traditional social controls). This means that a nominalist methodology which tracks explicit mentions of “civilization” and “civility” has very specific analytic legs: analysis of instances of when and how people talk about “civilization” will need to account for its explicitness. If Latour’s totalizing a-modern Constitution (with a capital “C” as he uses it) were instituted, it seems as though he believes it would be uniquely immune6 from creating the sorts of dialectic opposites 6

In his presentation of opposites, there seems to be little room for nested oppositions, and the relations of recursive hierarchical classifications such as marked and unmarked.

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that separate nature and society, and dialogic narratives which separate primitives from moderns. Another way to say it that he has no theory of explicitness, no theory of metadiscourse, and no sense of nested or hierarchical relations that might exist between social classifications. Then again, he is making a prescriptive argument about what constitutions should look like, and arguing that revolutions did not happen.

Agencies of Legal Civilization versus Christian Civilization in French Context Looking back to the revolutionary moment in France and its aftermath, taking this period seriously as a moment of change is worth keeping—not that it is a unique change in the history of the world, leading to modernity and exceptionalism, but that it is instead a moment of social transformation in the empirical organization of social institutions. The Napoleonic Code of 1804 which flowed from the opportunities created after 1789 is based on a recognition and empowerment of the creative capacities of law to completely shape and reshape social order through legislative acts. Civil Law theorist Christian Atias tells us that law’s “civilizing function was obvious to the legal scholars of the nineteenth century” as much in England as in France. However in contrast to Napoléonic civil codes, in “Anglo-Saxon” Common Law legal practice, cases are central to argumentation and jurisprudence, exemplified in the ways lawyers and judges cite previous case law (for example Roe v. Wade I mentioned above, and Brown v. Board of Education). In French law after the Napoleonic code, arguments and judgments are made only in reference to codified laws and decrees (for example Loi n° 2005-158 du 23 février 2005 which legislated that the national curriculum recognize the “positive role” of French colonialism, specifically the settlers repatriated from Algeria after 1962). In French governance, law is by and large a legislative creation in official ideology and legal practice: good Judges do not make 52

precedents in France, they simply follow legislation. In this ideological sense Christian Atias accurately calls Napoleonic Civil Law “the triumph of legislation” (2002:11) making lawgivers agents supreme over the populous and judges alike. More than a mere cultural belief, this set of concepts and assumptions have social consequences in how law is written and applied. The contrasting powers of judgment of lawgivers versus citizens emblematize the ways the relationship between law and society is operationalized in France after 1804, and recurrently fought over in explicitly combative narratives of the true and real origins of “civilization.” While the idea of civilization can be used as I did above to strictly describe a legal process for social change incorporating marginal areas and their residents to centralized civil order, from perhaps civilization’s first empirical appearance in print 1757 under Mirabeau’s name (as I mentioned above), it was enveloped with non-legal connotations of civility and high culture. On the heels of Napoléonic civil transformations, François Guizot argued instead that civilization had nothing to do with civil government and everything to do with Christianity. In two works based on his university lectures, François Guizot expounded a more patently ideologically motivated theory of civilization as “progress” in Histoire générale de la civilisation en Europe (1828) and the multivolume works Histoire de la civilisation en France (1829). Our Alsatian theorist Curtius tells us that Guizot’s civilization concept proposed that the process and its effect was “an essentially European phenomenon, since it presupposes a tendency toward freedom which is lacking in Asia…the civilizing forces in other countries have always had to pass though France…Thus, according to Guizot, France is the heart of Civilization”(Curtius 1962:19). Note the capitalization of civilization in the final instance, which I take as an accurate representation of his ideological intent: one single Civilization writ globally with Christian values, with France and Frenchmen as

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the agent of its global extension (which I take to be importantly different in intention than a Vatican centered Christian Civilization). Guizot is adamant that “Universality is…the first principle and ultimate aim of Christianity” (Guizot 1868:1 italics original), and this universal Christian history is precisely what creates everything about France that Guizot thinks makes her exceptional. At the eleventh century, the soil which we call France was covered with petty nations and petty sovereigns, almost strangers to one another, almost independent of each other….How comes it that really French civilization and history commence when it was almost impossible to discover a France? It is because, in the life of nations, the external visible unity, the unity of name and government, although important, is not the first the most real, not what truly constitutes a nation…moral unity in point and fact, far superior to political unity, and which alone can give it a solid foundation. (Guizot 1857 vol. III: 315) And per the origin of this “moral unity” of the French nation, and European nations generally, Guizot tells us that although he sees a pre-nascent France gestating five hundred years before Charlemagne, it was developed through the crusades (1857 vol. I: 175). His agent at the origin of “modern” Europe is Charlemagne who “founded all the states which sprung from the dismemberment of his empire”(Guizot 1972:328), which for Guizot was importantly Christian. The essential character of France is not manifest in its government or its legislation, but rather in its religion and Christian agency. For example, in defense of the goodness of Christian agency, in 1828 Guizot published an edited and annotated translation of Edward Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776). In this translation Guizot uses marginalia, combative footnotes, and a thoroughly unflattering engraving of Gibbon that points out his “enormous size,” and tries to "rectify such statements as appeared to me false" regarding the progress of Christianity in the text (Guizot [n.d.][1828]:v).

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Guizot’s civilization idea is informed by his politics. In the post-Napoleonic and postrevolutionary era of the restored July monarchy, in 1830 Guizot’s ideas resonated within the liberal monarchic regime of Louis Philippe, a man proclaimed “King of the French” rather than “King of France” as a compromise replacement for the ousted Bourbon Restoration. Within this “liberal” government, Guizot was elected to the Chamber of Deputies by a male land owning electorate, and was initially appointed Minister of Education, from which position he was ideally situated to institute his perspective of the benefits of French civilization as a slowly developing progressing centralization (not revolution), as an essentialized superiority of France over others, both European and non-European, made possible by their Christian faith. Later as Foreign Minister and eventually Prime Minister, Guizot clearly saw French Civilization and French Catholicism as integrated, and therefore gave full state support to Marist Missionary work in Oceania in the 1830s and 1840s casting them as veritable agents of colonial expansion (the priests of course had their own ideas about how they situated with the French state, as shown in following chapters). He described the July Monarchy as a meeting of the “French Revolution” and the “old French Society” face to face in “full liberty”(quoted in Craiutu 2002:xi) an explicit hybrid, embodied in a governmental order of a constitutional monarchy. Guizot argued this was a natural outcome of historical process: modern liberalism and democracy was something the aristocratic classes had been piecing together for centuries, and not some sudden creation of revolutionary peasants and Parisians. Guizot says that instead what he calls this “new society” originates with Clovis and Charlemagne and slowly developed into the present via the agency of careful aristocratic tutelage. The revolution of 1789 and Napoleon’s preeminence in 1804 are reframed as a brief episode in this longer progression.

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Political Tropes of Custom Versus the State: Situating An Aristocratic and Catholic Critique of the French Civil Code, circa 1925 Historian Eugen Weber would argue that the idea of “Frenchmen” as a people who are culturally and nationalistically French only comes importantly into focus during the period of 1870 to 1914 under the Third Republic (1871-1939). He says that before 1870 there was indeed a political entity called France—“a kingdom, an empire, or republic” (Weber 1976: 485)— but that it was not assimilative in political intent or practice. Weber points out that assimilation by his measure is seen by developments after the 1850s of things like French schooling, Pariscentered roads and railways, and universal French military service for boys (Weber 1976:493494).Weber describes by my measure a process of cultural “nationalization” in the late 19th century which creates France and Frenchmen, a process of homogenization that by 1932 allows Curtius to sincerely but inaccurately claim that for all its history “in practice, France finds it impossible to separate the concepts of the State, the nation and civilization”(Curtius1962: 26) as though they were all co-present ineffable concepts, and not things with particular histories. Eugen Weber’s materials do a good job to show Curtius’ anachronisms, historically speaking, with solid evidence that ideas about the French national body are historically emergent. For Weber, the concept of “nation” needs historical substantiation. This raises a pertinent question of my own: What was French “civilization” before it was enveloped in these later conceptions of the French nation? What precisely was the object of the “centralizations” of civilization sought by administrators and politicians if it was not the ethnonational French body politic? Specifically, what was French civilization in the 1840s, when New Caledonia becomes the object for incorporation and administration through a process of annexation? As the beginning of an answer, I fully agree with the spirit of what Eugen Weber 56

says of the early post-revolutionary era: “To be in France meant to be ruled by French officials” (Weber 1976: 489) and little more. Yet, even by 1789 the vast territory of present day France did not have clearly identifiable and unambiguously “French” officials. The territory was instead a group of pluralities governed by what I would like to characterize as customary lords, who were effectively semi-autonomous tax farmers to the Sovereign Ruler of France. While everyone knows that the French revolution of 1789 overthrew a monarchic form of sovereign rule, details tend to become murky about how monarchic rule actually functioned and how France was integrated or disintegrated as a unit of humanity before 1789. This is perhaps because the rupture from old regime to new republic is both chronotope and political trope for the new post-revolutionary era. Hence, scientific historiography of the Ancien Régime often will not necessarily help readers understand the past, so much as offer an insight into 19th century French discourse about the aristocracy, since the aristocratic and monarchical past is remembered, refashioned and deployed as a recurrent political trope. This does not mean this scholarship is a waste: I argue that otherwise quaint and historically misinformed ideas about pre-revolutionary France were used to inform how French sovereignty was extended elsewhere—including New Caledonia. This dialogic imagination of history offered a model, and through this optic of the past “customs” and “customary” groups were readily discovered in Africa and Oceania so that they could be incorporated and transformed into the civilizational body of France along precisely the same lines as “customs” in France had been incorporated before them. Here is one example, which presents themes which will reappear in my ethnographic and historical materials below. In 1925, Jean de Laplanche, an aging legal scholar from an old aristocratic family, published a history of French law which focused on the institution of the 57

Réserve Coutumière or “Customary Reserve” under the old French regime. In his pro-reserve rendition, a customary reserve was a feudal domain, connected to a particular noble family. Within these domains, the lords ruled according to a set of unwritten ad-hoc agencies and prerogatives that were eventually glossed as “custom”—reflecting (I conjecture) the sense of custom as something tailored and unique, as well as a customs tariff exacted on goods and persons as they cross domains. Presenting a map of France in the late 1500s, Laplanche draws a dividing line separating places ruled by written codified Custom (like the Commune of Paris) from provincial dutchies and county domains where Dukes, Counts and other lords ruled via unwritten un-codified Custom. Laplanche’s motive for writing about an old customary institution—the lord’s family land reserves which formed his customary regime—can be found in how he describes, in an accusatory tone, ongoing transformations in hereditary law implemented after the Civil Code of 1804 which he perceives as continuously eroding the “customary rights” of inheritance certain families once held inalienably in perpetuity, for all time. For Laplanche, Customary Reserves constituted a land system which would protect the family, protection provided via a land inheritance device that would support extended family relations through time, generation after generation. He describes an institution that protects broadly defined access to dynastic succession, through rightful inheritance of the family group of the form of material support, and argues that post-revolutionary civil definitions of family groups and legitimate inheritance undermine the family so defined. These family reserves Laplanche describes are the “House Societies” of early modern Europe identified by Lévi-Strauss (1987:151), as an early and temporary intermediary stage between primitive (or pre-capitalist) accumulation and full-blown capitalism. Unlike Lévi58

Strauss, de Laplanche sees nothing temporary in the character of familial domains and aristocratic institutions, and instead sees the decline of the institution as politically motivated by specific politicians and political parties whose agenda is to destroy the remains of nobility. He defends the institution of customary reserves as a means to protect “the family” from outside challenges and usurpations. The subject to be protected through reserves is clearly imagined by Laplanche as an aristocratic family, and legal scholar Ioanna Kondyli spells out that different legal conceptions of the family grouping defined as legitimate, natural, or adoptive, extended, and nuclear enters into consideration of the limits of French noble families. The definition of “family” in Laplanche’s use is elastic in precisely the ways Levi-Strauss finds worth theorizing as House Societies. “Family” is properly a shifter: it denotes something different depending on the context in which it is used, and who uses it, under what legal regime. The family, however defined, “is the subject and beneficiary of the protection which one tries to give through the hereditary reserve”(Kondyli 1997:4). An enduring trope rears its head in this political discourse, which I presented earlier via Hegel and Durkheim as social theory: Laplanche argues that customary reserves are for the “protection of the family” which needs defense against the interests of the civil or liberal State. The “family” is presented in all four social historical models (Hegel in the 1810s, Durkheim in the 1890s, Laplanche in the 1920s, and Lévi-Strauss in the1960) as losing its agency and functions to civil and state administrations. Politics enters into the evaluation of this process: for three out of our four this is a natural progression; for Laplanche it is anything but natural and is instead a shift contrived by his political enemies. Laplanche tells us clearly whose interest he believes is served through a modern narrowed definition of family used by civil law: the State in general, and socialist republicans in 59

particular. He maintains that while inheritance should clearly be able to pass co-laterally (“nieces” are his example), under the new civil regime of “legitimacy”, the idea that property could only pass to a single legitimate heir was gaining the upper hand in French jurisprudence and legislation. Laplanche states that proposals made as recently as 1917 by socialists in the legislature to concentrate inheritance in a single “legitimate” recognized heir were made with the motive to secure more of the estate and reserve for the State, through forfeiture in probate due to lack of an heir with legitimate standing, and higher rates of taxation in the event that law forces the estate be passed to a single person (Laplanche 1925:666). This then structurally deprives “the family” as an extended unit of its means of support and continuity over time since families have become narrowly defined through civil codes as a partilineal household which effectively “disaggregates the family, and, therefore, deprives the state of the organs necessary for its survival”(Laplanche 1925:666). By this he means that the aggregate (aristocratic) family, manifest in its perpetual reserves of property, is the basis of the State’s own survival, and the post-revolutionary state is a menace to the family and nation: Durkheim tells us explicitly that the agentive “organ” of society is central government at the expense of the agency of families as this is a good thing, while Laplanche tells us the survival of society depends on the familial “organ” retaining agency. Laplanche ends his tome by saying that while under the Third Republic, the legislature has taken formidable action to protect professions, yet to soutenir or “feed/support” the family, “an essentially natural group, nothing has been done”(Laplanche 1925:666). He offers us a clear idea of an alternative to the liberal state: the kinship state—even as he presents it as a predecessor which analysis easily shows never exists, he conceives of family society as a viable alternative. He then hopes that those with lucid intelligence and firm volontés or “wills” should 60

demand that public powers defend the family, since the French family is the “rampart—menaced today— of western civilization and of Christian civilization of which the destinies are inseparable”(Laplanche 1925:667). While Eugen Weber describes the period of 1870 to 1914 as a process of “turning peasants into Frenchmen” for Laplanche these same legislative processes of centralization destroyed what he conceives of as the natural family and its foundation in property. From this aristocratic perspective, civil law destroys the French family and threatens the very “foundations of its civilization.” When Laplanche writes these claims in 1925, we can see that for him the ‘civil’ in ‘civilization’ has nothing to do with the ‘civil’ in ‘civil society’: in fact, for Laplanche and arguably the other aristocratic families of France, the State and civilization are categorical opposites in conception and competitive interests in fact, since for them French civilization is founded on the old family and its custom7—not on the new state’s Republican and Napoleonicera civil codes, or on a liberalist foundation that excludes families per se from political functions and thereby unintentionally solidifies the institutions of family life through legally defining them and regulating their internal affairs in such things “legitimate” as descent and inheritance: here,

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While Laplanche derides the Third Republic for having systematically undermined familial domains starting in 1871, he seems ignorant of the fact that new customary reserves and new customary regimes were coming into being in the colonial antipodes of New Caledonia through the decisions of those very same officials and administrators of the Third Republic whom he seems to despise. In the sense of a piece of land set aside for the protection and support of the expanded family or clan, the lordly Réserve Coutumier nominally came back into being as a legal institution of the Third Republic via its colonial creations of “indigenous reserves” which became known as “customary reserves”. The institutions for a new “France Austral” in the 1890s were in this way undeniably modeled on the old French feudal order as imagined in the late 19th century, before proceeding on its own nuanced institutional trajectory. As with Laplanche’s defense of the Old Regime’s customary family groups against the encroachments and usurpations of the civil State, the customary reserve in New Caledonia was imagined by its Republican and secularly minded administrators like Governor Feillet and his predecessors as providing a space outside civil domains and jurisdictions for the protection of an aggregately defined familial group: the clan and tribe. The same administrators Eugen Weber describes as working to turn French peasants into French nationals at the expense of family and custom were making similar efforts to turn indigenous pacific islanders into custom-ruled family groups hierarchically dominated by tribal chiefs.

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the very concept and content of “legitimacy” and the exclusivity of blood as a recognized descent relation is shown to be an artifact of liberalism—not its predecessor.

Elements of a Framework for Analysis: Studying Customary and Civil Institutions in La France Outre-mer I am fully aware that colonial and imperial expansions were not one-sided externalization of European civil categories applied through policy and law. The empirical facts of colonizercolonized dynamics do not change my basic premise that civilization is a peculiar European thing. Facts from the antipodes such as New Caledonia demonstrate the need for historical nuance: ethnographically informed archival work offers a means to demonstrate a claim that colonial incorporations actually changed the organization of civil administrations and often created something new out of something thought to be old. Examples of administrative policy I examine below via the case of New Caledonia largely support an observation like Paul Rabinow’s that “French Modern” was made and tested in the colonies before being brought to bear on home administration (Rabinow 1989), and John Kelly’s impression that the tools of census and accounting used to govern the populations of Britain were first developed in South Asia by employees of the British East India Company overseeing a new-fangled joint-stock venture that needed to be quantitatively answerable to stockholders in how it managed the populations under its domain (Kelly: ongoing personal communications). From the perspective gained from attention to the details of colonial administration and its projects and organization, I conclude that the New Caledonian colony and French metropole are not always as coeval as Fabian might claim: they do not necessarily “share the same Time”(Fabian 2002:30) intersubjectively speaking, since administratively and organizationally 62

speaking since although these two locations are linked, one “home” and the other “abroad,” they are not made officially French in the same ways at the same time, and they are not objectively enveloped within the same administrative state structure. Pointing out that they could have been in the same timescape in policy perhaps helpfully reveals ideologies that hierarchialize the colonizer / colonized relationship as though the latter are living stone age people. While I agree with the theoretical heft of recognizing analytically the “coeval” status of colonizers and the colonized and the ways in which their coevalness is regularly erased, I first want evidence that their coevality is empirically extant and ideologically mediated in specific ways before claiming that it has been denied, effaced or elided into something else through colonial interventions. Something more interesting might be going on in administrative process than in the limited domain of anthropological otherness and its dialectics. For example, Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in Provincializing Europe (2000) that rural Europe and its peripheries become civil/civilized/modern/modernized well after the colonies if placed on a historical timeline of administrative intervention and its densities, and as I said above Paul Rabinow observes how modern France was tested in the colonies. My object is to demonstrate how this is possible, and I do so in the dissertation through the example of explaining how innovative land law and ideas about the possibility of using land as credit are easier to enact in the colony rather than the metropole. Ideologically, these Pacific islands are “New Societies”—which places an interesting twist on Fabian’s original intention of exploring the concept of coevalness. The new colonies evolve first as an matter of opportunity, and old Europe will follow. Newness and innovation comes from the colonies. Well before France was centralized to the Napoléonic Code of 1804, in the 1600s, colonial companies charted by King Louis XIV were contractually supposed to administer any territories they acquired via “the Custom of Paris”(Cole 63

1939). The French “hexagonal” metropolitan territory itself would be legally centralized or otherwise “integrated” to the code of Paris only under Napoleon I two hundred years later. From a legal point of measure, the old colonies8 of the Caribbean and Indian Ocean (Martinique, Guadeloupe, La Réunion etc.) were centralized to Parisian Metropolitan law more than one hundred years before France itself was centralized or “civilized.” The model of the “modern” French centralized French State following 1804 is based on the organization of French colonial law circa 1600. Specifically the “classic administrative hierarchy of the Napoleonic Consulate” (Schwartz in Lepawsky 1952:166) was brought to the Hexagon and deployed to create the “modern” administrative regime in 1799 and the centralized code followed in 1804. The French state apparatus created by Napoleonic reforms and centralizations, as Sarah Froning Deleporte nicely shows via conflicts between the cultural and educational ministries (2006), is a house divided into a plethora of bureaus whose administrators often work at cross purposes with one another, sometimes with obstructive intent (hiding cataloging information for artifacts is an example she presents), and at others in total isolation and ignorance of what their counterparts are up to in a neighboring Ministry even as they work on innately germane projects. Deleporte’s ethnography of these functionaries and the institutional history of their work shows the fractured character of centralized civil governance in France today, which belies the ideological assumptions about centralization: it is not as integrated as might be assumed. An American Walter Sharp comments in 1931: “Territorially, the government of France is an example of advanced centralization; functionally it is anything but that” (Sharp in Lepawsky 8

When speaking of “Old Colonies” it should be remembered that some of them shifted in and out of French sovereignty in the execution of wars and treaties with Britain in the 17th and 18th centuries. In Martinique this means that some residents claim that the French revolution of 1789 never happened locally and was strictly a metropolitan event, versus the “new colony” of New Caledonia where some claim that “our revolution” or “our 1789” in which old orders were overturned started with the landing of U.S. forces in 1942.

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1952: 162). Centralization and civilization is not homogenization, since government offices are not a single unit: one always has to ask which offices, which officers, and with what policies. From this perspective there is nothing identifiable as the French State at least as a singular individual or person like agency—and is instead composed of many agents and agencies that are differently structurally empowered to act agentively. Methodologically this empirical observation calls for a careful contextualization of where and why policy is created, with what specific ends, and how is it applied. Not only are the colonies centrally incorporated first to this bundle of competing agencies—before the rest of France, which remained provincial by comparison—even after both domestic and colonial domains are integrated into a centralized state-order, but also the overseas territories and dependencies of France were rarely administered under the Interior Ministry which was responsible for the domestic space of France. Instead the colonies fell under the Marine Ministry: they are within the State, but as in the lives of soldiers, a militarily governed colony is a distinct type of parallel civil order outside the regular civil government of the metropole. All residents of a French colony territory in the 19th and early 20th century no matter their origin or status, were legally partitioned in some way from the civil society of the metropole. Within some colonies, and New Caledonia in particular, the divisions between colony and metropole were recursively reproduced within the locally resident populations. Residents were bisected into two sub-types of colonial societies: civil subjects who lived in “civil society”, and native or indigenous subjects who lived in “customary societies” outside the jurisdictions and institutions of civil society yet within the State apparatus. The sovereign French State entailed the subcategories of civil society and customary society: in the metropole these three were 65

organized as nested sets, whereas in colonial contexts the civil and the customary were parallel and segregated from one another. Recurrently reproducing the same divisions again within the non-native civil colonial sphere, French citizens from the metropole who managed the colonial government apparatus as civil servants were “official” Frenchmen, and benefited from preferential employment, inflated wage scales, and opportunities denied to ordinary Frenchmen and Europeans in the colony. As inducement for expatriation the official Frenchmen received the best material benefits of both home and colony. Not unique to French colonies, Benedict Anderson describes a similar resulting structure in Dutch Indonesia as having a “tropical gothic” aesthetic, where the tokens of privileged race and class life in the colonies (servants for example) exemplified the fact that state functionaries had better opportunities in the colonies than at home in the metropole (Anderson 1991). Anderson proposes that ascent in the class hierarchy was possible through the way it was reproduced in the colonies, however the class hierarchy of the metropole was not necessarily transplanted intact nor designed to be a replica: instead, it often was designed to embody idealized social ends and orders not necessarily extant in the metropole. Additionally, as will become clear in the dissertation’s details, the official Frenchmen of the colonies in the 19th century tended to be naval officers and these officers tend to hail from old aristocratic families regardless of the form of government of the metropolitan regime (monarchy, constitutional monarchy, republic, etcetera). Expatriating oneself in the colonial service is not necessarily motivated by “class” advancement; however it is very lucrative. For instance as decreed by Napoléon III in 1860, the official stipend for commanding officers in the colonies is 15,000

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francs whereas the stipend for commanding officers in Europe is a comparatively paltry 6,000 francs. (Journal Officielle de la Nouvelle-Calédonie vol III:6). Beneath these (unelected) well-paid French colonial administrators and governors, the settled colonial populations of European emigrants and descendants of contract or slave labor from Asia and Africa often complained that they were structurally second-class to their corollaries in the Metropole, and decisively disadvantaged compared to the over privileged functionaries in their midst. As a trope common in colonial reproaches, this lack of equality in the colony was described poignantly in the mid 20th century as “La France à deux vitesses,” at two speeds, a double-standard which points out the fact that citizens living in the Metropole and Official Frenchmen in the colonial service were structurally “more equal” under the laws and benefits of empire. In official ideology everyone was supposed equal under the law (even in nonrepublican periods the Civil Code still pertains and was not revoked: for instance, everyone must yield to the vehicle on the right at an intersection regardless of personal social standing; all land owners were equally allowed to vote under the Constitutional monarchy without discriminating against certain land owners; all males were equally allowed to vote under the Second Republic. The new legal regime was not upended even as political regimes came and went). This resentment fueled anti-metropolitan sentiment in many colonial civil societies, which is manifest as explicitly “anti-French racism.” French Colonial civil societies were designed as worlds structured with Official Frenchmen governing everyone else, including a mixture of regular French citizens, assimilated citizens of various backgrounds, foreigners, colonial subjects, contract laborers, and in some cases slaves (on and off until 1848, and never in New Caledonia). This is not the class society of France, even if some of its component parts are the same. Together in a “civil society” based on 67

modified French organic law, non-citizens enjoyed the benefits of civil status which gave them standing to enter into contracts, own and inherit property as individuals, work as wage-labor, open businesses, and otherwise participate in colonial social order (and in the case of slaves, be treated as chattel under the terms of the civil code). The civil society in the colonies, as in France, was a society with economic and racial classes. In New Caledonia and Tahiti, a second category of tribal “customary societies” was created by the administration, formally and physically outside colonial civil society. A distinct native indigenous social order was slowly defined in New Caledonia by decree and legislation that categorized the original people as belonging to social units called clans and tribes. Individuals recognized by the colonial administrators as having “customary status” or “particular status” (a terminology borrowed perhaps from Henry Maine’s policies for India) were until 1944 neither citizens nor subjects living under the umbrella of French civil society and its organic law. This happened through fiat of a legal fiction enacted by Colonial Secretary Mathieu in which he officially defines indigenous inhabitants and their lands in terms of collectivist ownership of tribes and chiefs in 1868. He described this as a temporary and protectionist “concession aux coutumes” a concession to customs, even as he imagines that the “néocalédoniens” and their laws are already on the way to a horizon of privately rather than communally owned property (compare my interpretation to Saussol 1979:155-156). French officials of aristocratic and liberal inclinations were both ready to re-create the older customary institutions of aristocratic France for the purposes of administering the indigenous lands and peoples of New Caledonia, often conceived as being excluded and “protected” from the full implications of membership in civil society. As I will discuss in the details of annexation in the next chapters, elsewhere in the French Pacific—with the Royal 68

Pomares in Tahiti, and Kings and Queens of Wallis and Futuna—there is an explicit aristocracy recognized in the customary societies encountered and incorporated during voyages of European discovery and later missionization. This is the pre-history of French sovereign incorporations of New Caledonia. The same individual Marist fathers who found royal nobles in Wallis in the 1830s say they also found noble royals in New Caledonia’s hamlets and villages in the 1840s. In all places of the Pacific in the mid 1800s, the French missionaries rediscovered “custom” through an optic which saw the future of these customary peoples as the same as that of old French custom: threatened by civil encroachments and laws into their familial and religious lives. However, in most accounts of Oceania this politics of missionary activity is forgotten in analysis: my interest here is to reinsert political discourse and clarify civilizations tropes which inform things like the discovery of royalty in small Pacific islands. In chapter two I reassess the process by which French Bishop Pompallier’s intervention at the Treaty of Waitangi merits credit for unintentionally having “Maori Custom” recognized in New Zealand in 1840: I argue the story is more nuanced than an unintended consequence of sectarian Anglo Protestant and Franco Catholic rivalry, and is couched in the Bishop’s perception that all civil jurisdictions are illegitimate generally (and not just those of the British). I suggest and demonstrate that there is an intentional parallelism in the construction of customary regimes in the French pacific using reworked stereotypes of Ancien Régime aristocratic institutions as models—including the relationship with the catholic church and customary law. Recurrent tropes of custom and civilization help explain this parallelism, between how French aristocratic institutions were dialogically imagined from the hind-sight perspectives of the late 19th and early 20th century, which were brought to bear on similarly 69

conceived customary institutions developed in the South Pacific by the administrative government. Perhaps predictably, this means that the French State and its colonial governments in New Caledonia recurrently faced off with the Catholic church over the status of natives vis-àvis civil jurisdiction. In an uncanny parallel, the Marists fathers were ready to reengage the 1789 terms of contest in small Pacific islands, and defend custom and religion against civil law. However, this did not always necessarily involve actual conflict and disagreement between statesmen and missionaries. The first presence of French sovereign representatives in New Caledonia dates to 1843, when a French naval officer installed a small group of Marist missionaries on the island as the locally resident representatives of the French State (not unusual at the time, when traders and others who happened to be present often got to be resident agents of European States in small Pacific islands; see chapter two). When sovereignty was definitively established ten years later in 1853 (this time with actual naval officers as the resident authorities), the inhabitants and their lands would become subject to a process of legal integration into France. In a timeline of French government, this was roughly fifty years after the creation of the civil French State and its polity, as marked by the revolution of 1789 and the centralizations of the civil code of 1804, enacted fifteen years after the Revolution and its ensuing turmoil of internal “civil” war which ended with Napoleon Bonaparte at the head of the new state fashioned as an empire (neither a monarchy nor republic). These customary social units were conceived as being outside the social contract, and at some times estimated to have their own laws and government, making theirs a fully parallel society in French administrative conception (see later chapters; particularly Governor Feillet’s idea that these two distinct civil societies would overlap in the wage-labor and luxurious goods 70

market, but nowhere else). When Matt Matsuda declares in Empire of Love that the French civilizing mission was romantically sold to young administrators as a project to instill a “love of France” in her colonial children (2005), it is evident in policy differentials that mother France did not ‘love’ all her civil and customary children equally or in the same way. This would be evident to Matsuda from an examination of cross-colonial regimes of land alienation, where some natives kept land, some could sell land, and other had their land taken from them. In Tahiti the Journal Officielle was redacted in summary in a local language, whereas nothing of the sort ever happened in New Caledonia. In Tahiti, customary lands remained in customary hands under collective ownership which prohibits sales to foreigners, whereas in New Caledonia at its height more than 90% of usable land went into privately alienable regimes. In many respects, while the civilizing mission of France as an assimilative project is often contrasted with the institutions of British indirect rule which maintained difference, I will show below there were in fact in New Caledonia multiple civilizing missions, applied during different eras of French government which authorized different incorporating logics. Only some of these versions of civilization were premised on assimilation, while others recognized (and thereby created and institutionalized) the native population’s existing capacity for autonomous customary governance (but not autonomous sovereignty) and placed them outside the legal and territorial limits of European civil jurisdictions as a theoretically permanent condition out of which they would never assimilate (including the class positions and property relations assimilation necessarily entailed).

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The Dissertation Project: Examining French Civilization Concepts From the Antipodes of France Although “civilization studies” might be out of fashion in anthropology, studies of civil societies are quite popular. I argue that it is analytically problematic to talk about social orders as ‘civil’ without a consciousness of the history of the concept’s or concepts’ use, and accounting for how and why it transforms over time. French Civilization in the mid 1800s, operationalized as a centralizing process of incorporation which draws people and territory into that civil order (whether founded on contract or Christianity), was by design an envelopment of local custom and particularity through the extension of Statist regimes of sovereignty and legality. As the following chapters will show, colonial designs do not over-determine outcomes, and administrative intentions matter but are not the whole story of how and why policies are applied in a particular way—or why they fail. What is produced in New Caledonia through French State interventions starting in 1843 is today’s social world structured into customary and civil units, the relationships between these units ordered by the tropes and categories of the official civilization process—including the ways Catholic and Protestant religious missions were enveloped by this process. As I will show below, disagreements over the foundations of civilization did indeed flare up between French officials on the island over how this incorporation should proceed—whether indigenous peoples had standing to enter into land sale contracts for example, or would be subject to the same level of taxation as everyone else. As ideal types of foundational agencies of French civilization as variously conceived, and governmentally empowered in specific eras, I present the following metropole-derived ideal-types and eras of French Civilization which will

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be recognizable in the following chapters, manifest in policies enacted in New Caledonia under various regimes: 1) Aristocratic: the family is the agent of French Civilization. Ancien Regime to 1789; Bourbon restoration 1814-1830, July Monarchy 1830-48 2) Republic: the French people are the agents of French Civilization; First Republic 1792-1804; Second Republic 1848-52, Third Republic 1871-1939 3) Napoleonic: the Great Man and legislator is the agent of French Civilization; Emperor Napoleon I 1804-1814; Emperor Napoleon III 1852-1870 4) Catholic: the Roman Church and its clergy are the agents of French Civilization: Guizot’s ministry in the later days of the July Monarchy: 1838-1848 5) Ministeric: The State and its Administrators are the agents of French Civilization. Durkheim, Mauss, and their students in education and ministerial positions. 6) Protestant: Each Customary Society provides the basis for its own Civilization. Siegfried, Feillet, Mauss, Leenhardt, and students from the Institute of Ethnology: Lenormand. In conclusion, giving an historical context to “civilization” and not taking it for granted gives a contextual reading to not only colonization and its civilizing missions, but to decolonization and other processes of territorial dis-incorporation and projects of liberal statecraft more generally. After 1947 the possibility was created for colonial places like New Caledonia to ascribe to multiple French Civilizations at once, through autonomous institutions for local governance, manifest by a plurality of organic laws with overlapping jurisdictions and overlapping constitutions. These later projects remain part of a “civilizations” framework, even if not often described in civilizational terms. What I mean by this is as follows: as the process of liberal and liberal derived (its dialectic alternatives) extension and incorporation of New Caledonia into France proceeded, it recognized and defined “clans and tribes” as groups outside civil society. The process also cast families and kinship as more generally not germane to civil life. What happened in New 73

Caledonia in the way the Noumea Accords were written following a period of ethnonational conflict over independence from France is effectively an example of agents of a liberalist form of governance finding themselves ill equipped to deal with liberalism’s own creations. By dialectically opposing itself to governance by kinship and rights by descent, the liberal French State has reified everyday quotidian kinship at home in France and institutionalized the familial domain. Kinship thereby cannot be a solution to political problems of civil concern, since it is cast as an interest opposed to civil society and any political role for families is narrated as though it is an aspect which belongs to the past history of the pre-modern world of kings, aristocrats, chiefs, tribes, and clans. Instead, by having exiled kinship and family from the domain of legitimate public participation and discourse dealing with politics and government, the liberal framework prohibits the possible futures for a New Caledonian government which might successfully engage a very viable alternative to ethno-nationalism: not a monarchical state like that of the past, not a republican state like that of France, and not an ethno-national state that usually follows independence. Instead a kinship state is possible, and appears to exist in New Caledonia within its customary institutions. As defined for New Caledonia today under its Organic Law of 1998 the island’s new constitution in the making must head-on engage the colonial legacies of juridical conventions and administrative decrees that distinguish between liberal civil and indigenous customary collectivities as essentially different types of societies and socialities. Hence the historical narrative of this dissertation deals with two nominally distinct but intertwined processes of incorporation: civilizations and constitutions in the French South Pacific. This dissertation builds the “civilizations” argument through historical materials, setting the stage for a more robust 74

treatment of the “constitutions” which comes after 1998, which warrants a more detailed treatment in future versions of this manuscript. I can now begin my ethnology of the political history of French sovereignty in New Caledonia.

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CHAPTER 2 PROTECTIONS (1836-1843)

Pre-histories of the French Presence in New Caledonia The story of the “prise de possession” the taking of possession of New Caledonia by France usually begins in 1853, when French sovereignty was officially and durably established over the island. I will start instead with trying to contextualize an earlier attempt at incorporation of New Caledonia by the French state on New Year’s Eve 1843, by bringing in materials about French state and expansions elsewhere in the Pacific that are germane to this particular case of incorporation—without which many of its peculiar details would remain opaque. The first of these deals with the question of the relationship between Catholic missionaries and the French state: I argue materials from other times and other places shed light on the motives and process of the 1843 as well as the 1853 processes of incorporation. This helps highlight the “theological” tenor of colonial expansion of the French in the Pacific under the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe (1830-1848), allowing for a better understanding of how Catholic religion situates in colonial expansions in the Pacific on the clergy’s own terms, but also as a mutual relationship encouraged by Minister Francois Guizot whose civilization concepts I briefly presented in chapter one. This chapter presents a swath of time from the 1830s to 1843, dealing with material from France and the Pacific islands of Nuka-Hiva, Tahiti, Oahu, Wallis, Futuna, New Zealand and Australia. 76

This chapter supplies everything needed to contextualize the 1843 extension of French protection over New Caledonia, which I will get to in chapter three. Developing a perspective on French sovereignty which collects data from various Pacific contexts, this chapter offers a nuanced understanding of contemporary French politics in the metropole, Franco-British relations generally and in the Pacific in particular, giving a more complete understanding of the motives and processual nuance of actual interventions and interactions on the ground in New Caledonia which begin in 1843. This chapter argues that without first understanding Bishop Pompallier’s behavior at the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 in New Zealand, Bishop Douarre’s behavior at Balade in 1843 in New Caledonia is thoroughly less intelligible. Similarly, without understanding the problems French priests faced in Hawaii as landowners in conflict with French settlers, the decision of Bishop Douarre to adopt and name local children from the area around Balade as the heirs of the mission of New Caledonia might seem arbitrarily motivated—and not a solution to a recurrent land problem faced by French Catholic clergy after 1789 due to laws which forbade them from holding church lands in their own name. We will get to the issue of why French law would apply in Oahu in a moment; first I need to explain the relationship of religion and government in France as an issue of “civilization.”

The Vicariate of the Western Pacific: French Marists and the French State Expedition to New Zealand (1836-1838) As a brief introduction to the status of Pacific islands under International Law in the 1830s, although Captain James Cook is given the credit of discovering New Caledonia in 1774, having disembarked in the north at Balade, and given the island its name, the island was not automatically English. As in New Zealand to the south, where Abel Tasman disembarked in 77

1642 and Cook had a lengthy stay in 1769, discovery and even extended occupation of Pacific islands did not make them automatically part of discoverers’ sovereign nations or constitute an extension of formal sovereign rights and responsibilities over the island and its people. Even as Governor Hobson claimed New Zealand for the British crown, published on the 21st of May 1840 “by right of discovery”, officials in England immediately backed away from this claim of legitimacy, since it failed to signify in International Law. Law makers instead pointed to more contemporary justifications—such as actual long-term residence by Britons—but the claim had already been published and was ready to be attacked. François Guizot spoke on the subject of Hobson’s annexation of New Zealand in the Parisian Chamber of Deputies where he was concurrently French Foreign Minister. He declared, “This method of taking possession [by right of discovery] has never had any serious consequence. It could not be regarded as having constituted rights, and that is so true that the English Government has been the first to proclaim it [as not having constituted rights]”(Guizot quoted in Buick 1936:297). Instead of discovery, New Zealand became officially British by the signing and publication of the treaty of Waitangi of 1840, and installation of an official governor as an extension of the jurisdiction of British laws over the numerous indigenous Maori chiefs whose consent was specifically sought, and nominally attained, through their signatures on the Treaty. Faced with this, the French government relented despite its own significant interests in New Zealand. As suggested by Guizot’s objection to the content of Governor Hobson’s claim to New Zealand, as a member of French government he already had designs for the southwestern Pacific. A Catholic missionary by the name of Bishop Pompallier in 1836 was sent to establish in New 78

Zealand the headquarters of the Vicariate of Western Oceania which he achieved in 1838. His installation was followed in 1839 by a brief-lived French colonial company which was supposed to bring permanent French settlers to this still nominally independent country. The connections between the mission project, the new colonial company, and other projects undertaken with the support of the government of King Louis Philippe under the direction of Guizot sets the stage for understanding French expansions into the Pacific in the period generally. I will first outline the history of Bishop Pompallier’s implantation in the South Pacific as a means of demonstrating the interpenetrations of French State and French Catholicism, how their interests increasingly coincided during the 1840s, and how agents of Church and State differently conceived of “civilization” in their explicit policies and correspondence. This material highlights an explicit French Catholic perspective that “civilization” is rooted in Christian progress (as hypothesized and supported by Guizot), yet was sometimes grudgingly hostile towards civil government domains and the function of law making and legislation in particular. The priests nonetheless often argue civil governments are supposed to protect their practice of religion under liberal regimes of toleration. Bishop Pompallier left France for the South Seas in 1836 at the age of 35. He held funds from the Marist Fathers of the Society of Mary for the Propagation of the Faith which had recently been recognized by the Vatican. He held a mandate from Pope Gregory XVI to establish a new Vicariate in the Western Pacific Ocean with headquarters based in New Zealand. Although the July Monarchy of 1830 was initially considered driven by anti-clericalism (as a political overturn of the restored Bourbon monarchy, and tending towards a separation of church and state, and increased parliamentary powers and other forms of liberalist governance), the policies of successive ministerial governments under the July Monarchy were increasingly 79

warm to Catholicism and missionization efforts (Jore 1959:336). In this climate, before leaving France, Bishop Pompallier “was afforded an opportunity to visit King Louis Philippe and Queen Marie Amélie who interested themselves in the mission and promised their royal protection” (Cole 1957: 27). What might be described as the “first act” of intervention explicitly and overtly in favor of catholic missions occurred as a result of this 1836 meeting of Pompallier and the royal couple (Jore 1959:320). It was already acknowledged that by conventions of extraterritoriality European states could use military force to protect their citizens while abroad: battleships could be conjured up for the ostensible defense of a citizen’s interests and property in unincorporated or independent islands in the insular pacific (Brooke describes this as the “call a battleship” period). However, not all citizens had equal standing to conjure up state forces to defend their interest. At the 1836 meeting with the King and Queen, Pompallier was explicitly promised “protection” for the mission and offered other material support in writing. This support was manifest in a 1500 franc draft order from the sovereign (per Lilian Keys), and/or 3000 francs from the Minister of Justice and Cults (per Jore 1959:341). Lillian Keys published a translation the text of a letter of introduction carried by Pompallier, addressed to the Commanders of the French Squadron in the “Southern Ocean, Valparaiso” dated 24th September 1836: This letter will be handed to you by his Lordship [Monsignor] François Pompallier, Bishop of Maronea1, Vicar Apostolic of the Western Islands of the Pacific who, in the course of his august mission, may often perhaps require the support and good services of the ships of state. I request you to receive this prelate with the honours and the attention due to his office and his person, and I most particularly desire [that] you seize every opportunity of giving him the assistance which his situation may require and which yours 1

“Maronea, in Rhodope, Thrace, on the borders of the Aegean Sea” (Keys 1957:45).

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will enable you to afford. You will give similar instructions to the commanders of ships under your orders. I shall witness with pleasure all that they and yourself may do to be useful to his Lordship the Bishop of Maronea. [signed] Vice-Admiral Rosamel, Minister of Navy and the Colonies. (Keys 1957:49) Pompallier was given this and other letters of introduction to French naval Captains in South America and the Pacific, which offered an unprecedented explicit support of the regime for Catholic expansion. Pompallier also carried a letter from the French government to the presumed “King of New Zealand” a certain Baron de Thierry—a curious aristocrat, variously presented and perceived as English or French or other— who had informed the British and French governments in 1831 of his intention to travel to the South Pacific and establish his independent sovereignty in New Zealand on 40,000 hectares purchased from indigenous Maori (Keys 1957:48-49). The French government had in 1836 appointed the Baron as French Consul to New Zealand and made plans to invest “one million francs” in his project (Buick 1928:39). In this letter carried by Pompallier, the Baron was presumed to have made himself the head of civil and state government by the time the mission arrived. With the support of the Vatican and France (increasingly described in this era as the “Eldest Daughter of the Church”), Pompallier was accompanied to the South Pacific by four Marist priests and three catechists, including Father Bataillon and Father Chanel whose later acts make them worth special mention. On the 24th of December 1836 they sailed westward from the port of Le Havre in France having contracted passage on a privately owned vessel the Delphine (Pompallier 1888:13), which took them to Tenerife, around the Cape Horn to Valparaiso in independent Chile, whose very independence allowed it to be a center for the Atlantic-Pacific trade before the opening of the Panama Canal in 1914. For lack of ships, despite their letters it 81

took two months of efforts in Valparaiso before the party gained paid passage on an Americancaptained ship the Europa which took them first to the Gambiers, and then on to Tahiti. In Tahiti Pompallier got off the boat and met with Queen Pomare and the American Consul, Mr. Jacques-Antoine Moerenhout—whom Keys inaccurately describes as “a Catholic of Dutch extraction”(Keys 1957:60). Indeed Moerenhout was the American Consul to Tahiti, via an appointment made by Secretary of State John Forsythe—apparently based on Moerenhout’s business credentials and friendship with the Ambassador of Belgium to Washington D.C. with little consideration as to his actual citizenship 2 (De Deckker 1997:166). Moerenhout can be more fully described a French citizen born in what would later become Belgium, who fought in the Napoleonic wars from the age of 15 (De Deckker 1997:24-27). Moerenhout decided to help his fellow French Catholics secure timely and direct passage to their destinations, for a price. He rented his own "goélette" a Tahiti-built 60-ton schooner called the Raiatea, on a month-to-month basis for 400 piasters.3 Moerenhout “gave his permission” in his capacity as American consul and owner of the boat for Pompallier to land the ship wherever he wished (Keys 1957: 60). Sailing on a vessel owned by an official of the United States, Moerenhout arguably gave the French Catholic travelers rights to disembark in places they otherwise might not be welcome. Perhaps implausibly, Pompallier claims that the boat "had no cannons"(Pompallier 1888:18). 2

Moerenhout's career offers additional details about the political shape of the Pacific in the 1830s and 1840s. In 1845 Guizot named him French consul to Monterey, California (De Deckker 1997:318), which came under semiofficial U.S. control only in 1846. Moerenhout died and was buried in 1879 as French vice-consul to the county of Los Angeles. If we return to Eugen Weber’s comment above (i.e. Chapter One), if being French meant being ruled by French Officials, Moerenhout is an excellent example of the elasticity of membership in official Frenchness and official Americanness in Oceanic places in the mid 1800s. 3

"Piaster" is here a French term for the Spanish Dollar/Mexican Peso and its associated silver currencies (for instance from the Philippine islands).

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They sailed from Tahiti for twenty days arriving in Vavua in the Tongan group. Tonga was their first landfall within Pompallier’s huge domain of the Vicariate of the Western Pacific—which covered everything east of Australia and west of 158 degrees west longitude (the Vicariate of the Eastern Pacific, covered everything East of 158 degrees west4 was assigned to Bishop Rouchouze of the Picpus Fathers in 1833, although the order had been present in Oahu since 1827 as the Apostolic Prefecture of the Sandwich Islands [de Deckker 1997:173]). Tonga was the first island within this domain, and to their dismay it had already been heavily inundated by Methodist and Wesleyan Protestantism from the Eastern seaboard of the United States. Regardless, they wished to mark the occasion of landfall on their assigned dominion. After meeting a French sailor working as a black smith, who twelve years earlier had been accused of attempted mutiny against French Admiral Dumont d’Urville in the 1820s (see Keys 1957 versus Pompallier 1888:17), he led the group to a small hill on Vavua where they buried some religious items while chanting Ave Maris Stella. Keys states, “Thus they took spiritual possession of the first corner of the vicariate of Western Oceania in the name of Mary” (Keys 1957:63). As Keys often directly translated Pompallier’s writing from French without placing his words in quotes, this strikes me as his own choice of words: he saw himself taking spiritual possession of roughly 1/6 of the earth’s surface in a single act. Pompallier’s published writings say that the Catholics were prevented from leaving members of their party in Tonga to establish a mission because of the close relationship between two protestant missionaries and the Tongan King, George Tupou I. After a sojourn of less than four days, the King informed the group, through an interpreter, that their mission could not stay 4

"In longitude from the Society Islands, to the furthest islands of Polynesia to the west [i.e. Melanesia] excepting such as were already constituted under canonical authority [i.e. Sydney, Australia; Guam]"(Pompallier 1888:11).

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any longer and none of the priests could remain even for what Pompallier calls the "purely civil matter" (as opposed to an evangelical or religious matter) of warehousing supplies (Pompallier 1888:17). Pompallier later filed a complaint via the French government over the event on the basis of religious intolerance, which was followed up by a French warship visit in 1842, after which time Catholic missionaries were able to establish a permanent presence in Tonga. The Catholics learned from an American trader Thomas Boog that to the Northwest of Tonga—on Wallis Island—protestant missionary efforts had recently been violently repelled (Keys 1957:62), although other European and American foreigners regularly resided on the island, and trade with outsiders was otherwise common. Wallis then immediately appealed to Pompallier as the next landfall for the Raiatea since there would be no Protestants there. Wallisians and Tongans at this time had a tumultuous relationship. Wallis Island had been settled by Tongans in the 12th century.5 The island was integrated into the Tongan sphere as a tribute-giving area for three hundred years until the 15th century, when warriors attempting to claim tribute were successfully repelled. When King George Tupou I of Tonga was baptized by Wesleyan missionaries in 1831 he arguably “found in the Protestant religion a powerful means of re-conquering the former dependencies of the Tongan empire” (Talatini 2004:147). In 1835, Tongans trained as Protestant "teachers" made an attempt to retake Wallis Island through methods which apparently included armed conversion. Over fifty of King George Tupou’s teachers were killed on the order of the supreme Wallisian chief, which marked the start of an extended period of skirmishes referred to today as the Niua War (Talatini 2004:163; Roux 1995:65-67). 5

Sources I have consulted contradict each other on the details of whether or not Wallis Island was uninhabited at the time of Tongan colonization.

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In this context of two years of ongoing hostilities between Wallis and Tonga, the Marist Fathers of the Catholic Church disembarked in Wallis from the Raiatea in 1837 in perhaps uniquely favorable conditions. They found a population not merely free from any successful Christian installation, but one that was decidedly anti-Tongan and anti-Wesleyan. Once the Supreme Chief of Wallis was convinced of their non-Protestantism (Pompallier 1888:21), he was happy to find a seemingly powerful outside ally with similar enemies (Talatini 2004: 148; Roux 1995:45). Thomas Boog, who stated he knew both Wallisian and Futunan “language(s)” served as the priests’ interpreter—even as none of the priests themselves were yet capable of speaking English. While Cole attributes the success of the mission’s implantation to Bishop Pompallier’s “remarkable courage when threatened by a party of Wallis natives”(Cole 1957:28), Lillian Keys’ relatively full-bodied presentation of archival and personal materials written by Pompallier and the others shows that in addition to the fortuitous political circumstances which helped the Marist cast themselves as friends with a common enemy, the first meeting with the Bishop and the Supreme Chief of Wallis was made possible by persons like their American interpreter Thomas Boog, plus a Wallis islander who was an earlier acquaintance of Captain Stokes of the Raiatea. Many other Wallisians knew some English from interacting with sailors and beachcombers who were long-term residents of Wallis. Among the latter, there happened be a French beachcomber living on Wallis when the Priests arrived (Keys 1957:64). This was the mediated context of their first contact with the residents of Wallis. Bishop Pompallier left Father Bataillon and Brother Joseph with a few hundred francs, plus instruments for trade, agricultural work, and mass necessary to support them for nine months (Keys 1957:69). They thereby established the first Catholic Mission station in the 85

Vicariate of the Western Pacific authorized by the consent of the local Polynesian authorities and without a show of force or arms: recall that Pompallier pointedly tells his readers that the Raiatea is unarmed. The Raiatea left Wallis and sailed 150 kilometers to the west to Futuna, and deposited Father Pierre Chanel under similar circumstances in charge of a similarly small mission station. They had the notable assistance of a chief, Sam Keletoni, who had worked for five years on an Australian whaling ship (Keys 1957:70). Bishop Pompallier, father Servant and a remaining catechist then continued on their journey to New Zealand, landing first in Sydney Australia. The Sydney-based Archbishop Polding transferred to Pompallier a piece of land in New Zealand which had been gifted to his Vicariate by a resident of Australia (Pompallier 1888:33; Keys 1957). The group sailed on to New Zealand, where they arrived in 1838. The Raiatea was then returned to Moerenhout.

Civil Society and Christian Civilization in New Zealand 1838-1840: Bishop Pompallier and the protection of “custom” at Waitangi The Marist were relative latecomers to New Zealand, and were initially housed in the care of an Irish timber merchant. The Church Missionary Society (hereafter CMS) of England had established a missionary presence in the 1810s by lay missionaries. In 1820 the CMS brought a Maori named Hongi to Cambridge to complete the “first Maori dictionary” (Keys 1957:83). It was through conversations in England with Hongi that Baron de Thierry hatched his plan to become King of New Zealand, of which he took care to inform the governments of France and England in 1831. In 1833 the British Colonial Office appointed James Busby as the local British Resident to New Zealand. He actively sought to preemptively obstruct de Thierry’s 86

ambitions, to which ends in 1835 he organized a thirty-five member “Confederation of [Maori] Chiefs” who signed a document entitled the “Declaration of Independence of New Zealand” which was intended by Busby to thwart the Baron as well as anyone else with similar royal aspirations for New Zealand. The Baron himself did not arrive in New Zealand until 1837. Instead of 40,000 hectares and becoming King, he only managed to secure 300 acres (i.e. 121 hectares). Pompallier planned to rely on Baron de Thierry’s support and protection when they arrived in 1838. Pompallier met with Baron de Thierry soon after arriving in New Zealand, and presented him with the letters of introduction from King Louis-Philippe which addressed the Baron as the "King of New Zealand." Pompallier writes of that meeting: M. le Baron m’a comblé de civilités et d’honnêtetés en m’offrant des services obligeants; il a soutenu avec énergie les principes de justice et de civilization en ma faveur, quoiqu’il soit protestant de religion. Mais on me dit en ce pays qu’on n’a pas beaucoup d’égards aux actes qui eminent de lui-même. (Pompallier to Director of Colonies Saint-Hiliare March 20 1838 in Besson 1924:119-120) In other words, although British sovereignty had not yet been formally extended to New Zealand, the sovereign authority of Baron de Thierry6 was not establishable in any real sense, and his presence and their official letters to him offered no special help to the missionaries7. Absent this protection, Pompallier was apparently continually concerned about what he calls "Protestant and civil intolerance," which he claims circulated in New Zealand as "rumors" against him and his mission (Pompallier 1888: 32, 40). These rumors of intolerance lead him to 6

Nor was Baron Thierry's royal sovereignty ‘establishable’ in Nuka-Hiva where in passage in 1835 he named himself king and recognized an islander as his tributary lord to rule in his stead(see Besson 1924:118). 7

A similar situation presented a group of French Picpus missionaries who arrived in Honolulu in 1827 expecting protection “for our little colony” from a certain Frenchman named Jean B. Rives who was in no practical position to act as a sovereign/civil protector (Blue 1933:90). This earlier French project was sidelined by the regime change of the 1830 July monarchy and its official early anti-clerical policies.

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have the letter of protection he received in Paris from French Naval Minister Rosamel (see above) published in the papers of New Holland (i.e. Sydney, Australia). In response a French warship, the corvette Heroine commanded by Captain Cecile, made a call at New Zealand in the Bishop’s defense, and he promised use of artillery and sailors to defend Pompallier as a "prelate who was a French subject" against other Europeans, of whom he promises to "give them a lesson in civilization" if they continue to be a problem(Pompallier 1888:40). During Commander Cecile’s sojourn, the ship fired its guns in salute when Pompallier left the Ship, mass was held aboard in a very public manner, and although Pompallier does not mention it in his own narrative account, evidence suggests he henceforth flew a French flag over the mission from 1838 until British annexation in 1840 (Keys 1957:378). Although the French Flag flew at Pompallier’s mission it did not constitute what I would call a legitimable sovereign claim any more than Baron de Thierry’s. Even from the positioned perspective of François Guizot which I mentioned earlier in this chapter, New Zealand was not suddenly made British when governor Hobson arrived in 1840 and organized the Treaty of Waitangi (although this might be a hindsight apologist voice Guizot adopts for his memoires). Guizot seems of the opinion that protestant missionaries who had lived on the island for years, among other established British families, constituted a legitimate precursor to annexation by a foreign state—not the hoisting of flags and declarations and cannon shot. When Captain Hobson and his staff organized British annexation in 1840, they apparently made special efforts to include Bishop Pompallier in the process of writing and presenting the Treaty of Waitangi to the Maori of New Zealand (Keys 1957:123). On the morning of February 6th Hobson met with several hundred Maori, the Wesleyan and CMS missionaries, and Bishop Pompallier who was accompanied by Priest Catherin Servant 88

(O’Meeghan 1992:44). Pompallier apparently interrupted the procedure by making a request of Hobson, after Henry William had already read the document out loud, but before any signatures could be affixed (Orange 2004:32). Official notes are apparently wanting as to precisely what Pompallier said, and I intuit that the precise terms used in this exchange are important to apprehend. Importantly, Pompallier apparently did not explicitly use the term “custom” at any point in this request, even though it was due to his intervention that the protection of Maori custom now is considered an official part of the treaty. Pompallier spoke in English—which he had learned during his four years of travels in the Anglo-dominated Pacific and two years of residence in New Zealand. Lindsay Buick, who was no fan of Pompallier or Catholicism in New Zealand, writes in 1936 that “Bishop Pompallier leaned over to the Governor and asked that the natives might be informed that all who should join the Catholic Church should have the protection of the British Government”(Buick 1936:152). Lillian Key writes favorably about the Bishop, and reports the exchange in somewhat different terms saying, “[Pompallier] asked Captain Hobson to make known to all the people the principles of European Civilization, obtaining in Great Britain, which would guarantee free and equal protection to the Catholic as to every other religion in New Zealand”(Keys 1957:127). Hers is verbatim taken from Pompallier's own memoirs of the event: I addressed Captain Hobson, begging him to make known to all the principles of European Civilization which pertain in Great Britain and which would guarantee free and equal protection to the Catholics as to every other religion in New Zealand. (Pompallier 1888:63) Claudia Orange, perhaps the most accurate gloss of words actually uttered that day says, “Pompallier asked Hobson for a public assurance that religion in New Zealand would not be interfered with, that ‘free toleration’ would be allowed in ‘matters of faith’ ”(Orange 2004:32). 89

“Toleration” is a key term of liberal government in this era, a principle to protect religion from civil intervention, and is a recurrent trope in the writing of Pompallier, Guizot, and others: this is something Catholic priests often demanded of civil governments and took as a measure of their legitimacy. This was clearly Pompallier’s motive, or rather one component of his motives. Hobson agreed to Pompallier’s request for “tolerance” and directed the CMS missionary Henry Williams8 to write and translate a statement that “all creeds alike” would receive his government’s protection (Orange 2004:32). Buick and Keys give identical wordings for the statement produced by Williams: The governor wishes you to understand that all the Maoris who shall join the Church of England, who shall join the Wesleyans, who shall join the Pikopo [Picpus], or Church of Rome, and those who retain their Maori practices shall have the protection of the British Government (Keys 1957:127; Buick 1936:153 italics added). Bishop Pompallier accepted the statement, saying, “Oh yes, that will do very well”(Keys 1957:127; Buick 1936:153). Pompallier promptly departed from the proceedings on the grounds that he did not want to be further involved in what he considered "political matters" or civil politics outside his religious vocation. The statement penned by Williams was then translated into Maori and read by Williams to everyone assembled at the meeting. William’s statement was written down and is now standardly re-translated from Maori into English as follows: The Governor says that the several faiths (beliefs) of England, of the Wesleyans, of Rome, and also the Maori custom shall alike be protected by him. (Orange 2004:32; italics added [note minor variation from Law Commission 2001:73])

8

Williams reports he strongly disagreed with this directive, and produced a more detailed statement in English than requested, which explicitly named the creeds that would be protected, in which he claims he intentionally sought to elide Roman Catholicism with “heathen practices” via the careful wording.

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After this final statement was read aloud by Williams, the Maori chiefs present at the tent were called to sign the treaty. This final spoken statement is called the “unwritten fourth article” or “protocol” of the Treaty of Waitangi in which “The imperial consul [Hobson] explicitly guaranteed protection of ritenga Maori, Maori custom” (Law Commission 2001:73). This is not exactly what happened textually. The term “Maori practices” from the first text is rendered in translation as ritenga Maori and thenceforth regularly cast back into English as “Maori custom” as shown in the second text. “Custom” in this context was the English gloss to describe all things culturally Maori seen from a British perspective. For example an 1840 dispatch from Lord Russell to Hobson encourages him to become familiar with “native custom” relative to land tenure and stewardship. Additionally, as the Treaty and copies of it circulated for additional signatures after Waitangi, a missionary named George Clark was delegated the task of assuring to Maori that their “native customs would not be infringed” (quoted in Law Commission 2001:19, 73). The treaty language of “Maori Custom” is thereby attributed to Pompallier’s intervention, but Protestant accounts contemporary with the treaty vehemently and scornfully argue that this was not Pompallier’s intent. This is an upset worth understanding: it deals with the legitimacy of liberal civil governments as measured by their responsibility to protect religious sects. . Pompallier later in life claims to have ensured religious freedom to the people of New Zealand as a whole. Buick counters that Pompallier “plumes himself” with such a claim, and argues that the British Government would have automatically protected religious diversity (Buick 1936:154). Lilian Keys comes to the defense of the substance of Pompallier’s contribution, and points out

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that “toleration” was not necessarily guaranteed by British government as shown in the later example of Niue (Keys 1957:127). All of this sectarian banter, sporadic and venomous from 1840 to the 1960s, shows that the issue of religious freedom defined a civil battleground between Protestant and Catholic sects. According to Claudia Orange, identifying Pompallier as the origin of the recognition of Maori Custom is flawed, since “The official recognition seemingly given Maori custom should be seen for what it was—an inclusion arising from sectarian jealousy”(Orange 1987:53). Orange and others cite Williams’ later writing in which he says his intent of inserting ritenga Maori in the passage was made with “the hope” that Catholicism would be associated with “heathen practices” through tricky word-plays of translation (O’Meeghan 1992:44). If so, why not just say so explicitly? It seems a strangely complex scheme for Williams to devise off the cusp: Catholicism would be associated with heathenism in an obscure translation to Maori? Williams seems to protest too much. In my analysis, Orange and O’Meeghan do an excellent job presenting the motives, intentions and hindsight revisions of Williams, Colenso and the other protestant missionaries involved in the treaty process—but their reading of Pompallier is wanting and they tend to voice his critic’s version of the authentic account. Their interpretation that protection of Maori “custom” was an accident of an intent to protect “religion” ignores the tight relationship Pompallier and the Marists seemed to believe existed between indigenous custom and Catholicism. As established elsewhere in the Pacific under Pompallier’s Vicariate in places under protection of French sovereignty and beyond the reach of New Zealand protestant eyes, Catholic Religion and island custom are thoroughly entwined entities. 92

For Pompallier, they are connected inversely to the way that religion and civil government must be separated. A tight relationship between the Catholic Church and indigenous Custom was codified in written form in the Code of Wallis put down on paper by Monsignor Bataillon in 1870 (for the code see Rensch 1981). This code is a legacy of Pompallier’s models for legitimate religious government of islanders, which sees indigenous Custom and Catholicism elided together in an the act of “civilization” through conversion. Claire Laux describes the civil-religious relationship instituted in Catholic theocracies in the Pacific in the 1830s and 1840s as "une concurrence, plus un dédoublement entre pouvoirs civils et religieux, et cette fois [as opposed to the outcome in Europe], au bénéfice des seconds"(Laux 2000:221). Exemplifying this perspective, Pompallier writes of the Gambier islands during his passage of 1837 that he is impressed that Picpus missionary efforts there had rendered the people happy "with few civil laws"(quoted in Laux 2000:152). His assistant at the Treaty of Waitangi, Father Catherin Servant writes in 1847 an explicit statement describing Futunans five years after their island-wide conversion to Catholicism in terms of an explicitly anti-civil conception of “true civilization” as founded in Christianity rather than liberal civil government: Sans loi, sans tribunal et sans procès, les Futuniens vivaient heureux et paisibles, sous l'influence seule de la religion...Où pourrait-on admirer une vraie civilisation sans le Christianisme? Oui la religion seule est capable de former une société d'hommes heureux. (Servant to Colin quoted in Laux 2000:152 italics added) Here, Servant tells us that "true civilization" by his measure is shown in the results of Christianization, which (he seems to imply) others in France and Europe might mistakenly assume would be the happy effect of good civil laws. In their recurrent themes, this is recognizably the same species of argument François Guizot deploys 93

against Gibbon in his rewriting of The History (as I briefly mentioned in chapter one): Christianity is the true foundation of civilization, not Roman civil law. Every instance in which Pompallier and the Marist Fathers describe “civil” governments and “civil” institutions or protections (and there are many examples of this in Tahiti, Tonga, and New Zealand), it is always as the antithesis of the Christian civilization they seek to extend to the Pacific. The perhaps expected language about a barbarous savage “other” only figures anecdotally in these Marist letters, whereas the civil secular administrators they encounter are a much more full bodied contrasts to “civilization” in Marist thought and practice. Echoing the sentiment of similitude Michel de Montaigne holds towards the cannibals and difference toward his own well dressed countrymen, these Priests contrast themselves more readily with other Europeans than with indigenous islanders: and the measure of difference is explicitly a lack of “civilization” among the civils. I conclude that for Pompallier and the Marists, indigenous and religious domains are set together in interests and opposed to the civil spheres of government under the European State system. The British sense of “custom” I outlined above evidently does not map perfectly onto the French word coutume whose historical baggage is in part presented in Chapter One. Even as the two words are co-present in the Pacific, and appear to denote the same thing, they are too often assumed to carry identical meanings. This disjuncture should be kept in mind in all Pacific contexts where French use of “custom” is encountered. Returning to the happy effects of Christian civilization, Father Servant does not mention that the full and complete conversion of Futuna in 1842 which he celebrates was achieved under the gun of the French warship L'Embuscade sent to avenge the 1841 bludgeoning death of Father 94

Chanel. The ship’s visit was entailed by the formal (if briefly lived) extension of French sovereign protection over the island to protect the interests of the Marist mission. This and other evidence suggests that Bishop Pompallier, and Fathers Colin, Servant, Viard and the other Marists present in the Pacific in the vicariate’s early years of the 1830s and 1840s subscribe to an understanding of European civilization as an order in which the French State should have as its vocation the protection of religious domains from civil domains. In my reading, the indigenous populations that Pompallier and the Marists see as their subjects are to be incorporated fully into French Christian Civilization—and protected from French Civil Civilization and that of other secular liberal states like Britain. From their perspective it goes without saying that the protection of Roman Catholicism is effectively the protection of custom as a domain outside civil jurisdiction. The shape of the social world which the Marists instituted in all Catholic places in the Pacific where French sovereignty gave them the agency to do so reflects an understanding that indigenous and religious interests are tightly linked if not identical and co-terminus. Customary societies in French Pacific places were ultimately codified and defined to include Catholicism, and both formally existed in a domain separate and protected from the colonial civil governments of the officially secular and liberal French State. Of particular interest that clarifies how Pompallier thought civil and religious domains should be organized, after eight years in New Zealand and ten years after he was assigned the vicariate, Pompallier traveled to Rome in 1846 and reported to the Holy See, "an exhaustive essay on the Divine right of bishops to govern the flock that has been committed to their care,9

9

Recalling Gibbon’s words, these Vicariates might appear as small autonomous Republics, with Bishops as their presidents (Gibbon 2004).

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and to receive the obedience of the clergy, both secular and regular, who are engaged in the care of souls in his diocese"(Luck 1888:6). His model of church as local government, under a sovereign State’s protection, seems to be the project he was undertaking in the conversion or in his words “civilization” of Pacific islanders. In this form they would govern and administer the natives via laws of custom cum the laws of Christianity—a stridently anti-liberal agenda with no room for principles of religious tolerance. Even if his project proposed in the essay was not approved by the Vatican, and that it led to a schism with Father Colin as the Lyon-based head of the Marists, I now know how these missionaries thought they should position themselves relative to the French state up to the early 1840s and all other civil governments they might encounter: the bishops have a divine right to govern their flock and civil government is illegitimate and only good to the extent that it offers protections against intolerance. What then was the French State’s position relative to the Catholic missionaries?

Applying Guizot's Civilization concept: Extending French Sovereignty and Catholicism in the Pacific As I mentioned above, Francois Guizot objected officially to the British annexation of New Zealand, but he saw neither a basis for “legitimate reclamations” nor any utility in challenging the British annexation. Instead he concluded, “Il fallait cherecher ailleus qu'a la Nouvelle-Zeland l'establissement que nous désirions dans l'Ocean Pacifique”(Guizot 2002 vol. XIII: 41). What exactly was it that Guizot declares "nous desirions" that we French desire? Matt Matsuda argues that it is a policy which seeks points d’appui, points of strategic pressure, revitalization, and regional control; manifest as limited naval outposts that could control trade

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and commerce expeditiously rather than through expansive and expensive colonial territories (Matsuda 2005; compare with U.S. Admiral Mahan’s Plan). Guizot as Foreign Minister then acted on a proposition brought forward by Captain Dupetit-Thouars who had recently return from a voyage to the Marquesas Islands. In agreement with the Minister for the Marine and Colonies Duperré, who favored acquisition of colonial territories, Guizot authorized Dupetit-Thouars to incorporate into France those Polynesian islands he had recently visited. Again, he was ordered to do so since New Zealand had already been taken out from under them despite the company settlement project of 1839, the presence of French Catholic missionaries since 1838, and the agreement with the presumed “King” of New Zealand Baron de Thierry since the mid 1830s. On October 15th 1841 Minister Duperré promoted Dupetit-Thouars to contre-amiral with command over Naval Forces in South America, and issued him instructions to establish French “sovereignty” on the small island of Nuka-Hiva in the Marquesas archipelago as a revitalization point for French ships.10 Guizot states in later writing that Marquesas also could become a point of deportation outside the territory of the kingdom as provided for “depuis longtemps” under the Penal Code (Guizot 2002 vol. XIII:42). Duperré noted his opinion that “the inhabitants of these islands, among whom French [Picpus] missionaries have resided for several years, without a doubt will not pose any serious obstacle to our establishment/settlement”(Duperré to DupetitThouars in Guizot 2002 vol. XIII:198). Dupetit-Thouars was dispatched from France to assume command over a squadron of seven warships and two thousand sailors (De Deckker 1997:241). The official form of possession

10

It is unclear to me if this is a hindsight justification, or a motive that reflects intentions in historical context.

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was as an extension of a "protectorate" which is less invasive than "annexation." The former does not entail the extension of French civil jurisdictions and responsibilities into the interior governance and daily workings of the new acquisition, whereas annexation is designed as a full incorporation of sovereignty and government. Arriving in Nuka-Hiva in April 1842 with the Reine Blanche a fifty-two canon frigate of 460 men, and the Bucéphale a two canon gabare of 45 men (Besson 1924:120; Roche 2005) the contre-amiral took possession of the various island groups of the Marquesas without the actual use of force, ostensibly made easy by the earlier missionary efforts of the Picpus Catholics (Guizot 2002 XIII: 43), and over the strange objections later lodged by Baron Thierry that it was an invasion of his Marquesian tributary states for which he demanded compensation (Besson 1924:120). Once this official business was completed, Dupetit-Thouars sailed on to Tahiti because reports had reached Dupetit-Thouars that American Consul Moerenhout (who we met earlier in Bishop Pompallier’s 1836-38 crossing) was being paid by protestant missionaries to help them chase off French Catholic missionaries (De Deckker 1997:242). He arrived in Tahiti in August 1842, and found Moerenhout deeply embroiled with the British protestant missionary George Pritchard over the issue of Protestant versus Catholic missionization. Because of this embroilment, complaints had been lodged against Moerenhout with U.S. Secretary of State Forsythe in Washington D.C. who subsequently wrote a letter that relieved Moerenhout of his American consularship: however this letter had not yet reached Tahiti. Dupetit-Thouars had on his own initiative in 1838 offered Moerenhout a provisional appointment as French Consul to Tahiti after he found that an attempt had been made on Moerenhout’s life in confrontations related to the Picpus and Pritchard. Evidence suggests 98

Moerenhout had long wanted the French consularship, for instance while Pompallier was in passage in 1837 the Bishop wrote a letter of support for Moerenhout’s appointment (see De Deckker 1997: 200) —perhaps11 in thanks for lease of the Raiatea? On arrival in 1842, Moerenhout convinced his friend the contre-amiral that the accusations that he had turned against the Catholics were baseless, and instead proceeded to persuade the Contre-Amiral of the benefits of extending an official French protectorate to Tahiti and the Society Islands group as a whole. Moerenhout argued that France should take possession of the islands based on the evidence that A) the sovereign Pomares were not guaranteeing the protection of French residents like himself and the Picpus Fathers as they had promised in 1838 after the attempt on Moerenhout’s life, and B) the British might annex the island when Missionary Pritchard returns from England where he has reportedly received consular orders, and C) Tahiti occupies a key strategic position in the Pacific (De Deckker 1997:244). The French naval officer was convinced that he should proceed with extending French sovereignty over Tahiti on a logic of executive fiat in need of legitimate cause. He made a demand for reparations of 10,000 piasters from the Pomare Kingdom for earlier damages, a fee which would be waived if the government requested French protection. Guizot writes later that Queen Pomare “offered to place herself and her islands under the protection of France” motivated by “fear” of “force” (Guizot 2002 vol. XIII:45). Guizot got it wrong. The letter requesting French protection was actually written by Moerenhout and four principle chiefs of Tahiti while the Queen was away in Moorea in childbirth. She only learned about the letter, and signed it “à contrecoeur” after its drafting (De

11

This is one example among many of the questions and ambiguities I hoped to answer and clarify in conversation with Paul de Deckker.

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Deckker 1997). Dupetit-Thouars provisionally accepted her offer contingent on approval by Guizot and others in Paris, and stipulated that the Queen would retain governing autonomy within the interior of her kingdom while being protected from the exterior by the French state. Guizot would later declare that the contre-admiral was “ambitious” and “brave” and that “our occupation was regular” according to international law (Guizot and Guizot de Witt [n.d.] vol.VIII:352), (Guizot 2002 vol. XIII: 50). However, Guizot stipulates the officer had acted without authorization from the government and “from the moment the news of this event arrived, [in Europe] I had a presentiment of the embarrassment it would cause us” (Guizot 2002 vol. XIII:47, 49). Guizot nonetheless followed through with establishing the protectorate in law, and had the official notice of the French possession of Tahiti and the Society Islands published in the official journal Le Moniteur on the 20th of March 1843. Guizot was clearly both pleased and displeased with this outcome, even if the process was diplomatically problematic for him. He never shows any lingering resentment to Dupetit Thouars’ action, as he remained an admiral-ranked officer. When Guizot later named Moerenhout consul to Los Angeles it was partially on the admiral’s recommendation (De Deckker 1997). Guizot’s support for the Tahitian protectorate is particularly well articulated in terms of the new capacity of the French state to officially defend catholic missionaries on the island, as part of his point d'appui strategy for building a network of sea ports and islands necessary to support trade for the benefit of France without the encumbrances of vast territorial colonies. Least the point d'appui be mistaken for a hands-off mode of expansion, it seems to relegate to the missionaries the work of incorporating islanders into Guizot's true French and Christian civilization outlined in Chapter One. In an April 1843 debate in the Chamber of 100

deputies, over a cost of 5,987,000 francs requested by Marine Minister Roussin to support new port projects in Tahiti, to which some deputies balked, Guizot replies in what might appear to be a completely off topic fashion: “Why doesn’t the French government do for the French Catholic missionaries what the English government does for the English Protestant missionaries?” (Guizot 2002 vol. XIII:53) and declares that France should be the protector of the Catholic religion in the world. Tahiti as part of a regional points d’appui strategy was meant, in this instance, as a means to protect Catholicism. Less we think that he was unencumbered by the details of Catholic missionization and this is mere political rhetoric, in a speech on another occasion Guizot explicitly praises the work of Pompallier identifying him to the Chamber as a French bishop who has had significant success in New Zealand (Guizot 2002 vol.XIII:63).12 Guizot argued for and instituted a system of expansion in which the French Kingdom took small strategic possessions in the Pacific, without annexation and the necessary extension of civil rule of law it would bring, while the church took absolutely vast spiritual possessions in missionary endeavors in which they were under the sovereign “protection” of the French state forces. A similar request as that of Queen Pomare’s for a “protectorate” was effected over Wallis Island in November 1842, via a letter received by Captain Mallet of the Embuscade, a corvette of thirty-three cannons and 251 sailors (Roche 2005). Jean Brookes says, based on British Foreign Office letters from Cowley to Lord Aberdeen, that in Wallis “the native king and his chiefs signed a document declaring their desire to form a free and independent state under protection of the king of the French” and notes that a similar request was signed by the kings and chiefs of

12

He was arguing that Pompallier deserves protection by the British as much as the Protestant missionaries in Tahiti deserve protection by the French. This liberal trope of the protection of religious tolerance by civil orders is deployed at the awkward intersections where religious and sovereign interests of the British and French states might appear to coincide.

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Futuna at about the same time (Brookes 1941: 113). The actual wording of the letter was as follows, likely written by Father Bataillon or Father Viard: We, the king of Wallis Island and the undersigned, after having embraced the Catholic religion, Apostolic and Roman, we declare the desire to form a free and independent State, and, because of the communality of religion, we ask to be under the protection of H.M. Louis-Philippe 1st , King of the French. Made at Saint-Jean-Baptiste, the 4th of November 1842, the first year of our conversion. Signed: Malahama, Maulisio, I.P. Lavelua (Quoted in Jore 1959:155) In response to this request Captain Mallet of the Embuscade wrote up a series of legal articles clarifying their relationship in terms of things like escaped French sailors and taxes and tariffs on French goods. This is described elsewhere in contemporary official French writing as a “commerce treaty” between the Kingdoms of France and Wallis. This was technically the same form of “protection” as Tahiti, which recognized a Polynesian kingdom within the French kingdom, and the requests come similarly in French written in the voice of the indigenous sovereigns while a significantly armed French warship sits in the bay engaged in the semiotics and symbolisms of a show of force, offering the plausible deniability that force was used to extract the request. The instigation for the protectorate in Wallis and Futuna was instability of local politics which threatened Bataillon’s mission station, and the killing of Father Chanel on the orders of Chief Niuliki, King of Alo (see Matsuda 2005:80). Hence, a French subject had been aggressed and others were threatened: the French state had grounds to intercede for their protection.

Marists and the State: On to New Caledonia The definitive movement towards New Caledonia by the French state appears to originate in an 1842 letter from the founder of the Marist Order, T.R.P. Colin, to the Cardinal responsible 102

as Prefect of Propagation of the Faith in Rome. In this letter Colin proposes creating a Marist mission in New Caledonia (Faivre et al. [1955]:85). The Vatican decided that it would be a good time to cut up the vast Vicariate of the Western Pacific which up to then was still headed from New Zealand by Pompallier. The Vatican created the Vicariate of Central Oceania which would be administered by Father Bataillon from Wallis Island, who then became a full Bishop. Central Oceania was now administratively separate from Pompallier in New Zealand. In turn, the new mission planned for New Caledonia would be directed by Bishop Guillaume Douarre in cooperation with Bataillon, with the assumptions that New Caledonia would eventually become its own separate Vicariate. With the opportunity of offering assistance to the Marists, the state could extend its sovereignty to New Caledonia in what American State Department employee George Verne Blue later describes more generally for the Pacific as a whole as a French instrumentalization of French missionaries as “agents of the French culture and spirit”(Blue 1933; compare to Jore 1959:329). Acting on the letter, in 1843 King Louis-Philippe’s government via Marine Minister Admiral Roussin sent Commander Dupetit-Thouars orders to help the Marist mission in Wallis establish a new base in New Caledonia. In this and other French expansions, while protectorates and possessions abounded, Guizot’s Cabinet does not ever want to annex anything: I argue this is because the civil consequences of annexation would interfere with the Christian civilization project as a form of non-civil religious governance. Accompanying the open and official orders to aid the missionaries, the Commander was issued additional secret instructions in the name of Admiral Roussin, who could not plausibly have issued the directive without the support of Foreign Minister Guizot and the cabinet. Guizot tells nothing of this expedition in his extremely detailed sixteen-volume Memoires (2002), even 103

as an account of the expedition was published in 1845 (Laferrière 1845). I argue that this is a voluntary erasure on Guizot’s part, in which he claims ignorance of activities his British counterparts might object to, which he attributes to overzealous captains acting on their own accord. After all, this had already happened once with Dupetit-Thouars. However, the official archived instructions eventually came to light. And are available to us. The Marine Minister's complete instructions were more expansive than mere assistance to the Marists. He was to materially assist the missionaries’ installation and help them in “winning over the natives”, se concilier les indigènes through the exchange of objects and other signs of goodwill. But that’s not all: If your successes are great enough to bring them to recognize the suzerainty of H.M. [Louis-Philippe], do not neglect to do it and to have this recognition recorded by notarial acts [actes authentiques] drawn up in triple copy, signed by the chiefs, you and Messrs. the missionaries who can be witnesses. If the documents are clear and explicit, you will assure/promise the interests of H.M. and you will display the flag, which you will salute with nine cannon shots. (Secret Instructions, Roussin to Dupetit-Thouars quoted in Person 1953:93). In short, Dupetit-Thouars was ordered to secure French sovereignty over the island through signed consent from the natives. Why signed consent? Everyone with an interest in the matter knew that the land-mass Cook had named New Caledonia was inhabited by indigenous peoples, and the small corpus of materials from Cook's and the small handful of known expeditions that had landed there since 1774 could easily be read. It was not considered terre nullius under measures current at the time since people lived there. Even if it did not have a recognized independent government capable of protecting foreign residents and their property—which seems to be the working definition of a legitimate government—mere discovery was not enough. The procedure for securing this type of people’s sovereignty required their consent via their leaders, as seen with the Treaty of Waitangi 104

in 1840. Individuals who could plausibly be cast as the sovereign chiefs or kings of an island thereby had recognized standing to sign away their domains’ sovereignty and seek protection from civilized states (i.e. those possessing recognized governments, if not necessarily Christian). While the contracts and treaties signed might appear to deal with relations between the indigenous peoples and the French state, they actually have as their audience the other “civilized” nations of Europe. Bishop Douarre and eleven other missionaries left the French port of Toulon on the 24th of April 1843 aboard a French warship bound for Valparaiso: the Phaëton, a fast “corvette à roués” paddle-driven steamship which accompanied the Uranie, a frigate of 60 canons (Roche 2005), the latter carrying to Tahiti the first governor of the Establissments Français d’Océanie, Bruat13 (Faivre [1955]:86). While Pompallier in 1836 had only a letter of support and few thousand France when he left for Valparaiso, in 1843 the missionary party traveled on French state ships: Guizot’s stated wish that the French state should support Catholic missions abroad through its navy is now patently being carried out. From Valparaiso, the party first stopped in Nuka-Hiva in the Marquesas on September 16th 1843,14 where Dupetit-Thouars’ orders to assist the Marists and establish French sovereignty in New Caledonia were delegated to his “lieutenant de vaisseau,” Julien-Laferrière in command of the Bucéphale—a smallish ship, of 45 men and two canons—comparatively no ship of war in its own right and hardly capable of issuing a nine-shot salute of the flag called for in the orders.

13

The Governor was accompanied by his wife who made small presents of manufactured foods to the Marists, for instance canned sardines (Rozier 1990:83)

14

Governor Bruat arrives on this date according to De Deckker (1997:275), yet Faivre et al. say some of the Marists traveled on the same ship as Bruat, with an arrival on October 16th 1843 (Faivre et al [1955]:86).

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The missionary group transferred ships in Nuka-Hiva on October 16th and departed for Tonga November 1st, 1843. Dupetit-Thouars himself met the ships carrying Governor Bruat in Nuka-Hiva, before setting off to Tahiti in the Reine Blanche accompanied by the Embuscade to prepare an advance party for the arrival of this first French governor. Arriving November 1st with heavily armed ships, he intended to report to the Queen that the protectorate had been ratified and made official. Instead he found that Queen Pomare refusing to take down her flag in deference to the French, and was holed up at George Pritchard’s residence—who was now British Consul and missionary all in one and entering his residence would become a diplomatic issue. Governor Bruat arrived with the Uranie and the Danaé November 4th, and the standoff over the flag ended on November 6th, when 500 soldiers directed by captain of the corvette Aubigny invaded the royal residence. Pomare was relieved of her throne, the protectorate which had already curtailed her sovereignty to the interior of her kingdom was replaced by its full annexation to French Sovereignty. This provoked Guizot’s anger when he learned of it in February 1844 since “conquest replaced the protectorate”(Guizot 2002 vol. XIII: 64) and upset his diplomatic efforts underway with Britain to repair relations, but also undermined the very design and motive of his religious civilizational project which is only possible under a the regime of a protectorate. In other words, the large war ships and soldiers and arms of France were in Tahiti while the two-shot Bucéphale captained by Julien-Laferrière’s small crew, and Marist Fathers as passengers continued on to Tonga, and eventually Wallis arrived in 1843, before sailing on to New Caledonia.

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To their knowledge there were no known Protestant missions or European residents on New Caledonia, but Bishop Douarre and his companions were fresh arrivals to the region and likely had no clue to guide them. Father Viard at the time was in Wallis and had been there for more than a year helping to shore-up the mission stations after the killing of Father Chanel in Futuna. He had previously served15 under Pompallier in New Zealand although he was not present at the proceedings of the Treaty of Waitangi. In the layover in Wallis of the Bucéphale, Viard was added to the group because of his practical competences in actual mission work, even though he was supposed to return to his post in New Zealand. Details about the rest of the passengers and grew aboard the Bucéphale is not specified in documents I have consulted. David Chappell's historical work Double Ghosts reveals convincingly that the archival evidence (ships' rosters) do a poor job of recording the large numbers of “oceanic voyagers” or so called “kanakas” who served as pilots, crew, and myriad others in capacities rarely recorded aboard precisely these kinds of trans-Pacific European and American voyages (Chappell 1997). In any case, they do not figure in the received narrative of this voyage. The ship then left Wallis Island, sailing for New Caledonia, calling first at the island of Lifou in the Loyalty islands just to the east of New Caledonia before proceeding on to Balade— known to the naval men only from written accounts of Cook’s and a small number subsequent voyages.

15

Father Viard was eight years younger than Bishop Pompallier, was from the same town in France, and had known him as an alter boy.

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Closing: State of Contact in December 1843 With this chapter I can now begin to situate New Caledonia and the French presence there in broader historical narrative dealing with both France and the Pacific. From Guizot and other’s perspective, New Caledonia was the next big place after New Zealand where French efforts of Catholicism could establish a pied à terre in the Southwestern Pacific under Guizot’s points d’appui plan in which naval forces protected Catholic expansions. However, Unlike New Zealand, or Tahiti, or even Wallis and Futuna at the time of the Catholics’ arrival, there was no regular European or American contact with the inhabitants of the main island of New Caledonia. All early records demonstrate that there was relatively dense inter-island trade and travel by non-Europeans. However, absence of resident officials of recognized governments who could guarantee the protection of trade and property of foreigners combined with a treacherous uncharted barrier reef around a huge lagoon, and the presence of more accessible alternatives made New Caledonia relatively unappealing. In short, the island was strikingly insulated from European contact even by the standard of Pacific Islands. After Cook’s visit in 1774, the lost French expedition of Count La Pérouse perhaps visited in 1788 if the captain followed his stated intentions to investigate Cook's discovery (plans communicated during a fortuitous meeting with British Governor Phillips at Botany Bay, who himself only just landed and had not yet set about moving a few miles north where he would found the settler colony at Sydney). In April 1793 two French ships, the frigates Recherche and Esperance under the command of D’Entrecasteaux were sent in search of La Pérouse and called at Balade.16 In 1803 the H.M.S. Buffalo stayed for six weeks on the

16

Accounts of the visit are recorded by Labillardière (1799) (1800), and Beautemps-Beaupré (1807) and commander D’Entrecasteaux (1808).

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Southwestern coast of New Caledonia collecting needed supplies en route from New Zealand to Bombay. The captain baptized the location Port Saint-Vincent. No other “foreign” (i.e. non-Pacific) vessels apparently landed anywhere else on the main island of New Caledonia for the next thirty-seven years. Captain Morgan in command the London Missionary Society (hereafter LMS) brick the Camden sailed to the Isle of Pines seventy miles to the South of New Caledonia, where on the 13th of April 1840 the European Protestant missionaries on board left two Samoan "teachers" with the consent of Chief Touru. Sources report he only agreed to keep the Samoans until a European would be available. A relatively recent account, that however smells of sticking-words-in-mouths-of-natives, says that Chief Touru17 "was greatly impressed by the European's property and knowledge, and was most anxious that a white man should stay on the island to instruct him in the religious arts which appeared to lie at the root of this great culture" and its material wealth (Crocombe and Crocombe 1968:29). The Camden then sailed from the Isle of Pines to Port Saint-Vincent on New Caledonia arriving on the 16th of May 1840 in the same location where the H.M.S. Buffalo had sheltered in 1803, on which it published favorable reports. Reverend Thomas however failed to convince two Samoan teachers to overcome their fears and disembark and start a mission at the location, so the ship sailed on to Sydney (Rozier 1990:25). The Camden returned to the Isle of Pines a year later

17

As R.G. and Marjorie Crocombe narrate it (1968:27), Touru's chiefly position in Isle of Pines rested on a genealogy which claimed that "four generations" before his own, a party from Lifou in the Loyalty islands departed in a canoe and gained control over the Kunie people of the Isle of Pines due to their "disunity." Following the death of his father in a battle with people from the South-eastern extremity of New Caledonia, Chief Touru raided the coastal areas of mainland New Caledonia, perhaps making landfall in the area near Tuauru, with the war party moving north to Canala on the west coast, and the Noumean peninsula on the East Coast. He then collected what is often described in the literature as tributary extractions from these areas (e.g. Guiart), but as materials show these “tributary” extractions might not necessarily entail any depth of authoritative control, integration, or other qualities which are elsewhere taken as evidence of “sovereignty” in non-European contexts marked by receiving “tribute.”

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in April 1841, where incidentally and not without important consequences its crew discovered sandalwood (Crocombe and Crocombe 1968:29), one of the few objects viable for trade with China. The L.M.S. ship dropped two Samoan Teachers on the southern mainland of New Caledonia at Tuauru, an area which the LMS missionary Mr. Murray understood to be a tribute area belonging to the Chief of the Isle of Pines (see footnote above). One of the teachers died, and the other, named Taniéla, retreated to the Isle of Pines by canoe. In July 1842, Taniéla was dropped again in New Caledonia by the Camden, accompanied by two other teachers: another Samoan, and a Rarotongan named Ta'unga who kept a journal in his own language. Portions of his diary and later memoires, all in Rarotongan, are preserved in LMS and other archives, and were published in an edited collection in the late 1960s (Ta'unga 1968). Ta'unga’s journal and other archival documents offer evidence of a new density of traffic18 of beachcombers, sandaliers and missionaries who visited in the vicinity, and an older density of traffic by pacific islanders. In this context, Ta'unga's journal of 1842 and memoire of 1879 which recount his three years in New Caledonia (Ta'unga 1968) offer a unique perspective on the consequences of the missionary and sandalwood traffic. Very shortly after his arrival in July 1842, a canoe arrived from the Isle of Pines on the 24th of August informing him that Chief Touru had "driven away" the L.M.S. Samoan teachers because "the people were all dying, and the chief had been asking 18

Sandalwood discovery brought an exponential rise in visits. As early as 1840 a certain captain James Paddon who would later develop significant interests in New Caledonia set up a depot or factory at Inyeuc Island off Aneityum in the New Hebrides (i.e. Anatom, Vanuatu) and his agents collected sandalwood from "a dozen obscure sources" (Brookes 1941:32; picture Shineberg 1967:facing 99). Captain Thomas Ebrill of The Star was one of the privateers who called at Aneityum (Crocombe and Crocombe 1968:23), and provided sandalwood from locations he intentionally kept obscure and secrete (Shineberg1967:17). Ebrill is on record as having visited in mid 1842 arriving in Sydney by October 7th with a cargo of sandalwood. Meanwhile, the Caroline of Captain Woodin arrived in Tasmania on October 10th with sandalwood and sea-turtle shell from New Caledonia (Rosier 1990:31). By 1843 a dozen or more recorded sandalwood ships had called at the Isle of Pines (Shineberg in Crocombe and Crocombe 1968:25), and plausibly in the waters of New Caledonia.

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why they died" apparently attributing their deaths by influenza, measles, and dysentery to the presence of the teachers (Ta'unga 1968:37). Ta’unga later learned that the teachers fled on Ebrill's Star after an altercation over sandalwood exchanges (Ta'unga 1968:49-51), but they returned the following November 1842 to try and reestablish the mission on the Isle of Pines. Ebrill’s ship was then seized, plundered, and burned with all seventeen people on board killed, whom Ta'unga tells us includes six Europeans, three teacher missionaries, and a variety of islanders from Hawaii, the Marquesas, Huahine (Society Islands), Mangareva (Gambier Islands), and Aitutaki (Cook islands) (Ta'unga 1968:45, 51-52). Ta’unga was told that Chief Touru then gave orders for him to be killed. Living on the mainland seventy miles away, Ta’unga says the local chiefs refused to carry out the order. On the 3rd of May 1843, another sandal ship visiting the Isle of Pines, the Catherine, was attacked and briefly seized before its own crew blew the deck off with a powder keg as a desperate yet successful effort to reclaim the ship and escape to Sydney. With this newly violent and deadly situation, Dorothy Shineberg says that there are no records of any private vessel visiting the area for the next eighteen months perhaps due to this event (1967:45).19 In the interim, Ta'unga reports that a series of epidemics passed through the area when he lived in the south of New Caledonia before he was eventually picked up by the L.M.S. vessel the John Williams on the 12th of May 1845 and taken to Samoa (Ta'unga 1968:75). This is perhaps the same “Mr. Willams” which Marists hear of soon after first arriving in the North of New Caledonia in December 1843.

19

Trade resume sometime after Chief Touru's death in late1845 or early 1846

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This brings us up to the historical present of late December 1843: the Bucéphale is on its way to the northern point of the mainland of New Caledonia, an island four hundred kilometers long and twenty-five kilometers wide—on which very little has been published from a small handful of expeditions more than forty years earlier. Up to this point it has only had a handful of European vessels visit over a sixty-five year period, with a recent but sporadic presence of two or three Pacific Protestant teachers starting 1840, plus occasional visits from sandalwood traders starting 1841. This is the context in which one of the least important of the warships of the French South American fleet is approaching from the East, with a handful of French Marist Fathers and catechists aboard, and two mounted guns. The young Lieutenant in command of the vessel holds secret orders, if possible, to gain sovereign possession of the island for the Kingdom of France. As a project of civilization, his orders and his execution of them are intended to incorporate the indigenous inhabitants into the French Kingdom—in a process intended to make them Catholic while not making them civil.

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CHAPTER 3 POSSESSIONS (1843-1848)

The various accidents of war and commerce might indeed diffuse an imperfect knowledge of the gospel among the tribes of Caledonia. —Edward Gibbon, speaking of the tribes of Scotland Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (2004:83).

December 1843: Establishing the Mission On December 20th 1843, the Bucéphale sailed with its missionary passengers and small crew through the same northeastern break in the reef opposite Balade as James Cook’s 1774 expedition, and entered the waters of New Caledonia. Immediately after entering the lagoon, the French ship was approached by a “pirogue” on which one passenger held aloft a piece of white tapa, a mulberry paper/cloth material, apparently signaling them. Captain Laferrière’s official and published reports of the voyage offer this and other details which suggest he developed a sense that the conditions of their arrival were uniquely fortuitous (Laferrière1845; also Rozier 1990:41-81). The display of tapa lead Father Viard, who had been added to the mission at the last moment, to conclude that the man was a chief, since tapa in Wallis in his experience is a symbol of chiefly and royal authority. The pirogue sailed alongside the Bucéphale to its anchorage in the bay opposite the village of Balade. Several other pirogues then approached. On one, there was an older man who Captain Laferrière describes as “less dark than the other naturels” (italics mine, untranslated), and this strange lighter skinned man just happened to speak “a language Father Viard understood almost in its entirety”(1845:8), however “it was not entirely the language of Uvea which he spoke” with 113

Viard (Laferrière 1845:9). A shipside conversation followed with a mutual misunderstanding developing between this old man whom the text identifies as “Ouamo” and Father Viard over their respective origins: Viard tells that they had just come from Uvea (i.e. Wallis island), and the old man replies—what a coincidence!— that he too had come from Ouvea (i.e. Loyalty islands). It was not until some time later that Viard was made to understand the difference that Ouvea was an island settled by Wallisians and hence had the same name. What can be excavated in terms of this moment of first “contact?” Viard’s linguistic competence can be ascertained by the following biographical details: Viard arrived in New Zealand in 1838, did not speak any local languages at the time of his arrival including English, before being left alone among “the people of Tauranga” as their sole pastor for six months. He remained immersed until March 1841 when Bishop Pompallier selected him as Vicar General (Keys 1957:117, 137,146, 164). In November 1841, Viard traveled with Pompallier to Wallis and Futuna to try and salvage the mission stations after Father Chanel’s murder on April 1841 in Futuna created the impression that both mission stations might fail (1957:184). Viard collected Chanel’s body, transported it to New Zealand for burial, and returned to Wallis with supplies1 in April 1842 (1957: 185). Viard then stayed in Wallis heading the mission stations with Father Bataillon, until he boarded the Bucéphale in early December 1843. Viard’s competence to communicate with Ouamo would thereby be based on roughly one year and a half of residence in Wallis, the similarities in ways of speaking between Wallis and Ouvea, and any shared Polynesian language traits Wallisian has with Maori. Ouamo’s competence to communicate with Viard would depend on an earlier history of travel from Wallis to Ouvea, his own travel 1

As a benchmark of linguistic competence as defined by the Marists, Keys says, “At Wallis the Bishop [Pompallier] was finding the language very similar to Maori. After a few weeks he was able to preach and hear confession” (Keys 1957:185).

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from Ouvea to New Caledonia by an apparently undetermined means (outrigger or even a Protestant mission ship?) and a clear willingness and authority to verbally engage this new ship and its passengers—coupled with an assumption held by his party that these newcomers might plausibly be able to speak with other ‘people of the sea.’ In terms of other forms of competence and special skills possessed by Viard which would come in handy in this mission, as mentioned in chapter two, he likely wrote part or all of the treaty that “offered” Wallisian sovereignty to the French Captain Mallet in November 1842. Laferrière’s text continues, saying that as Ouamo and Viard talked, the pirogue with the man holding the white tapa cloth then approached their ship, and all the men on the other pirogues sat down or bowed as his pirogue passed. The Captain invited this “chief” aboard, along with the Ouvean-speaking interpreter Ouamo, and two others. “Trembling” according to Laferrière, the man boarded and offered the tapa cloth to him, which he accepted. The presumed chief and other members of the boarding party went below deck with Laferrière to his quarters in the company of Father Viard (and plausibly Bishop Douarre; the Captain’s report is ambiguous). As a first question the islanders were asked their names. The one who gave the tapa identified himself Tea-Pouma “the chief of Balade”, the second as his brother Goua-Pouma, and the third José-Pouma who was from the “same country as Ouamo”(Laferrière 1845:12). José’s Christian name stands out for the Frenchmen, as does his apparently off-island origins. Having answered this first question, the captain then gave his guests something to eat. The second question dealt with the presence of “foreigners,” and from their responses Laferrière understood that a certain “Mr. Willam[sic]” had landed three missionaries and their wives, one of whom was named Basilio (1845:15). In subsequent questions and answers they

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learned that the “principle chief of this part of the island” was “Paliki2 Pouma” the “king of the country of Koko” who resided on the other side of the mountains from Balade. Since Aliki and variants like Ariki were a common pacific island term for aristocrats or royal chiefs as far afield as Wallis Island and Hawaii, this group of Frenchmen now believed they had learned that Paliki Pouma was in charge of this hierarchy of chiefs. The entire group—captain, Marists, Poumas, and Ouamo—went above deck. The French sailors and priests offered gifts of a predictably trifling character to their ship board guests, as prescribed in the instructions from the minister. That evening, aboard ship, the crew fired two gunshots for the nightly salute of the flag, which Laferrière tells us solicited cries of fear from a few islanders aboard ship who had decided to stay the night, but reconsidered and jumped off the ship and swam to shore. The next day the “King of Koko,” the “Paliki Pouma,” arrived at Balade with a large number of men. The Captain sent to shore a “canot armée en guerre” with Viard on board, who fetched the Aliki Pouma back to the Bucéphale. The Aliki King offered a tapa cloth to Laferrière, who stepped forward to accept the cloth and shook the Aliki’s hand, but “il ne conceivait pas trop mon procédee” (1845:22). In Laferrière’s assessment the Aliki remained wary of them even after Tea Pouma (the chief of Balade) had explained things to him. Bishop Douarre and Laferrière offered the Aliki a shirt (costume ou blouse) apparently to cover his nakedness, which he put on. The Captain then ushered him below deck where they sat together at the table in his quarters. They were joined at the table by Bishop Douarre and Father Viard, while the islanders

2

PALIKA is now the “Parti de libération kanak,” founded in 1975 by Nidoïsh Naisseline and Paul Néaoutyine among others.

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present the previous day, chief Tea Pouma, his brother Goua-Pouma, the intermediary Ouamo plus three other “petits chefs” sat on the decking. The captain gave the Aliki a mirror and a piece of tissue/cloth, and passed bagatelles all around. The Captain questioned his “hosts” about foreigners as he had the previous day. In consultation with Viard he reached the conclusion that Basilio and the other missionaries left by “Willam [sic]” were “simply” people from Ouvea who had only been catechized and were thereby not really missionaries by his measure (1845:24), and thereby not an impediment or complication to the dual mission of implanting the Marists and extending French sovereignty. At this point Laferrière writes that they got down to the official state and mission business he was charged with. We asked Paliki-Pouma and the other chiefs present if it would please them [s’il leur conviendrait] if Monsignor [Douarre] were to stay among them. Either because they did not understand well, or for any other reason, they replied in a fairly indifferent manner, and we did not insist for the moment, before gaining a better understanding of the place. (Laferrière 1845:25) Laferrière then gave the group a tour of the ship, and in the text offers numerous derisive commentaries of Aliki Pouma’s strength and intelligence. The entire party went ashore to the village of Balade: Laferrière, the chiefs, the King, Douarre and Viard, and some of the ships officers, all went together in the canot. Once in Balade the Frenchmen spent an afternoon opening coconuts with knives, and offering gifts of colliers and bagatelles. After this official work (after all it was explicitly mandated in the Minister’s instructions) was done, they revisited the issue at hand: We returned to the question, which we had merely posed that morning, of knowing if it would be agreeable to them if Monsignor were to have a hut at Balade for himself and four other persons, who desired to live among them in order to teach them to procure for themselves all the things they saw of ours. 117

Father Viard made himself very well understood, this time, and the cry lelei! [good!] erupted from all sides with the accent of joy. (Laferrière 1845:47) The misunderstanding from earlier was now replaced officially with a mutually transparent understanding: with native consent the mission project could proceed. Father Rougeyron writes aboard ship that the islanders received the new mission with "benevolence" which he deems "sincere," but speculates that "fear of the ship can have a lot to do with it"(in Keys 1968:38). The choice of word, benevolence, suggests that from his perspective once the ship and its small guns depart, the unarmed missionaries would depend on an expectation of goodwill and protection from their hosts. From the State’s perspective (Guizot etc.), by convention this “native government” would only be legitimate if it was indeed benevolent and protective of these resident foreigners. The following day, December 22nd 1843, the Aliki Pouma went back over the mountain, and Viard and Laferrière spent an afternoon hiking around Balade with chief Tea Pouma and the mediator Ouamo looking for a place to build a mission. They happened to meet the “missionary” Basilio who they had heard about earlier. Laferrière describes Basilio as a tall red-skinned “aliki ouvéa” or stranger chief of Ouvea (1845:37). This “redskin” is the only person who is clearly identified as a chief, who can speak anything approaching “Wallisian” directly with Father Viard (compare Bullard 2000:39). Viard concludes through conversation that Basilio had indeed been talked to by Protestant missionaries, as had José Pouma (who was apparently also “from” Ouvea. José had made himself noticeably scarce after the first meeting aboard the Bucephale, and he was never seen again before the ship departed). Viard concludes from the meeting that Basilio, and by extension José, were not capable of communicating “religious notions” to others (Laferrière 1845:38). Even though they had apparently grasped the ability to communicate their Christian names, this did not qualify them as 118

“teachers” or other legitimate missionary presence in the eyes of Viard—and in religious matters such as this Laferrière deferred to the judgment of the men of the cloth in his charge. When Chief Tea Pouma proposed one location for the new mission and agreed to accept compensation for it from the Marists, Basilio stopped him by saying that other chiefs needed to be consulted. Laferrière writes that he and Viard were not interested in that location anyway, and decided it would be best to set up the mission in Tea Pouma’s village at Balade, as close as possible to his domicile where the mission would be “beneath his immediate protection”(1845:45) and hopefully ongoing benevolence. This relationship of “protection” is worth highlighting: protection of foreigners is the function of legitimate native government from a French perspective as shown by events in Tahiti, and the French were ready to oblige Tea Pouma to take on this function of government. That evening Chief Tea Pouma had his people start clearing a location for the mission in his village. The Captain and the missionaries returned to the Bucéphale with chief Tea Pouma, Basilio, and Ouamo—where Basilio reportedly completely changed his stance, and “opined in favor of all our demands”(1845:48) agreeing that the missionaries should be allowed to stay.

New Year’s Eve: Establishing French Sovereignty Having secured the Marists a mission station, and having demonstrably followed the part of his orders which instructed him to “win over the natives,” Laferrière then moved on to fulfilling the secret instructions from the Marine Minister (see Chapter Two): get the natives to offer to recognize French sovereignty. The day after Christmas 1843, after the ship had been at Balade five days, a new group arrived on shore: five chiefs from Bondé and their “king” Tchapéa, accompanied by his “wife” and a mass of up to two hundred men as protective escorts. 119

They came to Balade with the apparent intention of meeting the Captain. Laferrière invited the principles on board for lunch, joined by chief Tea Pouma and Basilio as well. Bishop Douarre had the five chiefs of Bondé outfitted in shirts to cover their nakedness while eating. At the end of lunch the captain invited the Bondé group back for a visit the following Sunday, with the hidden intention “to offer them the recognition of the sovereignty of the king of the French, that was in my instructions to try and obtain”(Laferrière 1845:53). The weirdness of this statement is in the original French, not in my translation: Laferrière was in a strange transaction of “offering” the natives something he was instructed to “obtain” from them. With the Captain planning an act of sovereign extension and incorporation, Viard and Ouamo went by foot over the mountains to seek out Aliki Pouma the “King of Koko” and invite him for lunch the following Sunday. With his attendance, it allowed for a sort of congregation of chiefs and two kings which would allow for a treaty signing. King Koko arrived instead on Saturday, and spent the night aboard the Bucéphale with chief Tea Pouma, his brother Goa Pouma, and the interpreter Ouamo. That night, “in the course of conversations that we had with them through the intermediary [sic] Viard and Ouamo, we learned that the island of New Caledonia is called Opao by the naturels”(Laferrière 1845:91, italics mine and untranslated). Never again is this claim made in any report or publication, or otherwise substantiated. Is the island of Opao a brief lived legal fiction, devised solely for the purposes of having a treaty signed? The following day, Sunday December 31st 1843, Bishop Douarre held mass in full Episcopal costume on the deck of the Bucéphale, in presence of as many naturels as possible. A disappointment marked the event: The Bondé chiefs and their “King” Tchapea who had been invited the previous week was not in attendance, and they were left with King Koko and the 120

other Poumas. Julien-Laferrière armed the crew for the mass, who ceremonially “presented” arms to the Bishop (i.e. fired shots) which quieted the otherwise noisy “savages” for the duration of the mass. The smaller than hoped for group of chiefs stayed aboard for lunch after mass, leading Laferrière to decide that it would be an “opportune occasion” to “bring them to ask for [les amener à demander] the sovereignty of His Majesty Louis-Philippe I and of his government”(1845:99). Bishop Douarre suddenly balked, and informed the Captain that his missionaries could not officially take part in such a procedure. His reasons are elsewhere fully communicated in a letter from Douarre to the Marine Minister (in archives I have located but not consulted yet). His reasons are likely fully in line with Bishop Pompallier’s behavior at the Treaty of Waitangi in 1840 described in Chapter Two, where in his own account he precipitously left before anything “political” could happen once he had ascertained that the treaty was drafted in a way that guaranteed liberal tolerance or protection of religious practice from civil interference. The Captain penned the following document in his chambers while he and the chiefs were having lunch on December 31st 1843, accompanied and assisted by the officers of his ship and Father Viard—without whom the officers could neither have communicated the content nor signed the document “in all [good] conscience” (Laferrière 1845:56). Ouamo is credited with explaining to the chiefs, through the gesture of interlacing his fingers, that they would be allied with the French people “in a way that would make them in a way nothing but a single people” [de mainère à ne faire en quelque sorte qu’un seul peuple]”, explaining that the King of the French would become their father, they would agree to render “tapou” or sacred the French Flag, and to tell Americans, English, and other strangers “We are French”(Laferrière 1845:101-102). 121

The word “taboo” and its variations like “tapou” are nowhere else in evidence on the island of New Caledonia at this time, other than in Laferrière’s report. On New Year’s Eve, all the chiefs present on board signed the following document, which was post-dated January 1st 1844, which supposedly integrated them with the French “people” through their allegiance to a shared sovereign King. Over the following days of the new year other individuals identified by the French as chiefs were located and signed the treaty. But King Tchapèa (who had missed lunch despite an explicit invitation!) could not be located anywhere before Laferrière’s departure. The treaty document carries fourteen signatures in the form of ‘X’ marks: We, Chiefs of the island of Opao (New Caledonia), Before the commander and the officers of the French Corvette the Bucéphale, we declare that, wanting to procure to our people the advantage of their reunion to France we recognize from this date the full and complete sovereignty of her government, placing our persons and our land of Opoa (New Caledonia) under their high protection vis-à-vis all foreign powers, and we adopt as our own the French pavilion, which we pledge to have respected by all the means in our power. Signed at Ballade, and placed in the hands of the commander of the French corvette the Bucéphale in the presence of the witnesses named below, the 1st of January 1844. The document is preserved in the French colonial archives (Archives des Colonies, Carton 40 NC). According to Yves Person who has consulted the original document, the page shows faint ‘X’ or ‘cross’ signatures next to the names of the fourteen kings and chiefs of “Opao” and their male relatives. The document ascribes to these signatories, all men, the standing and agency to “recognize” French sovereignty in the form of “high protection”, and is written in a genre of French civil law: a process verbale which despite its name is a written account of legal 122

consequence, which here manifests in the form of actes authentiques meaning they are notarized and signed in triplicate copy under the authority of a ministerial officer. It is written in the voice of the chiefs, signed by them and by the delegated officials, and witnessed by officers of the ship. Three copies presumably were ordered because they were to be retained by three participants: the chiefs, the state, and the mission—even as the religious party had officially opted out of formal participation. The final set of signatures were collected over several weeks, and Laferrière only reports firing the ships cannons the nine times as prescribed in his instructions, as the sign of the extension of sovereignty, on the very late day of the 22nd of January more than three weeks after the first signatures were collected. The firing of shots is then curiously reported by him only as a salute to Bishop Douarre as he departed the Bucéphale for the final time before they set sail for Sydney3 (Laferrière 1845:166). This suggests, as with the salutes Bishop Pompallier received when he disembarked from French ships in New Zealand, that in a sign-logics naval officers think they can tell local populations who their local authority figures should be by shooting cannons as these individuals leave their ship. No written translation was made of the treaty document, which is at odds with the Waitangi procedure directed by the British, but not with French procedures at Tahiti, Nuka-Hiva, Wallis, or Futuna where French sovereignty was earlier and similarly established in the form of “protectorates.” The Marists were in 1844 in a clear position to produce a written (if imperfect) 3

One remaining notable event relates to the presence of two sandalwood ships flying British flags, the Magnet and the Portena, the latter apparently grounded on the reef at Hienghiène for a week (Laferrière 1845:117). Captain Lewis of the Portena and Captain Laferrière heard of one another through inaccurate reports of indigenous shipboard intermediaries, on the basis of which Lewis called at Balade expecting to find a British navy ship. He informed Laferrière that English missionaries had tried but failed to establish themselves at port Saint-Vincent (Laferrière 1845:128). From this evidence, it seems that no ships came to New Caledonia without others hearing about it, however inaccurate the details might be.

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translation of the document and could produce an oral equivalent in at least one locally understood language. Did the men who signed understand the document and all that it entailed? This is highly unlikely for a variety of reasons no less fraught and complicated than those which plagued The Treaty of Waitangi, and lead to recriminations and revisionist histories which supplied the content for voluminous publications with titles like The True and Authentic Story of the Treaty of Waitangi by the Protestant Colenso (1890). However in New Caledonia there were fewer witnesses, fewer written accounts, and no confirmed Protestants present to write a dissenting opinion (Basilio and José were never in a position to write about these things, or apparently to communicate any dissatisfaction they might have had to others who might have wanted to write on their behalf). The account above is based on the official naval report of the voyage plus occasional Marist writings, and I know of no dissenting version contemporary with these events from which to draw out contrasting perspectives, and suggests that additional work incorporating the careful scholarship of Bronwen Douglas and Jean Guiart (among others) would improve this account greatly in ways that better show the local conjunctures, products of interaction, and offer a better understanding of figures like Ouamo—a figure of apparently minor local importance who is rendered historically crucial through his ability to mediate between local authorities and these French sea people. There is however no question that the fourteen signatures on the notarized declaration did not come anywhere near capturing an adequate number of signatories to demonstrate a transfer of sovereignty over the whole of New Caledonia. Consider for comparison the huge number of signatures gathered from all over New Zealand for the Treaty of Waitangi (see Orange 2004 for a copy of the tattered and ink stained documents, covered with columns of signatures extending into margins and going every which way). 124

Analysis and Context of Contact in 1843: Through the chance provided by earlier migrations, the Marist priest Father Viard was able to communicate with a few local inhabitants conversant in a way of speaking similar enough to the Polynesian language now called Faka’Uvea which the missionaries knew from Wallis Island (Uvea). An older history of Pan-oceanic migrations was overlaid with a newer one of French Catholic expansions. Perhaps in the early eighteenth century, if not earlier people from Wallis Island traveled 2000 kilometers in a westerly direction to the Loyalty Islands (Rivierre 1981:Planche 19), an island group immediately to the East of the land mass of New Caledonia. In the Loyalty Islands they established a permanent settlement on the extremities of an island which today is known as “Ouvea,”4 which oral and archaeological evidence suggests they conquered. From the Loyalty Islands, these Ouvean Polynesian settlers could make easy landfall in New Caledonia, which was only one hundred or so kilometers away. In New Caledonia they established settlements that today still exist as recognized chieftainships and clans of the “people of the sea.” Via this history of migration the “Wallisian” language can be counted as a language of both Uvea in Polynesia and Ouvea in the Loyalties, even as the two spoken languages are today distinguishable under their respective names and orthographies, Faka’Uvea for Wallis and Faga Ouvea for the Loyalties—this is the historical sedimentation that allows Viard to communicate with Basilio and Ouamo even as this communication was understood by Father Viard and Captain Laferrière as imperfectly precise.

4

This Loyalty Island is spelt "Ouvea" in its French orthography, which I will use hereafter to avoid confusion with Wallis Island or "Uvea."

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Christophe Sand points out that a pre-colonial social order in which “people of the land” who were politically subordinate to “people of the sea” existed in New Caledonia, as in much of the Pacific, specifying that oral history tells us this peaceful sounding social arrangement was not devoid of violence (Sand 2000:167). Among the “affirmed Polynesian clans” or stranger chiefs who installed themselves in New Caledonia are the TEA BWEOON in the area near Balade (see Bensa 1981:Planche 18). This is the chief "Tia Puma” of Captain Cook's journals of 1774 and the "Theaboomas" of the Entrecasteaux expedition of 1793 (Douglas 1970:187), and the multiple “Poumas” I introduced above via the texts of Laferrière and the Marist Fathers. The area of Balade was in regular contact with Ouveans from the Loyalties from a period which predates sporadic European visits of the late 1700s. After several years in New Caledonia Father Rougeyron figures the Ouveans (from what he calls “Halgan Island”) are present in New Caledonia “by the thousands”(Rougeyron to Colin in Rozier 1990:163). By some counts, twenty-seven “distinct languages” other than Faga Ouvea were spoken in New Caledonia before European contact, with a multitude of as many as sixty dialects according to other counts. Linguists classify this population’s ways of speaking as Western Austronesian in type, with the exception of Faga Ouvea which is classified as Eastern Austronesian. These other twenty-six non-Polynesian languages arguably share a common single mother language from which they diversified (Rivierre 1981:Planche19). This mother language of a Western Austronesian type and its genetic descendants did not have the ur-polynesian or proto-oceanic foundations which elsewhere in the Pacific offers a remarkable degree of similarity in ways of speaking across widely distributed island groups of Polynesia and Guam and Palau in Micronesia—but not so much in Melanesia with the exception of the Polynesian “outliers” of the sort found in New Caledonia. 126

The consequence in the similarities in ways of speaking for European histories of contact is that that New England Missionaries initially thought that people from Tahiti and Hawaii would be mutually comprehendible to one another, and the fact that Pompallier found it easy (I would argue he deceived himself) to learn Wallisian adequately to take confessions in only a few weeks from a good basis in Maori language. This linguistic or "Polynesian" similarity, whatever its caveats and over reliance on token elements of similarity, did in fact allow for relatively easy ‘first contact’ linguistic engagements by Europeans as they sailed around the pacific in exactly like those between Viard and Ouamo. At Balade, Cook’s expedition did in fact encounter Polynesian ways of speaking but did not realize they had encountered people who were likely relative newcomers to the island. They were unequipped to recognize that there might be a local linguistic diversity of ways of speaking which the word lists they compiled failed to account for. Forster mistakenly claimed monolithically "their language, if we except the word areekee and one or two more, had no affinity with any one of the various languages we had heard in the South Sea before" (Forster in Beaglehole 1961:537). Haudricourt and Hollyman point out that the word lists Forster and Cook collected as tokens of "the language of Balad" are more accurately elements from a set of local ways of speaking. They assert "Aliki [i.e. areekee] is, of course, a borrowing from Ouvea", and identify six other words as Ouvean from among the fifty words collected and given an English gloss on the Cook visit (Haudricourt and Hollyman 1960:219, 225). This is a truncated analysis of where lexical items originate, and focuses on the “borrowing” as a sign of a recent or more shallow connection between New Caledonia and Ouvea as the final step in a deeper and earlier series of connections signified by lexical similarities and differences which are used to reconstructively tie together the entire Oceanic region using aliki and allied variants. Areekee is 127

of course not limited to the littoral of New Caledonia and Ouvea. Talking about "the language" of "this population" at Balade (Rozier1990:10) perhaps captures Cook's and Forester's ideas about the linguistic unity of island communities and their fixity,5 but offer little analytic insight as a sign of the social life and history of New Caledonia. What do linguistic elements other than Ouvean "borrowings" tell us about social dynamics in New Caledonia, for example the general plurality of ways of speaking which are today counted as distinct languages and dialects? What of populations and communities, and their interactions and ways of speaking? In 1843 the population of New Caledonia is usually estimated to have been between 20,000 and 40,000 persons, but recent research and unearthed evidence is used by some to argue that it was much higher at the time of Cook's 1774 visit. Archaeologist Christophe Sand demonstrates using aerial photos of pre-contact taro fields in New Caledonia which are much more expansive and elaborate that would ever be needed to support a social world of only 40,000 people. Sand uses this and other corroborating material to argue that the pre-European demographic landscape of New Caledonia was much more densely populated than has up till now been acknowledged—proposing instead hundreds of thousands of people lived in the territory, something akin to the highlands of Papua New Guinea. Sand also argues that this social world was evidently organized in ways that would support large-scale cultivation projects (as opposed to individual, clan, or family plots) suggesting hierarchical complexity of the sort that other anthropologists and archaeologists have not hypothesized. When I asked questions of Sand’s presentation using examples of hierarchy in the archeological

5

In Batavia[Jakarta] while making word lists with an informant from Madagascar, Forster realizes that a linguistic continuity exists across the vast linguistic area now called Austronesia. Rather than hypothesizing that this linguistic similarity might be due to a history travel and migration, this man who was in the process of circumnavigating the globe conjectures that perhaps similarities of language are due to similarities of climate. (Thomas 2003).

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record of Hawaii and elsewhere in the Pacific (for instances vast differences in nutrition evidenced in skeletal remains within the same population) he replied that “Not all hierarchy looks the same” (personal communication September 2008). Another line of argument is offered, however, by Father Rougeyron who reports to have witnessed intentional overproduction of yam crops in New Caledonia (Rozier 1990:114), which suggests a similar need for a nuanced understanding of production and consumption as that shown in Robert Brightman’s ethnographic study of overkill practices by native North Americans (Brightman 1993) and Malinowski’s account of magic for overproduction in the service of competition between men in tuber production in the Trobriands in Coral Gardens and their Magic (Malinowski 1935). From an archaeological perspective of pre-history, Patrick Kirch offers no definitive solution to this type of question about populations and resources in precontact and immediate post-contact Oceania, and instead cautions on the side of pointing out the indeterminacy of the archaeological record (Kirch 1994). “High” linguistic diversity at time of contact is in my understanding not a function of the isolation of groups of speakers from one another, but instead can demonstrate their close interaction. The Marists eventually came to realize that while every valley in New Caledonia might seem to have its own language, almost everyone they encountered knew what their European categories told them were multiple distinct languages. The closeness of diverse ways of speaking in New Caledonia, for analysis, should be taken to constitute a linguistic unit that exceeds the boundaries often given to individual discrete languages, which are unfortunately made formally discrete in scholarly presentations such as dictionaries, lexicons and grammars that later emblematized their distinctness (for example, consider the present day formalized distinction of Faga Ouvea and Faka'Uvea discussed above). These standardized text objects 129

claim ostensibly to reproduce a social reality, a unit of communication via language, but in doing so they fail utterly to capture the actual textures and interpenetrations of groups of communities of speakers. In this regard—social units of communication—I conjecture that the linguistic evidence from New Caledonia supports an argument that the recognized “linguistic diversity” of the island indexes a history of close interaction rather than an isolation of groups of speakers and family units both internal to the island and with other islands beyond the confines of its lagoon. It is only in certain Western romantic imaginaries that small mountain villages grow their own languages in splendid isolation from one another. Yet through a process of differentiation6 speakers are supposed to have been able to turn one mother language into twenty-six ostensibly “distinct” languages. The evident conclusion to this point is that language boundaries should not be mistaken for the boundaries of social and organizational activities, or the limits of movement of people. Beside the Poumas of TEA BWEOON clan, it is worth considering chief Bouarate (i.e. Bwaxat per Shineberg) from Hienghiène with whom Viard could communicate in "Wallisian," and examples where the Teacher Ta'unga speaks "Ouvean" with a chief from Tiwaka, and encounters Mare islanders when he lived in the far south of New Caledonia in 1843. The social distinction today is still salient between and among Kanak Melanesians which distinguish clans of “people of the land” and clans of “people of the sea.” For example, there is a division of labor reported to me by an upper level manager at SLN that the workers who drive Ore haulers down from the mines in the mountains self identify from clans considered “people of

6

The linguistic diversity of New Caledonia is not born out of the isolation of groups of speakers, even though linguistic homogeneity is indeed often a product of conquest and administration and other ‘full-contact’ interactions. A plurality of languages is not necessarily a sign of an absence of interaction and contact.

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the land” whereas the workers who load ore ships self identify as coming from clans of “people of the sea.” What else became of the pre-contact population and its dynamics such as the distinction above between land and sea people? Perhaps starting from the instance of Cook's ten day sojourn in 1774, it is commonly assumed that there was an enormous die-back of the people of New Caledonia which parallels similar events elsewhere in the Pacific. If the upper end of a conservative estimate of a population of 40,000 is accepted, by the time of the first plausibly accurate population measure in the late 1800s the indigenous Melanesian population had fallen to less than 20,000 people. What happened in between? During the D’Entrecasteaux visit in 1793, Captain of the d'Auribeau recorded the surprisingly "miserable" condition of the inhabitants of the area, some as "veritable skeletons," which was distinctly at odds with Cook's account nearly twenty years, earlier suggests a significant change in material conditions had taken place in the interim7 (Rozier 1990:18). Bronwen Douglas addresses multiple theories of the cause of the reported distress at Balade, dismissing for lack of evidence an "invasion theory" developed by Jean Guiart (1963) in which Ouveans were conquering outsiders who set up the area of Balade as a feudal area ruled by stranger aliki (Douglas 1970:185), even as there is explicit evidence of significant Ouvean presence in accounts from as early as 1793 (Rozier 1990:19) and implicit evidence present in the word lists from Cook’s visit in 1774. This raises a common question: can the area of Balade in the far North, and Hienghiène in the East Coast be usefully counted as a tributary area of Ouvea, ruled by aliki up to the 1840s 7

Gicuqel proposes Cook's trade objects "introduced vice" of theft to the island (quoted in Rozier 1990:20), while later British writer suggest the French bad behavior accounts for their very different experience from Cook's. The reason for resisting that an epidemic took place is likely because these authors are performing the Anglo-Franco rivalry: the French writer seek to blame the British and vice versa as though the Europeans uniquely had the agency to effect bad change. Disease would take away the narrative structure in which agency is an opportunity for blame.

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as Guiart suggested and Douglas rejected? Before the point is dismissed out of hand, this statement would perhaps be true from an Ouvean perspective at the time, and from another perspective it is saliently remembered (at least in August 1969) that the word Aliki comes from the sea-people: "The people at Hiènghiène, Pouébo, Yambé and Balade all say that aliki is not a word of their languages, but of the language of Ouvea"(Douglas 1970:187). Although Douglas’ methodology is perhaps problematic, her point is well taken: these differences are a lived reality, manifest through aspects of social organization like chiefly adoption and oral histories. While European categories of interaction such as conquest, invasion, and tribute might not be a fully accurate or adequate means to account for the presence and chief-like status in New Caledonia of people from over the horizon, there is an actual connection and relationship that likely has a set of nuanced and specific indigenous meanings and protocols which in ethnographic meaning cannot be cleanly subsumed under the European category of tributary relations without losing the key motives and relationship which defined these connections (this is an issue for later research and analysis). The earliest written evidence from New Caledonia shows as a matter of course that a relative density of culturally specific meaningful movement and connections existed between New Caledonia’s mainland and the Loyalty Islands and the Isle of Pines. The diary and recollections written by the teacher Ta'unga's gives evidence of what look like erratic tributarylike relations between the South of New Caledonia and Isle of Pines. Also at his place of residence at Tuauru there were two people who were probably Mare islanders (Ta'unga 1968:49) and a man identified as Unihini the chief of Tiwaka (perhaps Unin of the Pwaola clan of Poindimié Guiart speculates) traveled down the East Coast of New Caledonia and visited the hamlet of Tuauru. Moreover this chief of Tiwaka "frequently spoke to [Ta’unga] in the language 132

of Uea [either Uvea or Ouvea]"(Ta'unga 1968:71). The chiefly Vendegou family of the Isle of Pines is in turn historically tied to Lifou “four generations back” as reckoned in the 1840s around Ta’unga’s sojourn, showing a series of vectors of chiefly connection, which I offer here an as indication of the continuing density of social movements in and around New Caledonia in the mid 19th century. While relations perhaps of a “tributary” nature might have existed in certain instances, there are clearly other and perhaps equally dense relationships of a completely nontributary character which might be forgotten by focusing on things that look to Europeans like tribute. Turning towards to Loyalty islands, the supposed origin of the tributary overlords of the South of New Caledonia who live in the Isle of Pines, R.K. Howe offers a compelling quote attributed to Chief Bula (senior) of Lifou from an 1861 publication. This snippet indicates the contours of the historical migrations of people from elsewhere to the Loyalties, even if it might be a fabrication by the missionary and not a reflection of any words Bula (senior) ever actually uttered, it does not sound like all outsiders should be mistaken fro stranger kings. In all past generations Lifu has had a good name. Lifu has always been kind to strangers. You see these Tongans sitting here? Go on shore, and you will see the graves of their fathers who were drifted hither, and lived and died among us. Go on shore, and you will see the children of Tanna men [i.e.Vanuatu]. Their fathers are all dead and buried, but the children live. (Howe 1977:38). While the claims about “tribute” and its meaning and context are easily brought in to question, what we do know is that although Laferrière describes the passengers of all other pirogues bowing or sitting for Tea Pouma in 1843 as he approached the Bucéphale holding his piece of tapa, after living in New Caledonia for almost two years, in 1845 Father Rougeyron concludes “the chiefs don’t have any influence, for they are too numerous. Hardly a village or a hamlet doesn’t have its own chief” (Rougeyron to Colin in Rozier 1990:115). These Caledonians are 133

strange chiefs only by European measures, and it follows they cannot be accurately described or measured in terms of feudal or tribute collecting European nobility. However, as an ethnography of French sovereignty, this is exactly what happened as I will show in the next section.

Caledonian “Salic” Government and the French “New Society” With the nine shots of possession fired by Laferrière as a salute for Douarre (similarly done for Pompallier when he disembarked French State ships in New Zealand before British annexation), a question can be asked: what was actually being “protected” by the new protectorate? What were the shots a sign of, not in the secret instructions from the Minister, but in Laferrière’s actual use? What was the “benevolent” native “government” in New Caledonia after this protectorate was established, as it was understood by the Marists and French Officials? As shown in chapter two in the case of Tahiti, the extension of French sovereignty can be officially justified by the failure of native government to protect French subjects and Catholic missionaries in particular. The French measure of government in New Caledonia in 1844 is provided in the language of the recognition document discussed above as written by Laferrière and Viard, and signed by individuals who they identified as the “Kings” of the whole island of New Caledonia. What precisely was kingship in this context thought to entail as a form of government? After two years in New Caledonia Father Rougeyron writes to the founder of the Marist Order, Father Colin, on October 1845. He says that terms of governance by chiefs, “Salic Law is in vigor in the country”(quoted in Rozier 1990:115)—meaning that there are numerous small authorities who derive their legitimacy through inheritance of title by males (“agnatic” in anthropological parlance). Salic law for these missionaries is the pre-Roman tribal law of the 134

Franks which Clovis had had written down in Latin in 507 as the Pactus legis Salicae after his foundational conversion to Christianity. In the Law’s mythological trajectory through eminent French Christians, it was further redacted under Charlemagne’s authority in 802-803 as the lex Salica (Rivers 1986:2,4,7). Salic law thereby is historically indexical of two eminent Christians that figure prominently in French origin stories: Clovis and Charlemagne, and this supposedly is the same law naturally found in New Caledonia. Rougeyron appears to have perceived Salic law as both a historical creation of the feudal Christian order, but also an instantiation of a natural and perhaps universal form of pre-Roman yet Christian aristocratic tribal governance by nobles. Rather than a cognitive dissonance, this makes perfect sense in a France-centered Christian universal civilization: history is the universal made manifest. In particular, the content of the Salic Law from these Marist’s perspective seems to relate to a system of government based on male-only land ownership and inheritance. In Rougeyron’s letter, he makes no effort to define Salic Law for his recipient, suggesting a transparency in its meaning among French Marists. He specifically focuses on the most stereotyped characteristic often given to Salic law: that it restricts inheritance of lands and titles to male heirs. Hence, perhaps importantly for correspondence between members of a religious order, I can conclude that he means to say that New Caledonia is not under the same unwritten aristocratic and feudal laws as those found in Tahiti and Wallis where women could become Queens,8 and the sign of Salic law is a tendency towards male aristocratic rule and agnatic inheritance like that found in France.

8

There is a long list of disputes over the character of Salic law, specifically its attribution to Clovis (e.g. Rivers 1986:4), its agnatic character and exclusion of women (e.g. Christine de Pizan [Hanley 1997]), in addition to its socio-legal study by Henri Lévy-Bruhl (1922), and comparative use by Sir Henry Maine (1883). However, the meaning for Marists in the mid 1800s seems transparent and uncontroversially transparent among them.

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Situated in terms of Francois Guizot’s academic writing from the 1830s (here quoting from an 1859 re-edition), French “Civilization” is co-emergent with Salic Law, the latter being the first legal instrument in the long process of “announcing a new social order,” a period of “confused fermentation” of the origins of a “new society” out of which “our society” and all modern progress and its forms of government eventually emerge (Guizot 1859: 230, 231). Guizot points out that the Salic Law was essentially a penal code,9 and thereby he takes penal codes as “the first effort towards the perfection of civil life”(1859: 245). Even as Guizot remarks that Salic Law’s importance is highly exaggerated (1859: 232), he concludes that the Salic Law, or in light of its penal code like character he reads into it, he then shifts into saying that the “Salic Code” fuses the Germanic social-state and the Roman social-state “to the benefit of a new society”(1859: 258) which is modern France. In other words, for Guizot the Christian foundation of Salic society is found in the penal code, while for the Marists in New Caledonia it is property and inheritance of landed titles. These differences matter: for those in a religious vocation versus those in a ministerial post, the Christian history of France is not identical in content. What I mean is clarified by a letter Father Rougeyron wrote on the 3rd of September 1846, almost a year after his first mention of Salic law. Rougeyron now has lived at Balade for almost two and a half years, and presents a more full-bodied description of this form of government, under the heading entitled “Caledonian Government: Salic Law.” He was apparently writing with an audience of a general French or European readership in mind and not just Father Colin (Rozier 1990:174-175). Rougeyron seems to think that the key characteristic

9

Essentially a Salic “penal code” as opposed to a “law” as characterized in Guizot’s review of the literature (1859:244, 257).

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that outside readers need to know about Caledonian native government is that “The Salic law exists in New Caledonia as it does in France.” Note that he does not use the past tense: Salic law still exists in France. His description of the niceties of rights of first born males and females in terms of leadership of tribes, and inheritance of chieftainships and lands might suggest otherwise at first glance, but he writes that just like France, children inherit their father’s “noblesse” in the form of “noble titles” and for an example he gives an example of how the “cadet” branch of the royal family fades from rights over time. In this presentation, New Caledonia is given a tribal government no different in foundation from the aristocratic side of the constitutional monarchy currently ruling the Kingdom of France, only minus the constitution. As Rougeyron concludes his presentation on the Salic government of the Caledonian tribes, he offers an example of a divergence from his understanding of French Salic Law, indicating that it is not quite the same as the law he imagines operating in Europe. Despite these laws of government, it happens, be it through extinction of the royal family, or by revolution or by choice or otherwise, that foreigners might be elected by the principal chiefs. Ordinarily, they take an adopted child, since it’s a well received usage to adopt someone for a son. This adoption completed, the individual becomes chief as if he was the true child of the family. (quoted in Rozier 1990:175) If Rougeyron is to be believed, the agency of the stranger chiefs the “people of the sea”—the Poumas and others who we are told come from Ouvea—is thereby derived from their adoption of children belonging to an already empowered noble family line, not through conquest or settlement or intermarriage but through taking the children of others as their own. The take-home message for Rougeyron from this variation in Salic conventions was clear enough: he had the mission pay to adopt two children as their own, which became their heirs in this system of property ownership and also would integrate them as a “true child” of the family 137

despite their foreignness. This is a structure of the mental conjunctures inside Rougeyron’s subjective view of the world, and makes the adoption plausible from his perspective (there is a shortage of information with which to form a similarly detailed and plausible description of what these children’s actual parents thought about this actual specific set of adoptions by these specific men of the sea. Plausible explanations can be built from the general ethnographies of adoptive practices which were later compiled, but I would argue that nothing mechanistic led to the adoptions or made them locally plausible). Since Salic Law is manifest in land and regimes of ownership of property, the form of government the Marists attribute to their “hosts” can be shown through the ideas about land they attribute to the chiefs: In this way, we learn that The land does not belong to [chiefs], but they have some right to it; they lift a type of tribute. Each individual recognizes very well the limits of their fields. They give or cede their fields as they please. In this way you see that our insulars recognize the right of property. (quoted in Rozier 1990:174). Rougeyron describes what he takes to be a feudal tributary land system—not necessarily extant, but described nonetheless. He does not tell us if the fields of which individuals know the limits are irrigation based, or are swidden or shifting cultivation areas. If the latter, he does not tell if the “property” as he describes it continues to exist as lands lay fallow. He nonetheless also tells us that they have the right to property in addition to government. This line of presentation allows Rougeyron to conclude that the “happiness and liberty so praised by the philosophers of the past century” is found fully manifest with these “savages”(in Rozier 1990:184). This is a somewhat opportunist attack on liberal ideals of government and the French revolution, which nicely show in its rhetorical deployment that it is very easy for Rougeyron to argue that there are allied Christian values and noble government among the 138

people of New Caledonia, but not in modern civil government. Rougeyron finishes his clever attack by saying that like the “great nations” with liberal constitutions, “New Caledonia recognizes the liberty of cults, or rather the liberty to not believe in anything”(quote in Rozier 1990:137)—implying that liberal toleration, rather than a great thing, is actual a form of barbarism. In terms of a consequential argument, Rougeyron has just argued that he and the other Marists are without need for additional civil protection by the French State in the interior of New Caledonia. The native government exists, and is adequate and need not be replaced through full French annexation as it meets its minimal requirement of protecting the missionaries under a regime of tolerance. What else was Rougeyron up to? In practical terms, the two children adopted by the mission, Louis Tadinan and Raphaël Diamane, were by Salic Law’s measures the rightful heirs to the Marist’s earthly possessions and properties (Rozier 1990:145). At the same time, according to French civil laws written after 1789, with which these missionaries were surely familiar since it had already become as issue in 1842 in Honolulu in a case requiring French state intervention, “French law forbade [Catholic] missionaries to hold land in their own right”(Blue 1933:97). The Marists in New Caledonia wrote up land transfer contracts for areas that were ceded or conceded to them10 (reproduced in Rozier 1990:134, 243) which are the instruments by which the landed “interests of the mission” are thereby defined and materialized, while their two 10

We learn from Keys readings of archival papers and correspondence that chief Bouarate of Hienghène knew "Wallisian" and allowed Viard to baptize one of his children. He then pointing out a yam field to Viard saying "That very nice [crop] is my child's, and out of love for you he makes you a gift of it" (Keys 1968:44). When Viard and others went to Hienghène by a small boat, he claims seventy or eighty of the chiefs men harvested the crop and placed it in the boat for them. Over subsequent years the Marist’s writings suggest both they and Bouarate considered the land as having been transferred, and Bouarate insisted repeatedly that a mission station should be established at Hienghène—although no deed is written in this case.

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adopted native children become the legal holders and heirs of their material interests—even as in this location most later ethnography indicates that land “ownership” is figured matrilineally. One conclusion is that the Marists misunderstood local land conventions, or more likely in my estimation, the Marist adoption was polysemic in motive: from a French consideration, it protects the material interests of the Church from a potential conflict with other Frenchmen who might seek to enforce post-revolutionary liberal doctrines which prohibit land ownership in the name of Catholic clergy. The day-to-day and practical relationship with the French government was significantly less manifest than might be expected. The first point of conflict between the Marists and local chiefs occurred when Bouéone Pouma, the son of the Aliki Pouma and heritor to the kingdom of Koko (per Laferrière’s characterization), was accused by Bishop Douarre of mocking god with impunity when holding a large festivity or pilou as an opportunity to settle blood debts. Worsening the offense of impunity, the Bishop says Bouéone Pouma had stolen a woman from a neighboring tribe (Rozier 1990:142). The chief took no recourse against the missionaries at that time, even as the Marists were not armed with guns and there was no regiment stationed with them. The protectorate had little consequences for instituting French “government” in New Caledonia, aside from the Marist’s insistence that Salic government and law did indeed exist, and that property rights and lives of subjects of foreign sovereigns would be protected. The conditions resemble Hobbes’ argument scaled back to its basic mantra: protection of property is the basis of sovereign government. The life and death aspects of French sovereign protection was apparently exercised over the few other European-origin foreigners who might appear in New Caledonia. In July 1846, Captain Richards of the Marian Watson who was engaged by the Marists at one point apparently 140

gave guns to chief Bouarate of Hienghène in exchange for sandal wood against the explicit orders of Bishop Douarre (Rozier 1990:155). It seems hardly a coincidence that it was only recently learned by Richards in conversation with the Captain of the French naval ship the Seine that the protectorate had been officially revoked by Guizot’s Ministries in France over diplomatic issues with England. Reading between the lines of archival texts, Rozier concludes that Richards learned that the protectorate was lifted, decided the Marist’s requests had no official backing, and felt free to trade in firearms. The guns Bouarate attained were subsequently used on neighboring groups. An Englishman named Robert Sutton who appeared at Balade on a pirogue 29th of March 1846, coming from Lifou where he had been for six weeks, carried a gun for protection, and spoke good French (Rozier 1990:146, 148). Rougeyron reports from Sydney in September 1847, after the fall of the mission and their retreat to Australia, that Sutton was killed at Hienghiene apparently by Bouarate and that a number of other English had been killed in various tribes in New Caledonia (Rozier 1990:210)—perhaps a reference to Ebrill and the other problems encountered by sandalwood ships at the Isle of Pines.

Life and Death and Joint Stock At the End of French Sovereignty Due to the décalage of being half the world away, Guizot received notice of Dupetit Thouars’ full and total annexation of Tahiti in November 1843 only by February 1844. Unlike the earlier decision taken by Dupetit-Thouars after a conversation with Consul Moernehout to establish a French protectorate over Tahiti, this time Guizot was not even remotely pleased with the Admiral’s actions. Guizot writes, “the government considered the Admiral’s action violent and irregular and at once disavowed it by restoring our simple protectorate”(Guizot and Guizot de Witt [nd]:353). My argument is that this disavowal comes because annexation is not part of 141

the point d’appui approach which only through the colonial method of protectorates can make room within the French liberal constitutional kingdom for official Catholicism free from civil interference. The “violence” of Dupetit-Thouars is a pretext. Guizot’s interests at this point were officially to preserve the fragile beginnings of a working agreement with the British government, particularly the cabinet of Sir Robert Peel. Working together, “The good sense and friendly intentions of the ministers on both sides, who had been specially appointed to treat the affair, succeeded in avoiding the complications it might have involved” (Guizot and Guizot de Witt [nd]:353). What he means is that the extremely friendly tenor of the correspondence between Lord Aberdeen and Guizot was not destroyed over Tahiti’s annexation (the correspondence between the two ministers is collected in Broglie 2006). To achieve this outcome, Guizot’s government had decided to publicly retract the simple protectorates France held over three other locations in the Pacific: the Gambiers (including Nuka-Hiva), Futuna, and Wallis. Aberdeen knows about these retractions, describing them in a letter to Guizot dated the 16th of September 1845 as the “three independent islands on which the protectorate flag had been raised; and which had been taken down by the natives” (Broglie 2006:173). It is important to note two features of this statement: the agents who took down the flags in Aberdeen’s version of events are the “natives” while no mention is made of New Caledonia. From the perspective presented here, it makes sense for Guizot to graciously offer to take down the French flag from three places whose entire populations had been officially converted to Catholicism: the colonial objective of the point d’appui was reached in Wallis, Futuna, and Nuku-Hiva and the state would officially withdraw without a threat to the missions. New Caledonia was less secure and still unconverted.

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Absolutely no mention is made of New Caledonia in other diplomatic correspondence, and the French flag was still hoisted by the Marists to signal ships as late as 1846. To reiterate a point I made earlier, New Caledonia’s 1843 annexation is nowhere mentioned in Guizot's public memoires and diplomatic letters11 (e.g. Guizot 2002). Even as Guizot did not have ministerial control over Marine ministry activities, the overall points d’appui strategy he called for in 1843 was a “formula” for colonial expansion, planned as a global network of safe harbors rather than conquest of vast territories that would require management. This strategy was fully within Guizot’s agenda, and the policy decision to follow his route was presented as a victory by him over the colonial officers of the Marine Ministry who desired territory (Brookes 1941: 110-111). Within this strategy favored by Guizot, missionaries such as those Marists in New Caledonia would be responsible for the territorial work of “civilization” earlier seen as the domain of naval and colonial officers. This is why annexation is undesirable for the Guizot government. At the level of the Guizot cabinet, the government made a documented decision to quickly and discretely withdraw the French flag from New Caledonia (Jore 1959:291) of which Guizot was surely complicit since it had a lot to do with preemptively seeking not to further aggravate British public opinion over events in Tahiti (Jore 1959:290-291), and make Aberdeen’s job more difficult. It seems that Aberdeen had misunderstood the French colonial strategy and how religion fits into its legal apparatus: civil annexation by France would have actually made things easier for the British Protestant missionaries in Tahiti.

11

In correspondence with Lord Aberdeen, Guizot shows a lack of transparency over what his government did and did not know about the protectorates extended over Wallis and Futuna in November 1842 by captain Mallet (e.g. Jore 1959:314), made curious by the fact that Captain Mallet was officially dispatched to the Pacific to settle a land dispute in Honolulu over details of lay vs. missionary land ownership under French law (Blue 1933:98), which he performed in August 1842.

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The Catholic character of French Pacific expansions under Louis-Philippe and Guizot is inescapable, but a reflex to try and elide the agencies of the State and that of the Marists seems to misunderstand their relationship, as well as how their particular interests as institutions might not coincide. There was, however, a clear program of official assistance to the mission up to and after the time the protectorate was quietly retracted without official publication. French ships, and the Rhin in particular were irregularly made available for the Catholic priests' service. In 1845 the Mission at Balade received revitalization from Tahiti and Sydney often via the French Kingdom’s corvette Rhin . On the 28th of September 1845, it arrived at Balade under Captain Bérard carrying large dimension timber for construction, a year's supply of food (flour in particular), and copious enough amounts of altar wine to allow them to hold mass "every day" (Keys 1968:45). The ship was also Viard's first opportunity to leave, and return to his post at the Vicariate in New Zealand (from which he had been formally on loan to Wallis since 1841). He left Balade on the sixth of October 1845 for Sydney aboard the Rhin, where he intersected with Bishop Pompallier who was visiting Archbishop Polding. Captain Bérard and the Rhin would later in 1846 take Pompallier on the first leg of his trip to Rome (Pompallier 1888:83), a trip from which he returned in 1850. However, missions were secondary to military orders, and even among the small number of Catholic mission stations in the Pacific, New Caledonia was the last station visited on revitalization rotations. Bishop Douarre seemed convinced that Bishop Bataillon in Wallis was keeping for himself supplies and new missionaries who should have been sent to New Caledonia: Douarre writes that by the time ships got to Balade, all that was left was what the other mission stations did not want (Rozier 1990), for instance a copious supply of large dimension timbers.

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Within the context of Douarre’s discontent with his supply chain managed by French state ships, he proposed creation of a new order which would undo the dependent relationship between missions and French state. This was already being implemented by associates of Bishop Douarre in France. Bishop Douarre… planted the seed of his enthusiasm for Catholicism and France in the Pacific in the minds of a young naval lieutenant named Marceau, a disciple of Saint-Simon, and of M. Marziou....The stock company which finally was evolved in 1845 under the name Société Française de l'Océanie was actuated by a curious mélange of motives social, patriotic, religious, and commercial. Stockholders were to receive only 5% interest....The Oceanians were to receive simultaneously the benefits of Christian principles and of European civilization. At each archipelago where a mission was established, a store would be set up under the management of Europeans of high repute who would care for the temporal affairs which in the past had adsorbed the time and energy of the missionaries. (Brookes 1941:175) The SFO's first ship the Arche d'Alliance sailed in 1845. Before it arrived in New Caledonia the French flag was taken down from the mission in 1846 when captain Leconte of the Seine brought official word that the government had reversed its decision to extend its sovereignty to New Caledonia. The State-based naval assistance seems from this point on to be replaced by the commercially based SFO. The first mission in New Caledonia ended badly one year later, in 1847 before the SFO was a fully functioning means to autonomize the missions from State assistance. A series of food shortages and escalating disagreements with groups in the area of Balade coincided with a the missionaries’ exhaustion over repeated failures to be adequately and regularly supplied via Bataillon in Wallis who had his own mission station to take care of, and State ships which had more pressing concerns in the Pacific and with Russia. In missionary and native discourse, significant evidence exists that suggests both sides had growing impressions that baptism was often quickly followed by death (Bullard 2000:40-41). 145

From the French missionaries’ perspective it is incorrect to say that the first Catholic mission was “chased” or "fled" from New Caledonia in 1847, since it was their own decision to finally abandon the mission stations at Balade and Pouebo (for statements to the contrary, in which native agency is emphasized see Clifford 1992 and Faivre et al. [1955]:87). Yes, the missions were under attack and aggression by people who were sometimes their “friends” and sometimes their “enemies” but the missionaries themselves were the ones who set fire to the mission’s buildings to keep them from being pillaged, and when the Fathers, brothers, catechists and converts were all picked up by a French warship in admittedly dire conditions while holding out at Pouebo after abandoning Balade. The Marists decided to board the ship after discussing the matter, agreeing with full cognizance that under current conditions the New Caledonia mission was thoroughly unsustainable. They claim they declined the captain’s offer to revenge the attacks at Balade in which an immobile brother had been left behind in a burning building by his peers and gave his life as a “martyr” (they cast themselves as the agents of even their own murders and the deaths of their peers). Meanwhile in the captain’s separate and official report he contrarily suggests that he made significant reprisals at Balade on behalf of the missionaries before sailing for Sydney, a booming metropolis where in retreat from New Caledonia the Marists found comfortable (if crowded) lodging chez Bishop Polding while they decided what to do next. In rhetorical fashion in their letters to superiors, the missionaries’ decision to destroy and abandon the two mission stations at Balade and Pouebo is coupled with their claim that they chose not to fight back, leading to the conclusion that final blame for the failure of the mission should firmly laid at the feet of Bishop Bataillon in an analysis made by Claude Rozier (1990). He notes as evidence that the mission station was not given material support reserved for them, 146

even after Douarre confronted Bataillon over it in writing. Rozier does not thereby give determining agency to natives who attacked, nor to the French state forces who might have upheld a protectorate regime for the support of the mission. Instead, Rozier comes closest to presenting the mission’s failure as an administrative problem due to the organization of the vicariate. Rougeyron and the other Fathers seem to think similarly as they sift through the aftermath of their failure, and as they planned for what would be needed for the next effort: rockwall enclosed compounds, heavy iron gates, and rifles “for hunting.” From a fall-back position in Sydney, the Marist Fathers minus Bishop Douarre, who happened to take a trip to France at the time they abandoned the island, immediately made efforts to establish new mission stations on the island in areas other than Balade. Like the LMS protestants they too considered Port Saint Vincent based on the 1803 reports of the Buffalo before discarding the idea, and tried to establish a station in the far South at Yaté (walking distance from where the LMS teacher Ta'unga was based from 1842-45). Areas in the south were likewise easily accessible to the relatively frequented Isle of Pines. This new circumstance allowed the SFO’s Arche d'Alliance to carry Isle of Pine sandalwood to Shanghai during its 1850-1853 rotation (Brookes 1941:176). The Marists managed eventually to reopen what became a permanent mission in Balade in 1851 with the aid of local converts whom the Marists had sent to Futuna for lack of a better option (Pisier 1981:Planche 20; Douyère 1992:43; Rozier 1990). In the period of 1844 to 1853 the Catholic mission project in New Caledonia suffered when formal French State sovereignty was lifted in 1846, but the Marists were eventually able to re-establish stations on their own without French State assistance and protection, once financial

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backing and revitalization was provided privately by the SFO company and the vicariate had been reorganized in a way that made New Caledonia its own self directing interest. Catholic expansions in New Caledonia were explicitly in competition with those of the London Missionary Society, but they had often incomplete knowledge of one another’s activities and locations. To situate these other religious groups in the narrative presented above, we learned from Ta’unga’s journals in 1842 chief Ti Touru Vendegou of the Isle of Pines expelled Protestants from his island and they were killed and burned when they returned on Ebrill’s ship. From that initial setback the LMS successful established a permanent Protestant mission in 1848 to the east in the Loyalty Islands when the chief of Maré, Nidoïsh Naisseline, was converted. His conversion was followed in 1851/1852 by a principal chief of Lifou named Bula (Douyère 1992:41, Howe1977: 38), and from that point on European missionaries came to assist the Polynesian teachers in missionizing the Loyalties, moving on to the island of Ouvea as well. Instead of reviewing in further detail the history of contact of the Loyalty Islands, since this history up to French annexation in the 1860s is largely outside the scope up this dissertation yet crucially important to an understanding of the present, I direct the reader to K.R. Howe’s The Loyalty Islands: A history of Culture Contacts 1840-1900 (1977), in particular what he described in the late 1850s as “a now thoroughly predictable pattern” in the Loyalties by which rival chiefs to those allied with the LMS Protestants would invite Catholic Marists to their islands (Howe 1977:49).

Epilogue: Catholicism and the Second Coming of The French Republic Guizot fled France in 1848 when his government fell, and went into exile in England. One curious oblique reference exists to another possible annexation project in an 1847 letter sent 148

from consul Patrice Dillon to Guizot (while en route to Hawaii), and intercepted by the British in 1848. Jean Brookes describe the content of the letter, which proposes that an unnamed island, fifteen day’s sail from Hawaii, could serve as a point for the France-to-China trade via Cape Horn. The consul describes it as the “most important” [potentially ambiguous in the French: importance, or size?], and that Bishop Louis Désiré Maigret of Honolulu informs him is still unclaimed and its population inoffensive and unmissionized. The consul proposes visiting this unnamed island and claiming it in the name of France as “Guizot Island” (Brookes 1941:178). Brookes does not speculate about which island this might be, although the plausible candidate for both “most important” and “unmissionized” would be Rapa Nui (Easter Island) which is around 3,800 nautical miles distant from Honolulu, What this letter firmly demonstrates is that when it comes to Pacific islands and France, Guizot is the person to pay attention to, and he more than likely knew what was happening both officially and unofficially in the region up to the time he went into exile in 1848. It should be remembered that the Catholic project in Oceania was an instantiation of his civilization concept made real, not with the Vatican as the center and agents, but rather France. This last example reminds us that Catholic missionaries and their interests were instrumental in all attempts to extend French sovereignty in the 1830s and 1840s as shown in materials I presented above—with the Picpus in Nuka-Hiva and Tahiti, and Pompallier and the Marists in New Zealand, Wallis, Futuna, and lastly New Caledonia, not even mentioning Honolulu in 1827 (Blue 1933). With the exception of the naval forces at Tahiti and Nuka-Hiva, the French State’s sovereignty in these places and actual on-island presence was manifest by little more than a small Catholic outpost with a French flag used to signal passing ships, which possessing the prerogative to summon French naval power to defend and revenge its interests 149

(Person 1953:159). Jore tries to argue that the relationship was not so unitary and tight, by pointing out that the Marists used Moerenhout’s unarmed Raiatea, SFO vessels, and other private and nonviolent means to ply their religious vocation in the Pacific. I add to this tempered perspective that Guizot’s ideas and Marist ideas about Christianity and Civilization do not necessarily correspond, as in the Salic Law example—yet these details do not seem to undermine a very valid impression that Guizot’s state and the Marists’ mission are wed to one another until death. What then of the tight relationship between French Catholicism and the French State after the Republican anti-clerical revolution of 1848? During Pompallier’s trip to Rome from 18461850, he was clearly aware of the extent and form of "protectorate" governments in the Pacific but also the condition of the missions in Wallis, Futuna, and New Caledonia. In this context the Bishop made a written presentation suggesting Bishops should govern their flock, both secular and clergy (see chapter two). This lead to a schism with Father Colin, the founder of the Marist Order of Fathers, and Pompallier and his Vicariate ceased to be associated with the Marist order (Pompallier was himself never formally Marist, although his vicariate was entirely staffed with Marist Fathers). Also during Pompallier's visit to Europe, he was undoubtedly keenly aware that there was a revolt in France, and the constitutional monarchy of his old patron King LouisPhilippe, and his avid supporter Minister Guizot was out of power and replaced with a secularist and fully liberalist parliamentary regime. Divorce seems to be the solution. Pompallier was personally tied to the reign of Louis Philippe, as shown by his audience with the royal couple in 1836, and the particular honor he received from the French government in 1844 when he was decorated Chevalier de la Legion d’Honneur, (Cole 1957:38), an award for civil service to the French nation. With the overthrow 150

of King Louis-Philippe’s constitutional monarchy and the establishment of the Second Republic, when Pompallier returned to New Zealand he penned two letters on the 5th and 8th of October 1850 to Governor Sir George Grey requesting that he be naturalized as a British subject, explaining that According to the divine rules of Christianism, the Roman Catholic Bishops ought to obey, for the natural life, the civil authorities and the civil laws of the countries where they exercise their spiritual labours…(quotes in Keys 1957:275) This was not Pompallier’s preferred relation. He felt civil authorities ought to obey for the natural life the divine rules of Roman Catholic Bishops. Regardless, he followed the Vatican’s official line. However, nothing suggests that in order to do so he needed to fully naturalize as a Briton in order to follow British law.12 The Legislative Council of New Zealand approved Pompallier’s October 1850 request on the 17th of July 1851. Father Viard was naturalized a British subject by an Act of Parliament on 18 August 1858, effective retroactively to the 1st of January 1850 (Keys 1968:118). I have seen no explanation for why Pompallier’s request was honored by the Council and Viard’s was not. Viard remained a Marist despite Pompallier’s schism with the order, and was named Bishop of Wellington in a vicariate separate from Pompallier’s. While Lillian Keys takes the motivation in Pompallier’s letters at face value, his and Viard’s full motive for naturalization is perhaps explained by the events in France in 1848, and the fact that in 1870, Pompallier chose to return to what he refers to as his “fatherland” in the final days of the Napoléon III’s Empire, living in a suburb of Paris where he writes at 69 years of age: 12

Father Viard had also filed a request for naturalization, eight months before Pompallier, in January 1850, suggesting the initiative to naturalize came from this younger and still close colleague of Pompallier.

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I have found much consideration and goodwill in the members of the French government, and above all a welcome full of kindness from the Emperor and Empress. (quoted in Keys 1957:378) This suggests a similar relationship as that which he and the Church enjoyed with Louis-Philippe and his Queen has reestablished itself with Napoléon III. Yet Pompallier complains of the Ministry of Public Worship, “they are quite willing to recognize me as a Frenchman, but not as a French Bishop!” (quoted in Keys 1957:378), eliding away his decision to naturalize as a British subject under the Second Republic with the explicitly and plainly stated intent to be a British Bishop.

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CHAPTER 4 ANNEXATIONS (1848-1870)

Napoléon III and a New Project for New Caledonia In 1848 a Parisian “class” revolution, per Karl Marx’s 1852 interpretation, upended France’s constitutional monarchy, and from the perspective of some of its supporters successfully “reestablished” institutions based on republican principles which had been upended by Napoleon I. The liberalist principle that the head of the French state should be elected, and government directed by ministers of an elected parliament was supposed to be put into place. First, an interim government decided to change voting laws so that all adult males would be enfranchised to elect the parliament, instead of just landowners as was the case under the constitutional monarchy of King Louis-Philippe. This liberal democratizing policy enacted by the interim government had the result of electorally empowering the bulk of France’s male population. At the time, the balance of France’s population lived in rural areas whose population increasingly opposed republican reforms emanating from Paris due to the disorder they created. In this context, Louis-Napoleon was thereby elected head of state of the Second Republic in 1850 based on his anti-republican orientation and family ties to Napoleon I. From his elected position of “Prince President” of the Republic, in 1851 he dissolved France’s democratic institutions by first closing the National Assembly, and in 1852 he named himself Napoléon III Emperor of France—an unelected and presumably life-long position. 153

The appeal of a project of penal colonization comes out of a conjunction of the political upheavals in France around 1848 described above, plus a decades-long parliamentary debate over how the port-prisons or bagnes of France should be reformed and made more humane. Bagne prisons were unanimously agreed to be inhumane places where inmates condemned to forced labor were often housed in unsavory conditions for the remainder of their time on earth. Governments in Britain and the United States were shifting to a more fashionable Pennsylvaniastyle penitentiary system, in which prisoner reform and salvation was a driving justification for the specific techniques used during incarceration. These ideas for reform held appeal with some French policy makers, a certain Alexis de Tocqueville in particular as I will discuss below. Louis-Napoleon embraced the idea of penal colonization as early as 1850 when he was a member of the National Assembly. In his own words, “It appears to me possible to make forced labour more efficacious and moralizing, less costly and more humane, by utilizing the convicts to further French colonization” (quoted in Roberts 1929:517). Later, following his 1851 ‘coup’ of dissolving the National Assembly, Louis-Napoleon was even more drawn to the concept of penal colonization: he could order the deportation of his political opponents, exiling them to the furthest reaches of his Empire. Political activists who either supported the earlier 1848 revolution against the constitutional monarchy, or who opposed the more recent 1851 dissolution of Parliament became candidates for policies of exile along with convicts from the bagne prisons— and there was room in the penal code to do this to political prisoners. However, a colonial location for exile of either political prisoners or convicts had not been decided upon and many places were tried out. In the immediate post-1851 period, more than six thousand political prisoners were sent along with general convicts to penal institutions in Algeria and French Guyana. These locations were deemed unsatisfactory as locations for 154

sustained penal colonization even by advocates of penal colonization, since Algeria was considered too close to the Metropole and offered chances for escape and might discourage regular free colonists. French Guyana was far enough, but proved to be equally inhumane as the bagnes, eventually earning Guyana a reputation as a “dry guillotine” due to the high annual death rates of prisoners: this fact was highly problematic for a program with the goal of colonial settlement, and politically unsavory in a period during which the legitimacy of a death penalty was under scrutiny—for instance as criticized by Alexis de Tocqueville. The two policies of political “deportation” and convict “transportation” lumped together these two officially unrepentant types of prisoners. The forced labor convicts, often serving commuted death sentences, arguably could be usefully applied to civil projects in the colonies where labor was famously scarce. Regarding political criminals, turning them into penal colonists was spun by its advocates as a great opportunity for them, and a sign of generous and humane clemency by the state. In the rhetoric that supported the program, which I will focus on below, a good and moral use could be made of all types of prisoners in the colonies, either as a source of labor or as permanent settlers. This political rhetoric authorized penal colonization, and offers context and official motive for the annexation of New Caledonia: it would not become a mere protectorate with its own recognized internal government like Tahiti in 1838 or New Caledonia in 1843/44. New Caledonia would instead be fully entailed by French civil governance through a process called “annexation.” An argument against situating the origin of a push to annex New Caledonia in parliamentarian politics in Paris, it should be pointed out that when Bishop Douarre traveled from Balade to Paris in 1846, he made a point to directly ask King Louis-Philippe to take 155

possession of New Caledonia via its full annexation (Dousset 1970: 53). In the intervening seven years between 1846 and 1851 the constitutional monarchy and its King was replaced by the Second Republic in 1848, and in turn the Second Republic was replaced by Napoléon III in 1851 in the process described above. This series of regime changes does not mean there were no continuities in French projects of expansion from one era to the next. I will show in the materials below that many individuals who composed the cast and characters of Louis-Philippe’s era reprised their roles in the era of Napoleon III (with, of course, the notable absence of Guizot after 1848). If the precise individuals themselves did not recur, their ideas and their terms of political debate continued to resonate among their supporters and individuals they mentored. In this way, Bishop Douarre’s request in 1846 that France annex New Caledonia is the likely origin of the impetus. However, penal colonization was not in the French future he imagined for his vicariate, and this end-use for New Caledonia clearly has another pragmatic and intellectual origin. The following sections of this chapter present the intellectual context of penal colonization, and track how projects for New Caledonia fit into the history of regime change in France outlined above.

Penal Colonies in de Tocqueville’s Civilization Concept There were many earlier precedents and pre-existing sensibilities that made penal colonization of New Caledonia palatable in 1850s France. New Caledonian historian Louis-José Barbançon traces the legal means and political willingness that lead to the transportation of convicts and deportation of political prisoners to New Caledonia under what he calls “la logique du grand éloignement”(Barbançon 2003:83). In this phrase he captures a geographic notion that placing prisoners at a distance is an effective way to both make them disappear, and offer a deterrent to others who might commit similar crimes. Advocates of penal colonization in the 156

1840s and 1850s draw on many precedents of pre-1789 Ancien Régime practices of exile and deportation, plus Napoleon I’s famous attitude that populating the New World with the refuse of the Old World would solve two problems at once. Yet there was one overarching precedent particularly relevant to New Caledonia that overshadows the French examples. As Barbançon specifies, “the Australian model is nonetheless always cited as an example” in the lead up and planning of Napoleon III’s penal projects (Barbançon 2003:49 also see 44-45). On the foundation of these precedents, both French and Australian, Napoleon III decreed that New Caledonia should be annexed as a place where France could replicate the perceived successes of British penal colonization. This is often described as having gone against Alexis de Tocqueville’s advice and policy suggestions, since he opposed anglo penal colonies. Because the motives of New Caledonia’s annexation can easily be glibly explained as a desire for a French Botany Bay in direct imitation of Australian successes, it appears the de Tocqueville lost out. I say this is glib because the timing of this project demands a more nuanced assessment, which is provided by a re-reading of de Tocqueville’s actual work. As I argue below, New Caledonia closely resembles de Tocqueville’s ideal “forced agricultural colony,” and even though he was not involved in the policy and planning of this colony, his colleagues and successors imagined it as a “New Society” built very closely to his requirements: it is not modeled on the Australian penal colony. The British government had in 1848 decided to permanently halt its Australian penal program in favor of “American” style cellular incarceration (Barbançon 2003:49). The French government did not decide to followed a retrograde path to penal policy, and they were not willfully blinded to British dissatisfaction with their own experiment. A rhetorical emphasis on prisoner salvation and reform was the official rationale of both French and British penal reform 157

after 1848. Penal colonization as authorized by Napoléon III and designed by his advisors was supposed to provide a path to salvation through the benefits of incarceration followed by release into a “new society” in the colonies. In this sense, British and French reforms shared the same goals of rebirth of the individual. The penal policies of British and French diverge after 1848 not on the goal of salvation, but on the means and methods by which resurrection can best be attained. The so-called Philadelphia system and other American reforms that England eventually adopted as a replacement for penal colonization were in fact examined by Alexis de Tocqueville during his famous trip to America in 1831 (Tocqueville 1904 [1935]), and the results of this official mission were written up an reported to the French parliament (Beaumont and Tocqueville 1845). The Philadelphia system is rooted in the Quaker pragmatic ideology that being isolated in a cell and only allowed silent engagement with other prisoners will allow for a natural relationship between God and the convict to reemerge. Silence and isolation thereby repairs the existing damage from social corruption, while precluding worsening their contagion through verbal intercourse with other criminals while incarcerated. It is supposed to solve the problem that prisons make prisoners worse. De Tocqueville was first elected to government in 1839 after his trip to America, and he kept his seat through both the July Monarchy and the Second Republic. He was only unseated when Prince-President Napoléon III abolished the parliament in 1851. While Alexis de Tocqueville was from an aristocratic family, I describe his politics as “liberal” in the sense that he recognizes as legitimate a distinction between civil and familial domains, and compared with a variant of arguments within British liberalism he supports the idea that civil governments should enforce tolerance of religious difference, and good governments should be based on 158

election of officials as a reflection of the general interest of the governed. In terms of colonial policy, his research trip to America in the 1830s and Algeria in the 1840s led him to favor the idea of setting up separate or dual legislatures for the colonized in French colonies: one elected legislature and set of laws for the settlers, and another for the natives. The idea of separate legislatures was part of De Tocqueville’s more general civilization concept, which is presented explicitly in material he relates about Canada and New England to support his proposal for this dual system. Regarding indigenous pastoral Indians and the process of their civilization through legislation in a settler context, he laments the following situation: Civilization begins in the cabin, but it soon retired to expire in the woods. The great error of these legislators of the Indians was their not understanding that, in order to succeed in civilizing a people, it is first necessary to fix [a people in place]; which cannot be done without inducing it to cultivate the soil…(Tocqueville 1904: 369) In these frontier settings in the New World, incorporation by the process of civilization is predicated on agricultural conditions—not by legislative agency alone (civilization through legislative agency of centralization and oversight like the 1804 Napoléonic civil code). I can also intuit that incorporation to civilization cannot be achieved through religious missionary agency or revelation provided by biblical texts in the vernacular (a model of civilization through incorporation of a more general Christian collectivity via conversion). Crucially, de Tocqueville does not propose that this civilization procedure should be a process towards homogenization: in a liberalist vein he distinctly dislikes a situation of “unbelief” which he assesses as not being in accordance with “the natural state of man” (Tocqueville 1904:338), yet he seems pleased by the freedoms he believes are indicated by the innumerable religious pluralisms of America, since he sees these sects as composing a general unity based on Christian morality (Tocqueville 1904:326). 159

Developing this idea over the following ten years, de Tocqueville reports before the Chamber of Deputies on the 24th of May 1847 on his first-hand study of French government of Algeria saying that “Muslim society, in Africa, was not incivilized; she only had a backwards and imperfect civilization”(Tocqueville 1866:436). In terms of Algerians, “What we owe them is a good government” (Tocqueville 1866: 438), a role he then casts for the French as eminently different from ancient (Gaul) expansions because “in conquering Algeria, we have not pretended, like the Barbares who invaded the Roman Empire, to put ourselves in possession of the vanquished lands”(Tocqueville 1866:438). Drawing on his American experiences from ten years earlier, his suggestion for Algeria is to form two separate legislative bodies, one for the Arabs and another for the French and European settlers. Rather than performing an assimilation of the Algerian civilization by bringing it into full continuity with French civil and religious orders, he proposes keeping them separate. This proposal was not taken up by Guizot’s1 ministerial government for reasons that should be obvious: it does not give Christianity a central role in the civilizing project. However, elsewhere de Tocqueville offers a cosmogony or origin of European Christianity, which suggests that working the land as cultivators has a special religious connotation for him; “In Europe, Christianity has been intimately tied to the powers of the earth”(Tocqueville1904:338). In other words, “civilization” cannot be an artifact of colonial legislation, or Christian missionization, but is instead an effect of cultivation of the land from which all other progress follows. 1

This brings me briefly back to Guizot, briefly. Guizot and de Tocqueville both were elected to the chamber of deputies (by male landholders), in 1830 and 1839 respectively, and aligned early-on over particular political issues. Tocqueville appears to share the progressivist stance of Guizot’s civilization concept, while disagreeing with him in the practice of real politics: for both men “civilization” is progress, and France brings “civilization” to other peoples, the question is how and why. In the 1840s, on liberalist populist and pro-parliamentarian grounds, Tocqueville opposed Guizot’s tightening relationship with King Louis-Philippe’s monarchy as evidenced in policy I presented in chapters two and three.

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This cultivist idea of civilizational progress is present in de Tocqueville’s specific proposals for prison reforms relative to colonies, written with Gustave de Beaumont in the 1830s after their return from the United States. In this piece of policy advice, the authors describe what they call the “forced agricultural colonies” of Holland and Belgium as “beautiful institutions” where detainees, abandoned children, and free colonists thrive at low cost and great benefit to the State (1845:278-279). As republished in a popular edition in 1845 with a new introduction they confirm the intent of reform of the a penitentiary system: to obtain the repentance of the prisoner (Beaumont and Tocqueville 1845:52 italics original). In this text the “forced agricultural colonies” are presented as a good means of achieving repentance, whereas Anglo-Saxon penal colonies are not. Their work suggests that the French Kingdom should introduce a U.S. penitentiary system, in the form of French agricultural colonies: the difference from an Australian penal colony is in the nuanced details of how prisoners in the agricultural settler-colonies would be managed and treated with an eye towards humanity and which creates that possibility of sincere and true repentance rather than a guarantee of death. An 1843 address by de Tocqueville to the Chamber of Deputies, speaking in the name of the prison reform commission (which included d’Haussonville, with whom I will deal in Chapter Five as a critic of the isolation and silence as a method of reform), he states clearly the committee’s recommendations: individual isolation at night, communal work during the day, and strictly enforced silence at all times to prevent “moral contagion” among prisoners though “immoral confidences” that might pass between them (Beaumont and Tocqueville 1845:384-85, 388). He recommends making cells sufficiently spacious, healthy and well ventilated offering a chance to exercise in open air, and suggests the management accord to the condemned something of the product of their labors—as an incentive 161

towards the overall goal to rebuild “whatever trace of honesty that remains in their souls”(Beaumont and Tocqueville 1845: 404, 409, 425). Enjoying the benefits of one’s own labor is the incentive to repent. The prisons that most offended de Tocqueville’s sensibilities as presented in this report were the port-Prison bagnes (which were under default and otherwise illogical direction of the Marine Ministry). While his committee’s recommendations only speak directly to incarceration reform within the interior of the Kingdom of France, it is clear from the full text that they think “forced agricultural colonies” (again, not to be confused with Australian penal colonies) would be a good solution to the prison reform problem and the bagnes in particular. De Tocqueville adopts a disinterested tone for his final 1866 analysis of the July Monarchy of Guizot and King Louis-Philippe of 1830 to 1848, taking the voice of a non-aligned parliamentarian commenting from a perspective above party politics. He considers the eighteen years of Guizot’s participation in Louis-Philippe’s Constitutional Monarchy an instance of “bad government”(Tocqueville 1896 :79). After Guizot went into exile in 1848 in London, De Tocqueville remained in the chamber of deputies opposing Louis-Napoléon’s rise, which he considered a reversion to bad government. De Tocqueville thereby provides a physical and intellectual bridge between these three periods of French government, and as I will show below, his civilization concept and religiously flavored ideas about the efficacy of cultivation and agriculture as a means toward the ends of civilization, are embodied in the forced agricultural colony created in New Caledonia.

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Bagne reform and an 1851 expedition to New Caledonia Yves Person based on his study of archival documents (1953:166-176) that on the 27th of June 1848, in the interim between the ending of Louis-Philippe’s July Monarchy and the start of the brief-lived Second Republic, a fourteen member exploratory government commission for bagne reform through penal colonization was put together (the term “forced agricultural colony” seems to have been too esoteric, and everywhere the label of choice is “penal colony” even as the projects pursued resemble the Dutch and Belgian models more than the Australian). The members of the committee seem to have all been naval officers rather than politicians. For this reason, de Tocqueville (or his delegated assistants) was not among them in any official capacity. One explanation for why the committee was composed of naval officers is that the colonies at the time were under the direction of the Marine Ministry, and as an institutional artifact bagne prisons happened to be located in port buildings under the control of the Marine Minister. Thereby prisons, colonies and navies were all co-present in the same institutional ministry, and this committee of naval officers was essentially an internal committee charged with making recommendations to outside politicians for its own reform. The commission met in 1848, 1849, and 1850 each time considering but failing to settle on a possible locations for a future penal colony. New Caledonia was suggested early on in 1848 by Wilhelm de Mülinen who was previously an officer of the Seine (recall from Chapter Three that it sailed to New Caledonia to take back the French Flag from the Marist Mission at Balade in 1846, and sank on the reef as it entered the lagoon, leaving Mülinen and dozens of other sailors stuck on the island for several difficult weeks). On this officer’s suggestion, orders were dispatched by the Marine Ministry in November 1849 for a thorough reconnaissance of New Caledonia, on which to judge its 163

appropriateness with the ends of penal colonization in mind. Admiral Bonnard of the Pacific Naval Forces in Papeete, Tahiti received the orders, and he dispatched the corvette Alcemène under captain Harcourt with open orders to inspect the newly established Marist missions, coupled with secret orders to gain a better understanding of the island in view of annexation for a penal colonization project. These latter instructions included orders for hydrographic sounding and other coastal mapping. Captain Harcourt sailed from Tahiti to Sydney, and then on to the Isle of Pines several miles off the extreme southern point of New Caledonia , reaching the island on 28th of September 1850. Thereafter he and his crew were in occasional communication with Father Goujon at the Isle of Pines, who manned the SFO comptoir in what he apparently conceived as a purely civil and non evangelical capacity. On the mainland, they were in contact with Bishop Douarre located at the reestablished mission at the extreme north of New Caledonia at Balade. Harcourt’s information gathering activities tended to focus in the Northern parts of the island around Balade. In the early morning of December 2nd 1850 one of the expedition’s canots was attacked by the residents of the island of Yenghiébane while the landing party was having their morning café and loading up to depart. Five Frenchmen and one person from Balade were killed, and three surviving members of the crew were “adopted,”(a curious choice of words used in the original report), and taken into the hills (Person 1953:173). It took until the middle of December for captain Harcourt to figure out what had happened to the boat and its crew, and the aid of Brother Jean to secure the release of two of the “adopted” sailors. Having secured their release, as characterized by Yves Person’s history, from the 16th though the 18th of December 1850, the Alcmène’s guns and sailors retaliated against Yenghiébane and their neighbors with impunity. 164

The French forces killed 24 native men and leveled three villages in the area of Paaba, going on to “methodically” bombard the environs of Yande, and “ravage” the entire population of Yenghiébane island, leaving the landscape littered with pieces of native bodies and exploded munitions. When Harcourt’s information collecting mission was apparently complete enough to make a recommendation in view of penal colonization, his battleship left New Caledonian waters on January 2nd for the return trajectory to France via Tahiti, but wrecked in New Zealand in transit. The crew was saved by a British ship previously known to them from a port call in Sydney, the H.M.S. Fly and Harcourt and his reports belatedly made it to the port of Brest in France at the very late date of April 1852. The bagne reform commission had in 1851 already voted 8 to 6 in favor of using French Guyana as a future full-scale penal colony, but New Caledonia was the commission’s second choice even without the benefit of Harcourt’s report (Person 1953:181). The reports from the Alcmène were favorable enough to push the committee to propose a precautionary occupation and annexation of New Caledonia for potential future penal purposes. In official public rationales this is the process that lead to the annexation of New Caledonia, which however should not overshadow Douarre’s 1846 appeal for annexation and his assistance to the 1851 expedition, or officer Wilhelm de Mülinen’s several week sojourn among the Marists at Balade after the Seine shipwreck. There is a circularity between motives and the establishment of motives for annexation in the materials, which makes a single lineal narrative of the process inadequate. Nothing I have located suggests Alexis de Tocqueville commented, contributed, or sought to modify the committee’s deliberations or recommendations. De Tocqueville’s favorable view of a “forced agricultural colony” nonetheless seem to remain the unstated (unmarked) 165

objective of bagne reform through penal colonization. The method he proposes of cellular isolation to prevent the corruption of prison life seems to have been followed, however any injunctions against cruel treatment of prisoners which might be associated with de Tocqueville’s name, had in the new regime fallen out of serious consideration in prison planning. The government now favored methods of penal incarceration which included a model of repentance in which physical punishment of prisoners was a legitimate means to attain their moral discipline. Despite his apparent non-participation in the designs of the penal colony project undertaken in New Caledonia, de Tocqueville’s idea that civilization and Christian morality are alike rooted in the earth—a rural agriculturalist ideology—seems a deeply ingrained component of all subsequent French penal colonization schemes. These projects were officially designed to obtain the reform and repentance of criminals through agricultural work on the new colonial frontiers of France, even if they were not kept in absolute silence. Recall that the Second Republic fully enfranchised a rural male majority of Frenchmen, who perhaps naturally supported this sort of scheme since it was supported by an ideological backing that is specific to the French institutional form of the penal colony project as brought to bear on New Caledonia:2 What needed reform through forced agricultural work were not simply prisoners, but Parisian prisoners prone to revolt and political sedition. In this logic, not at all reminiscent of de Tocqueville’s intent, is that once taken out of their urban squalor, the political prisoner and urban

2

Alice Bullard (2000) curiously highlights many explicit statements about how the redemptive capacities of working the land are supposed to provide the measure of success of New Caledonia’s penal project—specifically with its post 1871 manifestations, but there is no mention in her work of de Tocqueville as an intellectual predecessor, as a penal theorist, or as a French politician who life-work deals intimately with the details of prison policy and design which were brought to bear on New Caledonia.

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convict would be remade into something useful to French society through the redemptive agency of the very land. Penal colonization thereby combines in unexpected ways with the successes of other efforts made by de Tocqueville to 1) abolish the death penalty and 2) outlaw slavery. Slavery was outlawed in 1848, and executions became controversial if still legal in certain contexts. This legislative and regulatory movement created, unintentionally and simultaneously, both a growing incarcerated population of un-releasable yet un-executable convicts sentenced to hard labor, and a labor shortage in colonies which had often previously depended on slaves to do work (for an alternative solution to the labor shortage at the end of slavery, see analysis of the Wakefield Plan in chapter six). Why not re-apply the penal code to sentence un-reformable criminal types to a life of hard labor in the colonies with no possibility of release, as labor to build state infrastructure and supply a source of revenue by being rented out at favorable rates to private entrepreneurs and free colonists? From this perspective the metropolitan prison problem and the colonial labor problem could be simultaneously resolved, through penal colonization: all that was needed was an appropriate location for this new colonial project. As a tempering to this point, while Penal colonization is repeatedly presented as the “essential cause” of annexation (Person 1953:181)(Sand 2000), a confluence of other strategic interests of military, religious, and economic characteristics were also arguably being pursued. With the increasing prevalence of steam power for ships, coaling station plans related to a French Panama Canal project included New Caledonia (an approach which fits of Guizot’s point d’appui strategy of civilization expansion). The killings at Yenghiébane island described above arguably convinced the Ministers of State of the need to “establish security in that

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country”(Person 1953:180) as an added incentive to any other motives for which they supported the project to annex New Caledonia. When the shipwrecked commander of the Seine informed the Marists that they would have to take down the flag from the Balade mission in 1846, and that they could raise one of their own choosing (which they declined, Rougeyron quipping that no flag at all gave just as much protection as the French flag), New Caledonia reverted to unclaimed status. In consequence the island was considered independent by the French government as of 1846. However, in the interim, no other recognized or unrecognized sovereign country or adventurous individual had attempted to raise a flag in New Caledonia in the pause of 1847-1853. No one had published a statement of possession, and no enterprising European individuals like Baron de Thierry had stated an intention to build their own country there. The acts of the “protectorate” described in Chapter Three of convincing the naturels to offer a written recognition of French sovereignty, followed by a raising of flags and shooting of cannons would need to be repeated in order to be official. However, this was not a mere “points d’appui” strategy requiring simple outposts and minimal maintenance of native government. Instead, full annexation and the territorial and governing control it implied was the required arrangement. This required two steps: a “prise de possession” and then a later act of “annexation.” (This distinction, and time lag, is similar to the process by which Hawaii in 1898 become a US possession as requested by Hawaii’s President Dole, and only in 1900 being fully annexed to the US as an Unincorporated Territory). The motives for instituting this type of time lag for New Caledonia are not substantiable from the materials I have consulted—however it clearly serves some sort of administrative function to separate the taking of sovereign possession of a territory from the process of its incorporation into government. This resembles a ‘horse and 168

carriage’ arrangement between state sovereignty and government: you cannot put one before the other. Two unambiguous orders calling for 1) the “prise de possession” and 2) the establishment of military posts in New Caledonia were dispatched from the Marine Ministry. The first set of instructions were addressed Rear Admiral Auguste Febvrier-Despointes who was the commander of the Pacific fleet stationed in Lima, Peru. In the text of the orders he is instructed to “take possession at two points on the island.” From Lima he set out to Tahiti on a frigate, where he decided his orders were urgent enough to allow him to take command of one of fastest ship of the time, a corvette a vapeur the Phoque, which had both steam and sails. A second set of orders were sent from Paris to Macao by way of Bourbon (i.e. La Réunion) for commander Tardy de Montravel, who was similarly equipped with a fast steampowered ship called the Constantine. His instructions were to establish “two permanently guarded posts” on the island, essentially telling him to build of military garrisons and fortifications presumably at the two locations claimed under the first set of instructions. Both men set out for New Caledonia from opposite ends of the pacific, the Constantine sailing East from Macao under the command of Tardy de Montravel, and the Phoque sailing West from Tahiti under the command of Auguste Febvrier-Despointes (note that their positions in the naval hierarchy is reflected in their orders: the rear admiral Febvrier-Despointes is to take possession in the name of the Emperor of France, while commander Tardy de Montravel is delegated the less prestigious task to build and administrate).

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Despointes’ prise de possession: 24th of September 1853 Rear Admiral Febvrier-Despointes arrived first, and dropped anchor off the Northeast coast of New Caledonia on the 23rd of September 1853. As a revealing detail about how frequented New Caledonia was by private whaling and trade and mission ships, the rear admiral entered the reef close to Pouebo just south of Balade with navigational information he had obtained earlier at Lifou from an “American” pilot (Person 1953:182). At landfall, the Admiral met with the Father Rougeyron who had re-established his mission at Pouebo in 1851 after several failed attempts since 1847 (Rozier 1990 counts four failed attempts). Bishop Douarre had died a few months beforehand, leaving Rougeyron, Forestier, Vigouroux, Montrouzier and a few other Marist priests and brothers and catechists in charge of the reestablished missions in the North—which now benefited from better funding from the SFO enterprises, plus administrative autonomy as their own Vicariate separate from Bishop Bataillon’s Vicariate in Wallis. At this first point of call, in conversation with Father Rougeyron Admiral FebvrierDespointes decided that Balade would be an appropriate location for the first taking possession according to his instructions, due to the relatively long-term presence there of the Catholic mission, its reliable indigenous defenders, and also it happened to be the location where the 1843/44 process verbal that established the protectorate had been performed. The mission survived day-to-day on the labor and support of sixty young men from the area around Balade who had been seminarized in Futuna as catechists during the mission’s fouryear, on-and off absence since being definitively expelled in 1847 (Person 1953:143). In particular Louis Tadina, who had been adopted as the mission’s heir as described in Chapter Three, traveled to Sydney with Rougeyron in 1847, and upon his definitive return in 1851

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apparently began to regularly describe himself as the “chief” of the Christian converts who lived in and around the Balade mission (Person 1953:144; Rozier 1990). One day after arriving, on the 24th of September 1853, in the presence of missionaries and local chiefs, the French flag was raised at Balade by the Real Admiral, and saluted with 21 cannon-shots by his ship. The French clergy and officers present at the event then signed a document. The procedure is officially classified as a “Process verbal” within the genres of French law and was unambiguously described as a “taking of possession” and not as a “recognition” “request” or “offer” of sovereignty (see Chapter Three). The 1853 text reads as follows: I, the undersigned, Auguste Febvrier-Despointes, real admiral, commander and Chief of French naval forces in the Pacific Ocean, acting on the orders of my Government, declare that I take possession of the island of New Caledonia and its dependents in the name of H.M. Napoléon III, Emperor of the French. In consequence, the French pavilion is raised over said Island of New Caledonia who, from this 24th day of September 1853, becomes, as well as its dependants, a French colony. Said taking of possession is made in the presence of Messrs. The officers of the steam powered corvette the Phoque, and by Messrs. the French missionaries who have signed with us. Signed at landfall at the place called Balade on the above day, month, and year. Signed: De Bovis — A. Barazar—Rougeyron—Forestier — Vigouroux — L. Candeau — Muller — Butteaud — Mallet— L. Despériers —A.Amet— C. de Moue —Febvrier-Despointes Yves Person points out, compared to the 1843/44 document written by Captain Laferrière and Father Viard, “it is notable that this was a unilateral prise de possession” in that no local chiefs or kings were solicited to sign or act as official witnesses, even though they were present as onlookers (Person 1953:182 italics original). Additionally the voice of the 1853 text is that of the Rear Admiral himself, and represents him as the agent in this new relationship.

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Of special interest Father Rougeyron and naval officer Mallet had each earlier participated in Pacific treaties signings. Unlike the current document, these earlier treaties were all written in the voice of the chiefs even as they used French language (New Caledonia in 1843/44 for Rougeyron, and both in Wallis and Futuna in 1842 for Mallet). These men knew the genres of treaty writing, from which I conclude that this particular treaty’s nuanced particularities such as its voicing are neither arbitrary nor accidental. In another noted contrast with earlier Pacific treaties, in this instance the Marist missionaries were willing to sign and act as witnesses of this political event—which Bishop Douarre had earlier explicitly refused to do at Balade in 1843 perhaps based on the example set by Bishop Pompallier at Waitangi in 1840. All texts I have consulted consistently state that the deceased Bishop Douarre would have welcomed full annexation of New Caledonia by France, a claim strongly supported by his 1846 request: the question remains as to whether or not he would have again refused to witness with his signature a “political” act as he had refused to do in 1843. One chief, Bouéone (a Pouma), who had not yet converted was reportedly in favor of the possession, since he intuited that it would centralize the French presence in the area around his village at Balade, and thereby effectively calque their power onto his domain. Another chief named Thiangoune was reportedly completely opposed to the new French installation (note that any reports in this context are all French). The disagreement is documented, however it was disregarded in either case and the consent of these local leaders was not solicited for this treaty, and they signed no documents at this time (Person 1953:182; Faivre [1955]:92). Two days later the Phoque sailed south from Balade on the 26th of September 1853, along the east coast of New Caledonia, hurried by reports received by Father Montrouizier from sandalwood traders (delivering an entomological collection addressed to him from a 172

correspondent in Sydney) that a British naval ship was at the Isle of Pines. At Hienghène two Australian sandalwood traders told Fevrier-Despointes that the British HMS Herald was at anchor at the Isle of Pines at a bay called Vao. Fears that this British ship was sent on a mission to take possession of New Caledonia are commonly cited in the French literature. While the anxiety might have been real, no British plans for annexation seem to have actually existed. However this story is repeated for its romantic intrigue perhaps, without any foundation in reality3 boasting that the French supposedly snatched New Caledonia out from under the British. A Marist mission, or more accurately a comptoir or trade counter4 of the SFO had been established on the Isle of Pines since 1849, under Father Goujon with relative autonomy from Bishop Douarre. Goujon’s presence was made possible by the support of Ti Koua “Jimmy” Vendegou II, who succeeded to the throne in 1850. Even though his grandfather had expelled the Protestant Samoan teachers in 1842 (see Person 1953:140), the Vendegous had long desired a European missionary presence on their island. Vendegou II himself would convert to Catholicism in 1855, baptized under the curious name of the deposed French king LouisPhilippe, and the majority of the Isle of Pines residents or Kunie islanders would then follow suit (Person 1953:142). However, in 1853 the Catholic presence was manifest as a school for notables run by Father Goujon, (his pupils included Vendegou’s heir Missinète), and an SFO trade comptoir serviced by the Arche d’Alliance which took sandalwood and other items of trade

3

A popular myth says that Febvrier-Despointes arrived just in time to snatch Isle of Pines away from the British. As Yves Person nicely demonstrates the British ship was on a hydrographic mission commanded by Sir Henry Denham. Nothing reputable suggests that Denham actually tossed chief Vendegou off his ship upon learning of the ‘French coup’, nor did shame drive Denham to commit suicide. Instead Denham continued his hydrographic mapping project for another seven years, and died in 1887 as an esteemed member of the Royal Society (Person 1953:183-185). 4

Goujon says that the island was not “ready” to be catechized until 1852 so he did not preach.

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from Isle of Pines to Macao and on to France. Goujon is adamant that he was not involved in evangelical and conversion work at this time. The Phoque arrived at Vao the evening of the 28th of September 1853. The Admiral met cordially with Captain Denham of the H.M.S. Herald, and presented himself as a visitor to the Catholic comptoir and nothing more. In the middle of the night, the admiral met with Father Goujon and arranged so that at dawn on the 29th of September 1853 they would hold a process nearly identical to the one he orchestrated five days earlier in Balade. The procedure at the Isle of Pines was identical excepting certain crucial differences in the text which make it a significantly different procedure from the standpoint of legal foundations of incorporation, which I have rendered in bold: I, the undersigned, Auguste Febvrier-Despointes, real admiral, commander and Chief of French naval forces in the Pacific Ocean, acting on the orders of my Government, declare that I take possession of the Isle of Pines which, from this day, 29 September 1853, becomes a French colony. The island will continue to be governed by its chief who will come directly under the jurisdiction of French authorities. Said taking of possession is made in the presence of Messrs. the missionaries of the officers of the steam powered corvette the Phoque, and of chief Ven de Gou who have signed with us. Signed at landfall in double copy, in the bay of the Assomption, on the above day, month, and year. Signed: E. de Bovis—A. Barazer—L. Candeau—A.Cony—L. Despériers— Mallet—Muller—Chapuy—Goujon—A. Belle—A. Amet. X [Vendegou II]

Febvrier-Despointes

This is not a “prise de possession” but rather the establishment of a colonial protectorate, which will retain native government. Moreover, the orders the Admiral possessed were to take possession of New Caledonia at two points. However, not until this point had the Isle of Pines been considered a part of New Caledonia. 174

The text explicitly includes “Chief Ven de Gou” in the list of witnesses and the ‘X’ signature at the foot of the document is attributed to Ti Koua Vendegou II, placed on the same line as that of Febvrier-Despointes, set apart from that of the other witnesses’ signatures as though the two men were equivalent parties. Even so, the process verbale is written in the voice of the naval officer. Intuiting from the document, Vendegou has the standing to be considered a local sovereign in charge of functions of government: however he is not at this time called a King or a noble (the aristocratic honorifics would be added later to the titles of the indigenous chiefs of the Isle of Pines). Perhaps as evidence of his standing, the text was produced in duplicate copy, whereas only one copy had been written up at Balade five days earlier. A second copy was needed at the Isle of Pines because there were two parties signing the document with standing to retain a copy. Vendegou was encouraged to sign with the promise that the officers would militarily support the chief’s authority, and promised material support in the form of a stipend of 125 francs per month (which was not forthcoming from the State until 1879 under Queen Hortence) (Person 1953:185). Fevrier-Despointes then departed the Isle of Pines on September 30th, sailing slowly back to Balade by October 9th, making multiple shore calls. At Balade he and his men waited for expected reinforcements in increasingly dire conditions marked by eight deaths by food poisoning and lack of goods generally—notably they had no coal for the ship. The French steam ships Catinat and Prony arrived from South America as previously arranged, but belatedly due to a coal shortage at Tahiti. Eventually coal and revitalization for this veritably stranded outpost was brought from Sydney on two private vessels: one engaged by the French consul at Sydney the Marian-Watson, 175

and the second a passing American three-mast schooner Febrivier-Despoints took the opportunity to contract for a round-trip voyage, the John H. Millay to settle a debt: Captain William Grandell’s trépang party of Fijians had been attacked, and he approached FevrierDespointes as the new sovereign representative of the island to seek “justice” (Person 1953:186) and compensation for his material losses at the hands of the indigenous French subjects. Instead he received a shipping contract on generous terms. With the arrival of supplies in December aboard these two private ships, FebvrierDespoints was able to see to completion a blockhaus (fort/prison [see example in Jore 1959:Planche XV]). It was constructed on a piece of land “purchased” on Umbeip hill, by a device for property transfer drawn up for the occasion by father Montrouzier and signed by Boueone and three other chiefs on the 11th of October (according to Person 1953:188; see my treatment of Saussol below who says the contract was arranged with four sisters who signed). As specified in the document, they agreed to “quit” [quitter] the land in exchanged for “various etoffes, axes, knives, tabacco, pipes, scissors, necklaces, etc. for the price of said sale” (quotes in Saussol 1979:47). Based on published accounts of the instrument, I do not know what language or languages it was written in. A series of conflicts which tested the new sovereign authority and jurisdiction of the French naval officers was launched with Febvrier’s decision to put three killers of a “sorceress” in his new blockhaus. This was closely followed by another decision to react with extreme prejudice against a rumored plot against the French officers. The killing of the sorceress and the plot are both attributed in part or in whole to Chief Thiangoune in the officers’ reports and personal letters (cf. Brun 1933:648-49), as though this chief was singularly responsible for any and all their problems. Even as the chief did not himself kill the woman, and the so-called plot 176

apparently came to the officer’s attention through an unspecified catechist who revealed it to them before anything had happened, this chief is singled out as the origin and cause of their travail, and moreover Thiangoune is identified as the sole chief who opposed of the French act of possession. In terms of the murder of the sorceress, Father Montrouzier intervened and sought clemency for the three murders, and succeeded in having two freed from the blockhaus. The “plot” against the French was solved unilaterally by a military expedition of groups of twenty to thirty soldiers, who seized three chiefs including Thiangoune while he was sleeping in his bed. Febvrier Despoints exiled two of the men to Tahiti aboard the Catinat, but Thiangoune managed to escape. Father Montrouzier again interceded on behalf of the natives, and gained a pardon from the Admiral for chief Thiangoune on condition that he thereafter agree to support the French presence (Person 1959:190). Commander Jean-Jacques de Brun of the Prony concludes in a letter to his wife in France that this military solution “produced the greatest good in the country, in ridding ourselves of three individuals, the most dangerous, who cancelled-out the power of the official chief of the tribe”(Brun 1933:649). The official chief from this Frenchman’s perspective was apparently Bouene and Bouene alone. Yves Person describes these inaugural conflicts and their modes of resolution in terms of an “extreme inegality of forces” and presents evidence of the “irrespect” Febvrier Despointes had for traditional chiefly jurisdictions (Person 1953:192, 190). Person does not perceive how in the above examples culled from officers’ writings and reports, tropes of difference between the Marists and the French naval officers, where Marist are depicted as inserting themselves into conflict on behalf of the natives in the role of protecting them from the full force of the French State’s agents. This seems to be a recurrent theme in the literature, which casts these religious 177

men in a positive light as defenders of native peoples while simultaneously casting the aggressive naval officers in a positive light as having acted without impunity towards their new native subjects and having respected the wishes of the clergy. While French colonial officers and catholic priests are often presented as pursuing incommensurate ends, and conflicting over treatment of natives, in this instance it is closer to a Batesonian “schismogenesis” (Bateson 1935), in which their difference actually overshadows their often germane similarities of interest in a social division of complementary roles.5

Tardy de Montravel: Treaties, Laws and (Salic?) Penal Codes The Admiral departed New Caledonia aboard the Catinat in ill health on January 1st 1854 en route for France via Tahiti6, leaving the new island in charge of the lieutenant de vasseau of the Prony who sat waiting for Tardy de Montravel to materialize. Montravel had unexpectedly been delayed and personally injured by a cyclone/typhoon in the Solomon Islands on his sail East from Macao. Louis Tardy de Montravel had sailed first to the Isle of Pines the 5th of January 1854, and traveled on to Balade the 9th. He arrived at Balade eight days after the Admiral’s departure, and remained there until the 20th of February, convalescing from his injuries. As I mentioned above, his instructions differed in wording and substance from Febvrier Despointes, in that Montravel was instructed to establish “two permanently guarded posts” on

5

I can also note Guizot’s favorable statement that the younger son of his friend and fellow Minister the Duc de Broglie5 had “distinguished himself across the seas, up to New Caledonia, by his instruction and courage as lieutenant de vasseau”(Guizot 1872: 295-296). Paul de Broglie had joined navy in 1857 and entered the priesthood after a visit to New Caledonia around 1860, when he perceived in the Marist Fathers work his own calling. 6

He died before reaching France (Faivre [1955]:93)—hence his own detailed accounting of the events is unavailable except in his official correspondence and reports, often redacted by others (e.g. the two page extract: Febvrier-Despointes 1854).

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the island (Person 1959:194). In the absence of the Admiral, his administrative authority was organizationally under Governor Page of the Etablissements Francaise du Pacifique headquartered in Papeete, Tahiti, and the bulk of revitalizations for his outpost was coming from Sydney (see Cordier-Rossiaud 1957:27) perhaps under the supervision of the French consul there. Montravel was a member of the bagne reform commission of 1851, which settled on New Caledonia as a potential future French penal colony. With this future project in mind, under his own volition Montravel made a series of remedial efforts to obtain more signatures from native chiefs under slightly different wording from the treaties signed by Febvrier-Despointes. This initiative initially angered Marine Minister Ducos, but his acts were apparently motivated by a wish to better meet international standards for having demonstrably gained consent of the natives, hoping also avoid the pitfalls and complications that followed the Treaty of Waitangi in New Zealand which apparently compromised its legitimacy. With these rationales eventually communicated, Minister Ducos agreed with Montravel’s program. The first of Montravel’s remedial documents, signed at Balade, is written as a “Process Verbale”, first adopting his own voice, and then unlike the earlier document it shifts into the voice of the chiefs: The 23rd of January 1854 I, the undersigned, Louis Tardy de Montravel, commander of the French corvette the Constantine, having arrived at the village of baiao, tribe of Pouma, have received from “Filipso Boueone” its chief, and from the principals of the tribe the following declaration: I recognize and freely accept the sovereignty of H.M. Napoleon III and commit myself to protect and having protected all French subjects or foreigners who might live [s’etablirait] or might find themselves in the territory of the Tribe. Signed: X [Boueone]—Louis Tadina—Xavier Montrouzier—Cauedin—Olivier de Pezet— Sinee—Moirout—Campenon—De Brun—T.de Ticoudy—Tardy de Montravel. 179

(quoted in Person 1953:211). The document above also notes a change in Boueone’s name: between Fevrier-Despointes prise de possession in September 1853 and the signing of this document in January 1854, Boueone had agreed to be baptized and had taken the name Filippo. The signature Louis Tadina is of course the adopted son of the mission, the selfproclaimed “chief” of the sixty indigenous Christians of Balade. As his fully signed name indicates, unlike Boueone’s ‘X’, he had been adopted and raised by the Marist Fathers from a young age and could write.7 Unlike the 1843/44 treaty, these two “chiefs” from the area of Balade are nowhere identified as kings, nobles, monarchs, or aristocrats—and these two are the only “chiefs” who signed in this instance as opposed to fourteen from the 1843/44 document. Chief Thiangoune, who had earlier posed a problem for the French had apparently taken the prudent decision to relocate to the outer limits of his domain by this time (Person 1959:199), while any other potent dissenting chiefs were presently aboard the Catinat in transit to a long exile in Tahiti. In terms of law and governance, Tardy de Montravel on the 9th of February had Father Montrouzier write a code of provisionary penal laws in the voice of the two signatories: Felippo Bouéone (per Dauphiné 1992:18) and Louis Tadina (per Person 1959:200). The document is entitled the Code penal de la tribu de Pouma (original: ANOM Carton 67). It is promulgated in the names of the chiefs, even as the content and writing of this penal code comes from the collaboration of French officers and priests. In this form, the code appears to recognize a traditional jurisdiction of chiefs in penal matters, yet the content of the code is clearly not of 7

From the Marist’s retreated position in Sydney, in 1847 and 1848 Tadina wrote a series of letters which are now considered the first pieces of writing by an indigenous New Caledonian, one piece using the Niélaiou language and another apparently originally in Latin (reproduced in Rozier 1990:257, 261).

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local design and “severe” crimes of murder and cannibalism are relegated to the blockhaus and direct French oversight. Although Boueone was nominally cast as the lawgiver in whose name the code is officially promulgated, this code and the others later handed out by Montravel are designed to expire when the government in Paris might decide to introduce locally governed French institutions. In the meantime, the codes cast local chiefs in what Person sees as a role of “police commissioners” in charge of a twelve member indigenous gendarmerie complete with armband “uniforms.” The fact that these penal codes had little overall effect should not take away from what they reveal about the process of possession as a project for the future, and as an operationalized logic of government and change. The code for Pouma contains 28 articles. This process can be interpreted as “assimilative” to the degree that it seeks to replace and overwrite local legal institutions. It is not motivated by a protectionist ideology that might create very similarly structured institutions of indirect rule with which it should not be conflated. Montravels’ program for his penal codes in New Caledonia was not driven with the same horizon in mind as de Tocqueville’s antiassimilationist autonomist proposals for Algerian arabo-berber legislatures. Yves Person concludes that in this penal code “without a doubt Tardy de Montravel wanted to start to apply his own theory of assimilation”(Person 1959:199). What he means by “assimilation” is that the purpose of this legislation is incorporative of the chiefs’ subjects while being explicitly provisional. However Montravel was also instituting something uncannily similar to Guizot’s concept of the Salic Code as discussed in Chapter Three: Montravel’s first step towards civility was to implement a penal code, just as the first step made by Clovis as the mythological founder of France was to institute the penal code of the Salic Law in Guizot’s 181

interpretation. Montravel had likely followed Guizot’s course in French Civilization as part of his formation as an elite student under the July Monarchy. He knew what Salic law was from this text and its particular interpretation as being essentially penal in character (note from Chapter Three that Father Rougeyron and Guizot perceive Salic Law in markedly different terms of content). Montravel’s word for this process of penal law giving, in his report of April 27th 1854 to his superiors, is “civilization” by which he means to describe the establishment of French law and order. For him civilization not just an extension of French civil codes and territorial jurisdiction, but as an extension of French penal laws and “customary” norms. His is a juridical mechanism of assimilation by legal instruments and their institutionalization. As shown in Chapter Two, Marists would consider this incorporation by France the opposite of their concept of “civilization” by Christian conversion—yet the clergy in New Caledonia were not initially opposed to this French institutional expansion, and seem to have perceived themselves as increasingly allied with French civil authorities the longer they stayed in New Caledonia. This assimilationist character of Montravel’s self-described effort at “civilization” is substantiated by the uniformity of Montravel’s code. A word for word copy of the penal code for the Pouma, was promulgated as part of another elaborated prise de possession ceremony on the 15th of February at Pouébo, rewritten with the cooperation of Father Rougeyron under the title Code penal de la tribu de Muélébé (ANOM Carton 67), and promulgated by chiefs Uarebat and Hipployte (Christians both? Like Bouéne and Tadina?). Tardy de Montravel at this point had three ships at Balade, the Constantine, the Prony, and the Tane Manu. Having established one permanently guarded blockhaus, per his instructions, he and his officers were then able to then able leave a contingent at Balade and venture around 182

the island by sea along the eastern coast. His objective was to locate and establish a second guarded point on the island, and along the way he made a spotty effort to collect signatures on treaties which would demonstrate native consent in this land of one-thousand chiefs. At each location he raised the French flag and shot guns in a series of processes which comes closer to resembling the logic and extensiveness of signature gathering following the 1840 treaty singing in New Zealand (but was not nearly as comprehensive). The first objective was to perform a prise de possession at Hienghène, where Chief Bouarate still reigned. He had had initially friendly relations with Father Viard in 1844, manifest in the giving of a yam field to the mission which Bouarate pointed out on numerous occasions to other Marists trying to get them to establish a mission within his domain. Father Rougeyron suspected Bouarate had perhaps been dissatisfied with their reluctance, and in letters to his superiors suggests Bouarate had instigated the attacks against the missions in 1847 which had precipitated their decision to leave New Caledonia entirely (Rozier 1990). In the meantime, in 1848 Hienghène was paid a visit by the British warship the H.M.S. Havannah which was following up on reports of Britons killed in the area, yet Bouarate somehow escaped any reprisals even as skeletons of Britons were reportedly on view at the mouth of the Hienghène river. The same year as the Havannah’s visit, Bouarate managed to travel to Sydney aboard the sandal trader the Avon (see Cordier-Rossiaud 1957:26) apparently as part of the ship owner’s commercial strategy. During his stay in Sydney he was reputed by the Australian press to be “the king of New Caledonia”(Rozier 1990:216), a title he then attempted to actually achieve after returning to New Caledonia through attracting European foreigners to Hienghiène for any purpose as a means to consolidate kingly-styled sovereign power.

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Bouarate agreed to recognize French sovereignty on May 6th 1854, on the condition that he not have a penal code imposed on him by Tardy de Montravel. The flag raising was made on the 7th in the presence and protection of two hundred French sailors, and Bouarate signed his consent with an ‘X’ to a treaty identical in wording to the ones earlier signed at Balade and Pouébo. He requested that a flag be left with him to fly over his residence. Why were these provisions agreed to? Bouarate was not Christian, but he was a self-styled sovereign of New Caledonia, and was promulgated as such by the press in Sydney, and he resided at one of the most frequented points on the east of the island with a serviceable natural port. Another prise de possession procedure was held the 15th of May with chief Kai at Kanala, and another was held shipboard with Chief Boula of Kouaoua the 22nd of May. The limits of territories covered by these repeated possessions by verbal processes is conjecturally mapped by Yves Person (1959), who assumes that chiefly signatures corresponded to delimited territorial boundaries: while interesting, this map poorly captures how either the French officers or the chiefs subjectively imagined the territorial consequences of these procedures. Montravel seems to think the whole island is on the road to becoming a fully possessed French sovereign territory, every inch accountable for and linked to a chief with standing to sign his name, just as every tribal person is accountable collectively and linked to a chief with responsibility for their behavior if they aggress a Frenchman. Here is a fetishization of land and people by the French administration which makes the study of land policy a curious and unique device through which to view ideologies about people. The protectorate governance structure as imagined by the French will continue to exist, but now with a fade out horizon of assimilation. The chiefs who signed likely had no initial understanding that since the ceremony performed on their land was repeated at multiple discrete locations on the island, it was actually 184

a process that drew them and their “people” together as a single territorial and political unit under French control from the perspective of international law.

Tardy de Montravel’s Garrison on the Nou-Méa Peninsula Because of the barrier reef, and no piloting knowledge of how to cross it and enter the lagoon, from Kanala on the East coast, the Constantine and the Prony then had to sail south to the Isle of Pines before being able to head north up the west coast in the direction of Port Saint Vincent. The port was known from reports from the 1803 stay of the H.M.S. Buffalo as an excellent natural harbor where Tardy de Montravel hoped he would find an appropriate location to establish the second permanently guarded post called for in his instructions. However, on actual inspection Saint Vincent was not as good for the purposes of building a garrison as Montravel had been led to believe through his reading. He sent his ensign de Castellane on reconnaissance to the South west coast within the lagoon. De Castellane reported back that he had found a peninsula which offered one of the best protected natural harbors yet seen in the entire Pacific. Perhaps even more surprising, the ensign reported that he was well received on Isle Nou to the seaward side of the peninsula by agents running a trade counter8 for a certain Englishman named “Captain” James Paddon—a sandalwood trader who I introduced in Chapter Two. The “agent” de Castellane encountered is identified by Yves Person as a German named Ferdinand Knoblaugh or Knoblauch (sources use both spellings), however according to Knoblauch’s own recollections written around 1910, he claims that he did not arrive in New Caledonia until 1855 and did not work for Paddon at Ile Nou 8

Dorothy Shineberg notes that when Paddon opened his station at Aneityum he placed advertisements publicizing its overture and longitude and latitude in the Wellington Spectator and the Port Phillip Herald (Shineberg 1967:100101, 262 n.12). It is unclear if his establishment at Isle Nou was similarly publicized in the press.

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until July 1856. Knoblaugh claims that Ensign de Castellane was met instead by someone he later knew well: a New Zealand Maori named “Jack” employed by Paddon to tend cattle. He tells us Jack had a traditional moko face tattoo, and claims to have “obtained everything I mention below for history” from this Maori stockman (Knoblaugh 1989: 35). From second hand materials, perhaps from Paddon himself or “Jack” the Maori, we learn from Knoblaugh that Paddon had attained Isle Nou from “Grand Chief Kuindo” in the early 1850s and “if I’m not mistaken” it was “acquired by sale” in exchange for barrels of “tabac en figue”, and étoffes (Knoblaugh 1989:26, 60). Regardless of the ambiguity of the source, De Castellane learned from an employee of Paddon that Isle Nou was near a serviceable coal vein across the bay of Boulari, and the harbor on the peninsula of Nou-Méa did indeed offered easy access to Sydney via a break in the reef, which was directly opposite it across the Coral Sea. To overly simplify the process, through intermediaries Tardy de Montravel decided to invite the traditional chief of Isle Nou and Nou-Méa, Chief “Jack” Kuindo9 to one of his prise de possession ceremonies scheduled for the 15th of June, but Jack did not show up. Tardy held the procedure anyway, and baptized a location on the peninsula of Nou-Méa “Port de France” declaring his intentions that it would serve the future capital of the territory. He then set about building the “Constantine Battery” (barracks which were later converted into the old wing of the present day Hospital Gaston Bourret). From the secured position out in the bay of Isle Nou, or now “Dubouzet,” Montravel rented a hangar from James Paddon for use as a hospital10 (Person

9

Kuindo is written in other texts in various manners: Kouinedo, Cuinedo, Quindo, Quindowa, Tuinso, Kuydo (Saussol 1979:54), and Kouindo, and Kouindowa (Knoblaugh 1989:61). 10 I think this is perhaps a later conflation of the two locations.

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1959:206) which served as a fortified administrative center of the French presence in New Caledonia.11 However, Tardy de Montravel still wanted signed consent for his possession of this area in the name of France, even if this level of detail was not required in his instructions. On June 23rd 1854 Tardy de Montravel succeeded in getting Jack Kuindo and assorted members of the Gamba tribe to come to a ceremony, but none of their members were invited to sign the treaty. Sources tend to say that Kuindo refused, retaining the agency as his own. However, Knoblaugh claims that on the 8th of August 1854 under the name Kouindowa, Chief of Noumea, Jack Kuindo freely signed a treaty gifting the peninsula that would become Noumea to France, in the same document accepted French sovereignty and agreed to protect Europeans in his territory (Knoblaugh 1989:61). In contrast Alain Saussol says the only signing of a treaty took place ten years later, on the 16th of August 1864, which Chief Kuindo signed as Quindowa, under force (Saussol 1979:54). Neither source notes where the treaty documents they reference might be consulted, or whether they have personally seen the documents or how they otherwise learned of their contents. This leaves an ambiguity to the treaty process: Knoblaugh argues that these penal codes were agreed to by him, versus Saussol’s version in which they are imposed. The difference in these versions is in the legitimacy each author claims is contained by the Treaty Chief Kuindo signed with the French. While interesting from the perspective of contemporary French concerns about the legitimacy of treaties which this dissertation documents, and offering fodder for present day recriminations against French colonialism like Saussol’s, neither version helps situate Chief Kuindo in this interaction on his own terms of engagement. 11

Practical affairs seemed to have devolved to Paddon, who possessed perhaps as many as twenty ships and the equipment at Ile Nou to build and repair them. Among other administrative services, he ran the regular postal rotation to Sydney

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1853-1864: 2,000,000 hectares and the long wait for penal colonists Penal colonization was only one among several justifications of the possession when it was officially announced to the French public in a brief piece in the Moniteur Officiel of 13 February 1854, although the penal project seemed to have pride of place in the official announcement.12 The use of steam supplemented sailing ships, and their weakness without regular coal supplies like the two used by Tardy de Montravel and Fevrier-Despointes also indicate a new and growing need for a chain of coaling stations. Even if the existence of coal at Boulari was not known before annexation, its discovery was surely something these captains fantasized about. Regardless of the ends desired, any sea power that wanted to have an effective military presence in the Pacific would need a series of coaling stations as well as a source of actual coal (for trade and commerce, religious missionization, or any other purpose these military ships and strategies might be intended to protect and serve). The French at this time did seem to be mapping a Pacific military strategy to support Pacific transits for trade to the benefit of the home Metropole—a free market in Sydney and China, and a fantasized about canal project, would mean passing through New Caledonia. As shown by the actual facts of transit times, these new steam powered ships would not be able to make the crossing in a timely fashion without well-placed and dependably replenished supplies of coke. New Caledonia, Wallis Island, Tahiti, and later Clipperton clearly form a chain across the Pacific from Australia to the mouth of a French-planned Panama canal—a projection

12

Marx reports that penal projects were popular in France in the 1848-1852 period in a particular way: people in Paris invested in fraudulent pyramid-like projects, drawn by the dual appeal of making money and throwing out the vagabonds.

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which should not be underestimated in consequences even if it never came to fruition after the 1890s bankruptcy of the French public-private venture responsible for building it. From 1853, legal preparations for penal colonization were make in Paris relatively quickly after possession even if New Caledonia had only been a back-up to French Guyana. The Loi de 30 Mai 1854 outlined the objectives of penal colonization and its means. The law included clear Tocquevillian provisions for rehabilitation and civilization, proposing that well behaved convicts be given land cessions in the colony free of charge, and that after release these plots would eventually become their own fully alienable property if conditions of residency, rents, taxes and probation were met. The apparent simplicity and speed of the promulgation of the above land regime of 1854, in explicit design with penal colonization and little else in mind, quickly ran into a multitude of challenges—not the least of which was the absence of penal colonists, to which I can add an increasingly problematic but unaccounted for presence of an indigenous population, and preexisting land transfers effected between indigenous chiefs and figures like the Marists and Paddon. As described above, Febvrier Despointes’ men had written up a purchase contract for a piece of land in the North near Balade where they built a blockhaus. (for a copy of the text see Saussol 1979:47-48). The “Act of Sale” of 11th October 1853 is worth reproducing in full for several reasons, not the least of which is that Yves Person’s account of which locals signed it poorly corresponds with the text of Alain Saussol’s reproduction. In this contractual instance, unlike the prise de possession treaty only two weeks earlier when no locals had signed, there are four ‘X’ signatures attributed by the document to four “sisters” who it identifies as Dibu, Damaléué, Vimo who lived at Uébunu and Fabiane who lived at Boelat. The meaning of 189

“sisters” can be set aside for the moment, in favor of the observation that contracting with women for the purchase of land would seem to contravene the standard conventions of Salic law—which as discussed in Chapter Two in the Marist interpretation typically confines the inheritance and ownership of land to males. Rougeyron had in 1846 specifically written that the Salic law was in effect among the chiefs of New Caledonia as much as between the nobles of France, yet he and two other Marist fathers drafted this very act of sale in which women transferred ownership of land to the French state. Saussol claims that in this 1853 document “everything indicates” the Marists had attained some ethnographic knowledge of their local, by recognizing how land possession by clans is established through proximity of women’s’ gardens to clan houses (Saussol 1979:48). However, if this were accurate, I would expect Rougeyron to make a restatement of his ideas about the nature of property and ownership somewhere in his correspondence, and consistently make recourse to matrilineal aspects of clanship when acting as an intermediary with the state. I have located no evidence that clarifies the case either way.

1855 Government, Annexation, Concessions, and the 1/10th Figure Governor de Bouzet relieved Tardy de Montravel (who went on to be governor of French Guyane). In his first act, on the 20th of January 1855 he declared that New Caledonia henceforth appertained to the government of France: while already within the French State as a possession, it was only with his declaration that local governance fell within the domain of French Government via annexation. In this act he specified that only land titles coming from the government would be recognized and he declared “null, non-valid and prohibited in the future,

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all contracts made with the chiefs and the indigenes, and the sale or pretense of sale, exchange, gift and transfer of what ever sort of title”(Declaration du 20 Janvier 1855). He reports this declaration in a letter to his Minister on the 15th of march 1855, saying with palpable disapproval, that not long before he had made this declaration a “certain number of individuals” had purchased land for little more than “tobacco, some axes, and a few pipes” (quotes in Saussol 1979:49). This seems to reflect a similar attitude held by some colonial governors that good colonial government was also in the service of the colonial subject (see the example of Gordon in Fiji). One notable individual who purchased land using these exact instruments was Admiral Febvrier-Despointes, another was Paddon, and a third were the Marists. This suggests why concerns about land in this declaration do not conform to those of the Treaty of Waitangi, which forces all future transfers to pass through the new government but recognizes old transfers. Several secondary sources suggest these French administrators were aware of problems in New Zealand they believed were attributable to shortcomings of the Waitangi Treaty. In his very first act as Governor, de Bouzet therefore limits to the State the competence to contract with natives for land and thereby define the terms and nature of legality and property, but also defines the legal nature of natives while rendering land to a status quo ante. The document specifies that “Considering it is the principle that when a maritime power se rend souveraine of a land not yet occupied by a civilized nation and possessed only by savage tribes, this prise de possession annules all the contracts made anterior by particular individuals with the naturels of this country,” because “the Chiefs and the Indigenes never had, and cannot have, the right to dispose of all or part of the land occupied by them in common or as a particular’s property…in favor of individuals who are not part of their tribe or are not aboriginal 191

of said territory”(Journal Officielle 1955:26-27). What the governor fails to acknowledge is what the Marists say repeatedly in their letters: large numbers of non-European residents of New Caledonia came from far and wide in the Pacific (Hawaiians, Fijians, Maori, Ouveans, and Wallisians all figure numerously in accounts of social life before annexation). Islanders’ political orders and territorial domains were outcomes of conflicts, exchanges and interpenetrations with not merely neighboring groups one valley over, but people on islands as far afield as Wallis and Tonga. However, de Bouzet’s did not see these sorts of people, or did not consider them problematic. An American called Cannibal Jack, an Englishman named Mr. Underwood, and people clamoring at the French consul in Sydney for permission to emigrate to the new possession were the intended targets of this new land policy. In my interpretation the Governor did not deny New Caledonians the capacity or standing to enter into contracts, he simply asserts that the State has a monopoly, or in his words “reserves to itself exclusively the right” to make legitimate land contracts and restricted to the State’s agents the people with whom they could legitimately contract. While he clearly imagines a horizon beyond which all natives would hold property individually, for the time being this in not in effect. Per foreigners already holding land titles, he states that they would be reviewed according to the norms of International Law. The decree of January 20th 1855 was operationalized as policy. On the 10th of April another decision regulated how the state would grant concessions and organize sales and leases, specifying that it would “réserve” in perpetuity lands “au profit” of two entities. It “reserves” for the State domain features like mines, houillières, and mineral spring. It then “reserves” for indigenous inhabitants 1/10 of unoccupied rural lands which otherwise would be destined for sale (Delignon 1898:10) (cf. Saussol 1979:50 who anachronistically uses the word “reserve” as a 192

noun, specifically referring to native lands). State lands were “reserved” and indigenous lands were “reserved,” in theory both domains would be held inalienably in perpetuity (see Chapter One, on customary aristocratic reserves in France). The nature of the French domains pertaining to ‘unoccupied lands’ which New Caledonia seemed to posses vast tracts, meanwhile had not been established anywhere else in the French empire, with the result that title and terms of ownership become increasingly complex from 1855 until a coherent land regime was definitively established in 1897, including a decades long search of cross-empire legal frameworks for defining the nature of unoccupied and perhaps ownerless lands, and defining the interests of particular colonies versus that of the more general state. Setting the stage for these later conflicts, on the 20th of January 1855 De Bouzet declares these vacant lands domains dominaux or “domains of the dominion.” A process of revisions of pre-annexation land sales then followed. As such, the Marist missionaries and persons like James Paddon who had secured land from the natives before annexation were faced with a situation in which they held land without recognized title, even if they possessed contracts of sale or transfer. They were something akin to “squatters” in the Administration’s eyes, and this viewpoint was legally buttressed with passing years as the State’s jurists slowly defined the nature of unoccupied and plausibly ownerless lands within this new domain. For the Marists, the State tended to recognize their pre-existing self-drafted concession titles, and the State had acquired for them additional concessions after possession in 1853 but before formal annexation in 1855. In 1854 at a location to the East of Nou-Mea henceforth called Saint-Louis, the State recognized a new concession for the Marists, where the Church built a compound and agricultural center and fall-back position for its island-wide mission. After 193

recurrent conflicts in the North around Balade and Pouebo in the 1850s, many converts were relocated to Saint Louis to be under the relatively closer protection of the State’s forces, a history of use which makes it a contemporary point of conflict with local groups whose presence predates the mission. Relevant to this contemporary land conflict, Alain Saussol uses an October 1854 letter in which Commander Lebris talks about his doubts over the legitimacy of the purchase of the Saint Louis concession saying of the Boulari who he describes as the old owners of the land, It is permitted to doubt that they had understood the alienation, despite all the care we employed to try and make them understand that we did had no pretense of depoullering them of their tresses…we recognized their right to property and, in a word, we wanted to buy the lands from them. (Saussol 1979:42). Saussol goes on to ask if land sales, in the sense of fully alienable transfers, “had really existed in traditional society”(1979:43). I will not pursue this question here, in favor of a different line of questioning that will recur through the following chapters: to what extent did the French administration think the natives of New Caledonia had the capacity to buy and sell land? To what degree is it permitted in policy, and how and why did these policies change over time? Penal colonization seemed to lose some of its urgency when in 1856 Napoléon III granted mass pardons to mark the birth of his male heir. In this decision, pressure from prison overcrowding was reduced and penal colonization became less urgent. By 1858 no real movement towards starting penal colonization seems to have been made, and Napoléon III himself suggested that it might be relatively cheap to allow private company interests to take up the task of colonizing New Caledonia and thereby being responsible for the welfare of colonists in isolated places.

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On this suggestion, the Marine Minister granted the local administration the powers to grant concessions to French or foreign person who might be interested in settlement (Delignon 1898:15). With Napoléon’s explicit authorization, land cessions at a distance from established and garrisoned areas could be obtained through public auction in New Caledonia. For the explicit purpose of encouraging free colonization, the local administration was authorized from Paris to enter into contracts for settlement schemes with private individuals who seemed to work as land brokers. One of the first contracts for land concessions was negotiated by the local administration with two men from Sydney for 40,000 hectares, Mr. Brown and Mr. Byrne. They proposed bringing one thousand free adult immigrants to New Caledonia, of which the contract specified “a third at least belonging to the white race, the rest composed of Polynesians, Malays, Chinese, Indians, etc” and that in each of these categories of immigrants at least one third must be female (Delignon 1898:22-23). The mode of compensation for nonwhites and the nature of their relationship to their settlement broker is not specified in materials I have consulted, but appears to resemble indentured servitude leading to permanent settlement rather than Asian contract labor with repatriation. Each white male immigrant would receive a lot of 20 hectares, with definitive title delivered to Brown and Byrne by a government agent with the condition that the title would be lost if the concession was abandoned. While the early Brown and Byrne contract did not come to fruition, it served as a template for other settlement contracts. It is only at this time that James Paddon, who since 1853 was heavily engaged in business between Sydney and Noumea, was able to legally receive title to a concession of 4,000 hectares at Païta (Shineberg 1967:107). Paddon then brought in “Paddon colonists” from Australia of various European nationalities to raise cattle on the concession (Musée de la Ville 2007:72). A French citizen D.N. Joubert received a similar concession 195

contract. He installed fifty-five “Europeans” and brought in Chinese laborers to improve the property (Delignon 1898:28). Despite the agency given to the local administration to allow free colonization, and these examples of its successful contractual productivity , the officials turned down many requests for concessions and the policy only lead to the granting of forty concessions by 1860 (Moniteur Universelle March 22nd 1860). Many of these early concessions were abandoned by their settlers, who either left the island or found a livelihood in the Port de France/Nouméa area. The Marine Ministry and Department of Colonies and various governors of New Caledonia also made special proposals during this time which were meant to encourage French government functionaries—and retired soldiers in particular, and other State functionaries about to retire—to settle in New Caledonia. This had few takers aside from the small number of individuals already present in New Caledonia as state employees. Nonetheless, Port-de-France was established as a civil jurisdiction on January 1st 1859, in which Governor Saissel declares that from this day forward, the Commune of Port-de-France would range from the sea to Pont des Français, and from the Pont to the Marist Missionaries’ concession. “Delimitation” is the language used to for the establishment of the limits of a civil commune. Within this delimited communal territory (which notably does not envelope the Marist’s religious concession), all civil and military life is placed exclusively under the powers attributed to a governing naval commander,13 and within the boundaries of the Commune of Port de France, the Code Napoléon is promulgated as the sole and singular law (Journal Officielle vol

13

Saisset cites as precedent for defining the extent of the commanders powers as governor, Article 7 of the Ordonance of 28 April 1843 pertaining to the “extraordinary” powers given to the governor of the Marquesas, signed by Louis-Philippe. I note this as an example of how French laws remain in effect across regime change.

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II:108). Civil government was thereby established through the “civilization” or legal incorporation of Port de France to the Civil Code of France. In the long wait for penal colonists the few administrators who managed the small garrison of Port de France on the Nou-Mea Peninsula had recurrent ideas that other types of settlers and colonists should be encouraged to colonize New Caledonia. A land regime that was designed to favor penal colonists seemed to them unnecessarily limiting, given the absence of any concrete plan to actually bring any actual penal colonists to New Caledonia. One administrator from his post at the antipode wrote to his Minister arguing that spontaneous colonization should be encouraged through free land cessions for all arrivals, rather than contracts with brokers and land auctions, noting that the “American Pioneer, who arrives in a country with a pick and shovel on the shoulder has the right to ask for a piece of land” (Guys to Minister, February 1860; quoted in Dauphiné 1995:100, translation mine, italics original and untranslated). In an ecology of landscape, these concessions and land policies dealt with largely uncleared and unoccupied lands that required expenditures of labor and time to make serviceable in a system of production. This land was perceived as being worthless until developed through labor in a mise en valeur colonial project. This raises a question which I will examine in Chapter Six: the structural problems of free concession from the perspective of French government.

1864: The First Penal Transport and Gov. Guillain’s Social Project In the ten long years between annexation in 1853 and the arrival of the first contingent of penal colonist in 1864, the “free” colonial population of New Caledonia grew modestly to perhaps 500 persons from a pre-annexation population of several dozen non-natives (not counting several thousand Ouvean islanders and others of non-European origin who might be 197

classed as foreigners). The indigenous population of 1853 was estimated at 21,000, but as I have said in Chapter Three was perhaps much higher at earlier points. The first “transport” of convicts disembarked in New Caledonia in 1864 under conditions set by the law of 30 May 1854, which justified penal colonization on the Tocquevillian assumption that prisoners would be morally rehabilitated by working the land, and those that were beyond salvation would give their labor to the general benefit of France. Rather than finding a peaceful existence as agricultural homesteaders, rebuilding themselves through hard work on their own plot of land, the first 250 convicts instead were used as labor for public works and hired out as domestic servants for government employees and the few spontaneous colonists who lived in the garrisoned area around Port de France, Ile Nou and Ducos peninsula. Later shipments of convicts gradually found slightly better accommodations on arrival. The mixed directions in which New Caledonia was thought to be developing as a colony is captured by two artifacts from Governor Guillain’s tenure of 1862-1870 which appear in a school text from 1992: the first is a proposed “devise” for the colony of “Civilize, Produce, Rehabilitate” and the second is a statement that “the métis of New Caledonia will make a beautiful and intelligent population”(Douyère 1992:50). In this imagery and statement, both of Guillain’s conception, we see an articulation of a project to “civilize” natives and “rehabilitate” convicts, who together would form the foundations for a future mixed-race society. However, Guillain recognized that a population of male convicts and laborers created a demographic problem. A common-place recognition in settlement colonies is that women are needed for the success of the project. Beginning with a request from Governor Guillain in 1869, female prisoners from Europe were brought in as potential brides for freed male convicts. The 198

apparently racial aspect of Guillain’s decision to bring European women to New Caledonia can be tempered with his statement reported above that métissage can produce something good. There were simply not enough women in New Caledonia for this growing prisoner population, indigenous or European. The plethora of Australians and other immigrants of European and non-European origins seems outside the margins of Governor Guillain’s conception of what the colony is, and what it would become. However, he did not seem to imagine it as exclusively French in the national cultural sense of the word, nor should this be surprising (cf. Weber 1974). Starting in 1864 he made significant efforts to bring in “Bourbonais” creoles to raise sugar cane (named for the French Indian Ocean possession Ile de Bourbon, present day La Réunion). Under Guillain, New Caledonia was being navigated towards a future as a mixed society like that of Reunion and Martinique, and not one based on penal colonization alone.

From “reserve in perpetuity”(1855) to “incommutable property of tribes”(1868) The 1855 device to “reserve” lands for Indigenous use and for State domains, as opposed to entering them into alienable concessions, was modified by a declaration of 20 January 1868 (Journal Officiel published 26th of January) that recognized “indigenous territorial property” as the “incommutable property of tribes” and not the property of clans, families, or individuals who compose the membership of a tribe. With this new definition of property, on February 2nd 1868, the governor issued a decree “delimiting the territory of the tribe of the Manongaies” which after delimitation would remain free from taxation for five years. “Delimitation” is also the language used to for the establishment of Port-de-France as a civil jurisdiction on January 1st 1859. The delimitation of the Manongaies is a similar legal jurisdictional-creating operation. Henceforth, 199

the governing administrations identified the chiefs of tribes as their officially intermediaries with all other indigenous peoples in terms of property, land, law and taxation. Alain Saussol calls this the first institutionalization of the “Reserve” (1979:157) but again, in this context it is an anachronistic use of term which only becomes current much later: contemporary publications talk about “delimitations” of indigenous communal lands in the same way that they talk about delimitations of civil communes. However, the policy of “delimitation” of native lands was motivated by a perception that, since the indigenous population was dying back, they needed less land for their support. The delimitation policy was supposed to establish the boundaries of communally owned tribal lands as for any other “communal” legal entity (like cities and towns), and then the administration could adjust boundaries of these reserved lands as the needs of the indigenous population decreased. Again, this is not “a reserve,” or “a reservation,” in the policy or vernacular language current at the time. Instead it is talked about as a “delimiting” of indigenous territory in 1868, as the “cantonnement” of tribes in 1876, and not until the 15th of March 1880 is there a declaration from the local government which reads the lands “are reserved for the needs of indigenes of the tribes of the valley of Thio.” Writing his thesis in 1897 Delignon proposes a “delimitation of indigenous reserves” in favor of free colonists (Delignon1898:172), and the phrase “réserves indigenes” and the need to “reduire les réserves” appears in the Fillon Report of 1907 (e.g. Fillon 1907:348). As a cross-check of policy language, “reservations” appear as a conventional way to describe Indian lands from before the 1850s, although the Oklahoma Indian Appropriations Act of 1851 as modified in 1871 begins to share element of the delimitation policy, as does the 1887 Dawes Act (parallels in native policy which I will discuss in chapter four). 200

For now, note that “Cantonment” is a strange word, with military and other connotations. In this specific policy language, it comes from Algerian precedents in which the French policy was to try control nomadic groups by consolidating them into tribes, and sedentarizing them into villages (de Tocqueville’s hand in this should be obvious: this is the only way he thinks civilization is possible on the frontier as I discussed above). When this policy is recontextualized in New Caledonia, segmentary social groups which had nothing resembling a tribal affinity were uprooted from when they lived and resettled together through the a process which Alain Saussol describes and maps very concisely and thoroughly (1979). However, in 1868, policy had not proceeded beyond the idea that indigenous lands could be made into discrete and bounded units. Beyond the attention I paid to nominal reserves, this 1868 decree is indeed the institutional foundations on which the indigenous reserves were established. However, there is no mention yet of “coutume” as a special domain of indigenous practice, or as shown by the land tax law, New Caledonians were not yet essentially different and autonomous types of humanity in the eyes of the state.

Conclusion: Life and Land at the End of the Second Empire By 1870 the total number of convicts transported to New Caledonia was around two thousand, however as of December 31st 1870, only 59 convicts or released prisoners had been placed on plots of land (Haussonville 1875:581). As Alain Saussol has suggested the granting of concessions to convicts was an after thought in practice (1981:Planche 22), even though it was the foundational rationale of the scheme as the original theory of penal colonization. Land, as mentioned above, was classified into alienable concessions, and inalienable reserves belonging to the State and to Indigenous groups (or Tribes after 1868). After 1858 with 201

penal colonists not forthcoming, units of 40,000 hectares were granted to individuals who seemed to intend to sub-divide their vast tracts lands down to units of 10-20 hectares as part of settlement schemes, most of which were abandoned before even the first sub-concessions were distributed, with the result that the lands we re-enrolled in the potentially alienable domains of the colony (Delignon 1898: 30). This limited program was halted in 1863, with a view towards actually beginning penal colonization in 1864, however many small concessions after that point were still granted by special Ministerial Decree to non penal colonists. In conclusion I offer a comparison of terminology, classification, and dates of jurisdictional promulgations, decrees, ordinances noted in the island’s two official publications: the colony’s Journal Officielle, a serial publication of which “Volume One” is 1853, and the Moniteur Officielle a newspaper-type publication that started in 1859 for the new civil readership of Port-de-France (the latter contains “official” and “unofficial” sections). Not to labor the point, the civil jurisdiction created in 1859 subsequently contains an official civic “public” which apparently needs a newspaper for civic “publication”: the official paper is a device of French civil life. I noted important dates and outside origins of institutions that are often ascribed to some of these legal devices (i.e. Salic law AD 507). I argue that this table shows a parallelism of French Civil and Indigenous Customary governing and legal institutions as designed and described over time by State Administrators and State Agents. Clearly the first is the model for the second: French Civil Government

Indigenous Parallel

Unit:

“Commune”

“Tribu”

Head:

A Commanding Governor (1 January 1859)

A Tribal Chief (1 January 1859)

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Code of Law:

Napoleonic Code (1 January 1859; 1804)

Custom /Tribal /Salic Code (1876 / 1854/ 1846; AD 507)

Codes’ Extent:

Delimited Civil “Commune” (1 January 1859)

Delimited Customary “Tribe” (2 February 1868)

Valid Contracts: Only between Civils (20 January 1855)

Only between Customaries (20 January 1855; 1876)

Communal Property—Inalienable: Reserved State Domain (20 January 1855) Owned in Perpetuity, Communally by the Commune (1 January 1859)

Reserved Indigenous Domain (10 April 1855) Owned in Perpetuity, Communally by the Tribe (2 February 1868)

Individual Property—Alienable:

Outside Law:

Individual’s as per Law/Code (20 January 1855; 1 January 1859)

Individual’s as per Custom (6 March 1876)

International Law of Civil Nations (1855; Grotius ca. 1625)

Unspecified (Unmarked: Natural Law)

While from the perspective of some French administrators and Marist Fathers, the customary tribal population of New Caledonia is structurally an older type of social organization—perhaps resembling the tribal organization of pre-Christian Germanic barbarians, or perhaps resembling the aristocratic organization of early Christian Gaulic French feudal orders, instead what this table shows is a near perfect parallelism between civil and customary institutions. This effectively creates, unintentionally, indigenous society as a perfectly mirror of French civil order, towards which it is thought to be on the way to assimilation and thereby incorporation within French civilization. This does not mean that pre-colonial styles of indigenous lives and cultures ceased to exist, or that indigenous institutions conformed either perfectly or imperfectly with this new 203

imposed organization. However, an institutional framework built on French liberalist ideas of custom and civilization was now in place, at time competing with French Catholic conceptions of how this governing relationship could better be arranged. Further study would focus minutely on how via a cultural logics all its own the consolidation of previously unallied groups into tribes yielded chiefly representatives in non-mechanistic way. Within a regime that recognizes full capacities of alienability within customary area and between customary agents so long as they are provided for in unwritten customary conventions, the reserves are indeed locations where one might empirically locate indigenous concepts formed in conversation with civil conventions of alienability. This valuable work is outside the limits of this dissertation while being intimately germane to it: they are both necessary parts of an adequate account of French colonization of New Caledonia. Within the structures and possibilities often dictated and enforced by the French State and supported by missionary agents, land and authority in the newfangled “tribal” arrangement would emerge in dialogue with liberalist, anti-liberalist, and often competing indigenous cultural-groups specific logics, ideologies and interests.

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CHAPTER 5 COLONIZATIONS (1870-1897)

A New Society through Settlement By the 1870s, Algeria and New Caledonia were the only locations in the entire French Empire where administrators and colonial theorists believed European families could permanently settle. They argued that only in these locations would the temperate climate support European agriculturalists who would actually work the land themselves. By this measure, the generations of French families which had settled in tropical climates such as La Réunion, the French Antilles and other “old” plantation colonies were not evidence to the contrary. In those places slaves and their descendants were expected to do the labor, not Europeans. Penal colonization efforts in French Guyana from the 1850s offered mortality statistics and anecdotes which supported the impression that labor in the tropics killed European colonists, leading to the conclusion that those locales were more suited to people of non-European origins. On this basis, only the dryer malaria-free climates of Algeria and New Caledonia were deemed suitable to serve as colonies du peuplement or settler colonies. Following this logic, Colonel Charrière reports to a commission of the National Assembly in 1874, I’ve been involved in transportation since 1852, and I’ve participated in the organization of the penitentiary in Guyane. It’s my most intimate conviction that transportation to New Caledonia will give excellent results. The softness of 205

climate permits the European to work at any hour of the day without risk to his health….(Commission 1875:594) An 1894 guide for emigrants to New Caledonia offers a reassuring chapter heading for the intending colonist, suggesting that they needed to be convinced of the softness of the Caledonian climate: “Working the earth is without danger to the emigrant”(Challamel 1894:136). Work was supposed by many to be a mortal danger in the colonies. However, as de Tocqueville told his fellow Frenchmen in the 1830s and I related in Chapter Four, working the land at the frontier can build the foundations of moral order: sedentarization, civilization, and Christianization. From this type of perspective one could even argue that rather than being dangerous, agricultural labor at the Pacific frontier of France might actually be good for emigrants generally, and particularly good for encouraging the repentance and resurrection of penal convicts. New Caledonia had the added appeal for emigration: someone misinformed and exaggerated reports kept coming in to the metropole that suggested the island was underpopulated by natives—particularly in the south. Like Pacific islanders elsewhere, the indigenous Melanesians were supposedly on the road to extinction. Presumably these native lands would quickly be “opened up” for settlers. If a French settler colony is defined by European labor, how is it different from other official modes of colonization? In Stephen Roberts’ presentation of what he calls the “French theory of colonization” (1929) he nicely recapitulates an official classification systems used by administrators during the Third Republic (1871-1940). Roberts tells us that administrators classify colonies by two criteria. The first classification identifies a colony by its “degree” of European emigration, which sets in opposition the category of a commercial or capitalist 206

“exploitation colony” and that of a “settlement colony.” The second classification identifies the multiple “motives” for colonization as either “political” or “theological” or “economic.” Roberts leaves the era specificity and shifting connotations of these motives largely aside, but they can be used to help clarify historically specific motives and oppositions for my purposes here (cf. Maunier 1949:20-21 who also writes in the 1920s and identifies these motives with specific historical periods of colonization as a diachronic classification). Eras of colonization seen in terms of motives and intentions are less unified than Roberts seems to realize. These ideal-type constructions make an easy target for critique, since they never occur empirically as pure types except in policy statements and colonial theorizing. However, in New Caledonia everyone involved in the administration of the project believed they were working towards at settlement of the island with Europeans. Lots of other activities were also going on, sometimes of commercial and religious characteristics, but the motive and intent of colonization was clearly settlement in policy directives produced in the 1870s. Udo Krautwurst takes the easy target of the settler colony category, and concludes in light of the mixtures of types that “all colonialism is settler colonialism” and rejects any effort to make distinctions between modes, motives, and eras of colonialism saying that they are empirically inaccurate and seems to suggests these categories only matter from the perspective of colonial apologists (2003:58). Krautwurst explicitly adopts Frantz Fanon’s modes of persuasion, and re-presents this eminent anti-colonialist’s political assertions as a legitimate mode of analysis. Krautwurst’s is a deeply anti-ethnographic perspective. For obvious reasons, this rhetorically geared argument fits poorly with the empirically selected evidence I present in this dissertation. I argue that the intentions of administrators and politicians involved in colonial projects of civilization, and the intellectual foundations of these 207

colonial policies are worth understanding because they have real and lasting social consequences. Planning New Caledonia’s future as a settlement colony in the 1870s colony renders it a materially very different kind of place within the Empire than a non-settler colony. Even in light of Krautwurst’s borrowing of Fanon’s observation that settled French emigrants live in all types of French colonies no matter the nominal type of colony, bureaucratic organizations and policies do actually matter. For example, I have an excellent contrast built from materials dealing with New Caledonia of how settler colonialism is different from its most common contrast, commercial exploitation colonialism (as found in plantation systems for example). French settler colonialism assumes that non-whites will die out or be marginalized over time, and that Europeans and their descendants will form the bulk of the civil sphere and labor force. Exploitation colonialism assumes instead that non-whites will continue to live, serving as labor either as slaves or as lower class wage earners , and supply the balance of the population. In this latter colonial form, Europeans are the managers of labor, since if whites were to work in such climates they would surely die. Class, race, labor, governance and myriad other rubrics of lived experience would thereby be organized differently by colonial policy. While New Caledonia was planned at various stages as a place for settlement of prisoners and later free French, nothing in any policy I have yet encountered suggests anyone intended to build a replica or one-to-one reproduction of the French metropole in the South Pacific through settlement. From their perspective New Caledonia offered an opportunity to build something new and different through settlement, projects that were utopic and idyllic at times, and at others conceived in pragmatic terms as a better alternative to what existed at the time in France. Within the sixty years of the French Third Republic (1871-1940) by which this chapter is encapsulated, the possibilities for New Caledonia are often described as though the possibilities 208

of “settler” colonialism were set opposite to those of “exploitation” mode of capitalist colonization. New Caledonia was not supposed to be a place where economic well-being would be based on large-scale capital-heavy enterprises and wage-labor compensation. Areas of French Indochina offers examples of this business-friendly mode of production, where individual Frenchmen did not own property outside urban areas for their own agricultural exploitation. Instead, as materials below will collaborate, during the Third Republic (1870-1940) the manual labor and bulk of population of New Caledonia was supposed to be European in origin, eligible according to official design for eventual membership in the land-owning classes, earning their living through the fruits of their labor on small family-owned and family-labored plots of land. They were also supposed to be penal and political prisoners. At this point, anyone with a decent knowledge of labor and settlement history in New Caledonia will object that this organized emigration—penal or other wise— largely failed as settlement and labor programs. By the first half of the 20th century, most wage labor in New Caledonia were Asians brought to the island on long-term work contracts arranged by corporations and the government. As I will show below, this practice was intended as a stop-gap solution to meet capitalist labor demand for mining and agriculture during an economic downturn which threatened to bankrupt the colony. These “Asiatic” laborers were supposed to return to their point of origins at the end of their contacts. The fact that so many people from Japan and present-day Indonesia and Vietnam settled permanently was not part of the programs’ designs or intentions. This trajectory is only interpretable in context of the failure of policies of penal and free emigration from France as they relate to not merely settlement but class, labor, and opportunity.

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The Parisian Communards of 1871 as subjects for “Natural Law” At the end of the previous chapter, Emperor Napoléon III had entered into the FrancoPrussian war, during the course of which he managed to get himself captured at the battle of Sedan on the 3rd of September 1870. He had left the Empress in charge of affairs of State in Paris. On her orders, her legislative advisors1 met in the chamber of deputies on September 4th to discus how to proceed with a new government, when according to official reports a “Parisian mob filled their chambers, demanding the overthrow of the Empire and a proclamation of a Republic” (Currier 1893:127). Famous political men like Gambetta and Jules Favre lead the “mob” to the Hotel de Ville or Mayor’s office of Paris and promulgated a provisional Government of the National Defense composed mostly of deputies from Paris, while stating that elections would be held at a future date. A citizens’ militia composed of the majority of the city’s men was formed under the name the National Guard, which immediately faced the task of holding off the advancing Prussian army at the gates of Paris. They successfully held the Prussians at the gates for two months, allowing the provisional government to enter into extended treaty negotiations with Otto Von Bismarck and the united Prussian forces. Final treaty provisions stipulated that France pay monetary restitutions for costs of the war, that France would conceded most of the eastern territories of Alsace and Lorraine which earlier had been granted to France at the Treaty of Westphalia. In exchange, Prussian forces would withdraw from all other occupied territories, and would lift the siege of Paris on condition that the Prussian army would briefly occupy the capital before withdrawing. The treaty 1

Including Jules Favre, Count Palikao, and Thiers who made proposals on how to proceed according to Currier 1893.

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additionally called for an armistice, giving a respite to allow for elections of a new French National Assembly. France-wide voting by adult males took place starting February 8 1871. As a result of the unintended effects of a structure of majority rule and universal male enfranchisement, only two of the fourteen ministers appointed from members of the Assembly were Republicans, while remaining ministers were an even split between Orléanists and Legitimists (Currier 1893:129). The result is what Alice Bullard calls a “Monarchist Republican” government: most Frenchmen outside Paris elected monarchist candidates to the Assembly. This provisional assembly sat in Bordeaux, presumably for the pragmatic reason that Paris remained under nominal siege by the Prussian army since the treaty had not yet been ratified (Bullard 2000:68-71). Aldolphe Thiers was selected by his peers as president of the Assembly. He was an Orléanist, who officially favored constitutional monarchies as a form of government, yet agreed to work within the republican institution created by the provisional government rather than work to destroy it as Napoléon III had done in 1851. To keep the story short, under the Treaty agreed to by newly elected President Adolphe Thiers, the Prussian army was authorized to occupy Paris for the first three days of March 1871. Once the siege was lifted, the National Assembly in Bordeaux then voted to relocate to Versailles, rather than return to Paris where elected and consultative assemblies had tended to preside since the revolution 1789. This frustrated Parisian politicians, who were further angered when President Thiers appointed a former officer of Napoleon III as the head of the Parisian National Guard. The National Guard’s central command refused, which constituted an act of insubordination. Because the committee had not followed orders, the French National government in Versailles declared them “criminal and conspiratorial” in the Journal Officielle 211

published on March 17th. In the early morning of March 18th the regular military from Versailles was sent into Paris to retrieve cannons and machine guns from Fort Montmartre. Members of the Parisian National Guard managed to ally with the Versailles rank-and-file soldiers, and in a series of events that are not fully clear (Bullard 2000:73), yet typically attributed to a great and agentive creature of French mythology called the “Parisian Mob,” two of the Versailles officers were killed by their units and the soldiers entered into an armed mutiny in alliance with the Parisian mob. Control of the city was taken by “in the name of the working class” by some well situated social activists, who formed a new government for the Commune of Paris—a singular and autonomist government of radically Republicanist ideals, often described by later commentators as socialist, communalist, anarchists, anti-establishment, and anti-clerical. What the “Communards” as a group might have been up to is less clear-cut. However, the city-state government they created is now known as the Commune de Paris, (not to be confused with the administrative unit which still exists under that name today). The Commune lasted for ten weeks, from March 18th 1871 to May 28th of 1871, ending in one week of fighting called the “Bloody Week” of May 21st to May 28th in which Paris was taken by the regular French army in street by street fighting. President Thiers supposedly sought advice from Prussian officers (Bullard 2000: 71), in an operation the culminated in 20,000 deaths according to the most generally accepted estimates (see Anderson 2004 for a nice statement on assessing death count assertions related to the Commune). As Alice Bullard points out, the ways the Commune’s rise and demise is narrated fits into an already established set of accusations of barbarism and debauchery leveled on both sides of the leftist/rightist divide in Europe writ as a worker/elitist contrast (Bullard 2000:68). In the 212

aftermath of the Commune the monarchist-dominated national government was the prosecuting party and had an authoritative voicing and institutional might to frame the communards as the “savage destroyers of civilization” (Bullard 2000:199). Government inquiries and trials fixated on “the alleged immorality of the communards—their socialism and internationalism, their atheism, their disrespect for the patriarchal family, and their distrust of property…”(Bullard 2000:97). Prisoner Henri Rochefort’s quip that President Thiers had committed “true cannibalism” in his execution of the Bloody Week (Bullard 200:72) demonstrates the reciprocal use of primitive tropes in the aftermath of events. The government of the communards was presented for prosecution as a singular moral problem for the nation, requiring a moralizing solution: the working sense of “civilization” which they are accused of destroying in this context is clearly civility and its familial Christian trappings, as well as the political integrity of France. The Commune of Paris was an effort at self-rule and thereby amounted to an attempt at the disintegration of the unified civil sphere, the opposite of a process of incorporation: French civilization was thereby threatened by the Communards in both a political-legal and socio-cultured sense. Thousands of Parisians were sent to prison by magistrates and prosecutors with royalist backers. They were officially and explicitly described as savage and uncivilized threats to social order. The perhaps anarchistic and anti-patriarchic and anti-property objectives often ascribed to Communards by French State Jurists show that the state’s officers believed they suffered from an absence of proper or natural familial and political order. The new electors of the new Third Republic saw an easy solution to these moral trouble makers swelling the prisons of France beyond capacity: send the individuals to the oft-talked about and plausibly functioning penal colony in New Caledonia. 213

Political debates in the National Assembly in 1871-1872 culminated in the Loi du 23 mars 1872 which selected the Isle of Pines off the southern tip of New Caledonia as an appropriate location for these uncivilized political deportees. The law of 1872 had particular ideas of reform in mind, meant to produce what Alice Bullard calls “The ideal subject for the third republic”(2000). In Bullard’s analysis, purposefully harsh treatment of prisoners was supposed to reduce these criminal types to a blank slate, offering the possibility that they could be rebuilt into moral citizens through direct engagement with the natural world and its laws, and New Caledonia offered the opportunity for unmediated engagement with this natural order. New Caledonia, and the Isle of Pines in particular, was presented to deputies and senators in Paris as a place which existed in an ideal state of nature, where in the form of a “pastoral penal colony” the wayward Communards could re-learn basic human civility by rediscovering its grounding in natural law (Bullard 2000:121). Specifically, in the Pacific they would discover the naturalness of patriarchy, property and Christianity and realize faced with such evidence the unnaturalness of anarchism and communalism as ways of life. Anarchy as defined by state agents seems a very broad category indeed, a seeming catch-all that describes everything that threatens recognition of agnatic descent and inheritance—in other words only Salic Law styles of rule and inheritance are legitimate, a perspective what might be expected from a monarchist-run republic like the early Third Republic. Land concessions in the penal colony would be an instrument to help these wayward French discover the value of property they had lost through working on and owning property. Land formed the central leverage this project of re-moralization was supposed to have over the prisoner. The perspective assumed that there is a natural moral, which had been corrupted by urban life and was potentially redeemable by rural life. A quote by the penal program’s designer 214

Vicompte D’Haussonville ( which I culled by Bullard) puts penal colonization in precisely these terms during a presentations to the deportation committee of 1872 when he described the scope and intentions of the over all penal colonization project and its root assumptions: During the entire course of its deliberations, your commission has had a unique goal in view: to facilitate the founding of a new society2 in New Caledonia…Timeless truths….What is the basis of all societ[ies]? ....Property and family; without property and without family, no civilization is possible.(quoted in Bullard 2000:129 italics added). D’Haussonville was one of the central advocates and architects of the slow retooling of Napoleon III’s penal scheme described in Chapter Four into Third Republic penal schemes. D’Haussonville presents evidence to the committee that the penal system of New Caledonia created in 1864 had fallen short of the promise of morally rehabilitating prisoners, and suggests that in no way was it helping to found a “new society” of desirable qualities. Citing material dating up to 1870, he argued that the colonial prisons in Guyane and New Caledonia reproduced those very conditions of the metropolitain bagnes they were meant to prevent (Haussonville 1875:558), specifying that in terms of the “moral” reform of prisoners, New Caledonia was no improvement over the old system (Haussonville 1875:591). In his examples, their “moral” shortcoming is specifically and pointedly a religious shortcoming in the anecdotal information he offers the committee as evidence of the system’s failure. He proposes that this failure is attributable to one variable: none of the prisoners seemed to ever actually end up on a plot of land (see Chapter Four).

2

“New Society” has now come up in Guizot’s characterization of modernity after Clovis (Chapter Two), and in the words here of the son-in-law of Guizot’s friend the Duc de Broglie. Note that Guizot, Broglie, and Haussonville were colleagues who served together at the 40 member Academie Francaise.

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Yet D’Haussonville grants that the penal colony in New Caledonia has a saving grace, since it solves the problems faced by all penitentiary systems of how to successfully reinsert the prisoner back into society. He claims that the penal colony is unique: It Creates for them a future, in giving in one word the possibility of retaking in a new more indulgent and less closed society the position that they had lost in the metropole. In one word, it’s colonization… (Haussonville 1875:568) His assumption was that reform of regular prisoners’ moral characters was eminently possible in these young colonial societies, since once released into a new society they would not fall into the same class hierarchy or social position in that hierarchy that they had previously occupied—with evident dissatisfaction (dissatisfaction which led to crime and revolt in the first place, and recidivism in the second). What holds for one criminal type apparently held just as well for all criminal types in D’Haussonville’s scheme. For Communards and criminals, New Caledonia was supposed to be a fertile place of ruralist opportunity, free from the debased class position freed inmates enter in the social order of the metropole. New Caledonia is by his own words a “new society” where moral persons could be cultivated from immoral persons, and the sign of their morality would apparently be an increase in religious observance and activity (for example, attending mass). He argues that Colonial penitentiaries instituted under Napoléon III failed to take full advantage of the beneficent qualities of the land itself, and a real agricultural settlement scheme should have no problem turning the moral failures of prisons into a moral success. This seems in line with de Tocqueville’s favorable views of forced agriculturalist colonies, and it should be noted that D’Haussonville was part of de Tocqueville’s committee which reviewed the French penal system in the 1840s (Chapter Four). D’Haussonville’s disagreements with de Tocqueville seem primarily over the latter’s proposals for enforced 216

silence in prison contexts, while both recognized the cruelty of strict regimes of cellular isolation and other regimes which deprive inmates of all human interaction. Following the arguments advocated by D’Haussonville, after several years of legal processes, in 1872 and 1873 almost four thousand officially godless anarchist communards were shipped from French port prisons to the other side of the world, classified as political deportees. This status preserved special rights to expression compared to other prisoners, for instance the civil right to print and read newspapers which is denied regular prisoners. The logic of this strange convention appears to respect the civil rights of free thought and expression for political prisoners since their crimes are different in intention from routine criminality. This convention and its origins deserves a fuller treatment than the one I present here. The Communards were joined on their voyages by one hundred or so individuals of Berber and Arab ethnicity who had rebelled against the French in the Kabyle Revolt of 1872. These two groups were placed together by happenstance, since the Kabyle or “Mokrani” revolt in Algeria commenced a mere four days before the start of the communard insurrection in Paris (Pisier 1971: 39). While not necessarily conflating the events, members of the National Assembly of the Third Republic seems to have regarded these two groups as legally equivalent in status (apparently regardless of race or origin in light of the political nature of their offences). When the Communard and Kabyle cases came before judges the legal regime treated the politically condemned Kabyles under the same loi du 23 mars 1872: through this legal conflation both North Africans and the Communards to the Isle of Pines. There is no misunderstanding in the archival records that both these groups of political deportees were equally expected to make excellent permanent settlers of the New Society in New Caledonia, which D’Haussonville and other politicians envisioned. 217

The new Republican government acted with particular haste to prepare New Caledonia for this new class of political prisoners from Paris since no facilities existed on the Isle of Pines for their incarceration. Existing establishments in French Guyana had been officially closed to male European convicts since 1867—five years— because of rates of prisoner mortality up to 28% annually. Starting in 1867, in a racial logic of penal colonization dealing with criminals, non-Europeans who were not afforded the special protective status of being labeled a political prisoner were deported to the bagne prisons of French Guyana: This made it a site where colonial subjects “en particulier les Arabes” were interned. European women were sent to Guyana until Governor Guillain’s 1869 request to bring female prisoners to New Caledonia to serve as brides (Clair et al 1990: 7; Merle 1995: 63). In other words, there is a order to the Penal Administration in which prisoners are classed and categorized by offense, ethno-racial origins and gender. This policy taxonomy offered a fairly consistent means of determining where in the world a prisoner would be sent, although good behavior en route apparently could win a prisoner sentenced to the hard life of Guyana a diversion to the soft life of New Caledonia.3

Communards In the Penal Colony These prisoner-type distinctions are important in terms of where and how they would serve their time in New Caledonia. Dangerous criminals, called bagnards, were sentenced to forced labor, often for life as a commuted death sentence. This category of dangerous prisoners were incarcerated on Isle Nou, often involved in industrial work making shoes, clothing and other goods to support the prison population, as well as being used in public works and 3

At this time, ships sailed from le Havre and other ports in France, crossed the Atlantic to French Guyana, then went back across the Atlantic to round the Cape and proceed to New Caledonia approaching from the South of Australia. In this way, French Guyana was on the way to New Caledonia on a voyage that took six months.

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construction in Nouméa (Reboul and Charrières at séance du 30 juin 1874, in Commission 1875:578-579, 584). Adjacent to Isle Nou, on Ducos peninsula, the more volatile political prisoners were condemned to an enclosed “fortification,” which in 1873 at the time of General Reboul’s inspection, was not in his estimation fortified or enclosed, and contained 750 prisoners of which only one, named Assi, had briefly agreed to build and operate a forge for a client in Nouméa. While the General would like to see them all forced to work, legally “deportees are free” and the guards have no right to command or force them to work (Commission 1875: 581). The less volatile political prisoners, distinguished from the ringleaders as “déportés simples” (Saunier 1971: 20; Pisier 1971:5) were sent to the Isle of Pines where they lived in relative freedom. Reports of officers tell they able to raise crops and animals, print newspapers and engage in other freedoms of expression such as reading, growing beards, wearing their own choice of clothes. Again, as political prisoners, they could not be forced to work by their guards. To house and support these prisoners, the governor divided the land-mass of the Isle of Pines into two parts: a section in the West for the Political deportees was cut out of the Vendegou domain and divided into five Communes. Within these areas, the Communards and Mokrani Kabyles were supposed to raise their own goods for consumption and exchange, and each Commune had right to name three representatives to bring complaints to the commander of the island (Commission 1875:581). In otherwords, they officially had a form of civil representation, they lived in communes, and had a significant range of civil rights. The majority of the Isle of Pines island sill remained in inalienable domains of ownership as defined by the 1868 law. The land the Communards were supposed to work on the Isle of

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Pines was prison land: when concessions were granted, they would be on the mainland. By the following measures all land is inalienable on the island: •

From 1868 until 1872 the Isle of Pines in its near entirety of 15,000 hectares was reserved as an indigenous domain inalienable in perpetuity, with the exception of resources reserved inalienable to the State such as waterways .

•

Enacting the March 1872 decision by the Versailles National Assembly to make the Island into a forced agricultural colony, 12,000 hectares became reserved for the needs of the Penitentiary.

•

This 15,000 hectares of land is henceforth classified into 12,000 hectares of “Réserve Pénitentiarie” and 3,000 hectares of “Réserve Indigènes” (Delignon 1898:78).

Both these reserves are separate from the civil communes and military domains which are overseen by the Governor and subject to the Napoleonic Code. This reflects a tri-partite system of territorial government within the colony: a colonial administration headed by a Governor; a penal administration headed by a Commander directed by superiors in Paris; a tribal government headed by a chief. At the time this vast amount of land was converted over to penal reserves, the Isle of Pines had already been experiencing a land crunch due to the relocation of Maré islanders after clashes with over protestant / Marist expansions in the 1860s. To encourage the Kunie Chief, Queen Hortence, to accept this land arrangement, for the first time the sovereign of the Isle of Pines was given the monthly stipend promised by Febrvier-Despointes to Chief Vendegou II in exchange for signing the process verbale of the prise de possession of 1853. The settlement side of this scheme was a failure in terms of the Communards. General Reboul’s somewhat dismissive report from 1873 says that the political deportees had no interest 220

in leaving the Isle of Pines to farm their own concessions, and instead wanted to go to Noumea, where he tells the Commission “there are cabarets and cafés”(Commission 1875:582). Most Communards remained in New Caledonia only as long as they absolutely had to by law. After their amnesty by a vote of the increasingly Republican and less monarchical National Assembly on the 11th of July, 1880 they were legally free to repatriate back to the Metropole at the expense of the French State. The few who had been granted small agricultural concessions on the mainland had demonstrably poor material assistance encouraging them to stay on, despite rhetorical claims made by administrators that all efforts were being made to ensure that each individual settlement was a success (Pisier 1971: 7; Clair 1994: 137). Parisian Communards knew nothing about farming, and the techniques of farming did not come naturally from the land and would have had to be learned. Others simply objected to the program of work in its entirety (see Bullard’s treatment of “the right to laziness”[2000:143144]). The administrator General Reboul complains in May 1873 that his charges only worked enough to receive a wine ration in which they imbued to such an extent that they “forget their dignity as political men”(Bullard 2000:143; D’Haussonville 1875:549), a reference to the privileges given them in regards to the respectable nature of their offenses—which Reboul perhaps wanted to see curtailed. A few Communard had shown signs of what I take to be a serious inclination to become permanent colonists. By 1876 some four hundred and sixty five family members had agreed to join their men in exile, benefiting from having their passage paid at the expense of the state (Claire 1994: 140). Perhaps these men4 and their families were resigned to their circumstances

4

Only twenty-some women were included in the original deportation of Communards.

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and willing to make the best of their situation. In administrative logic, the presence of wives and children of the prisoners was supposed to encourage their permanent emigration from France. Once pardoned, the Communards repatriated en masse at the expense of the State. Close archival research shows the almost absolute failure of this program to settle New Caledonia with Communards: only twenty three of the 4000-odd French communard deportees sent to New Caledonia actually stayed on as permanent settlers (Claire 1994: 146).

The Royal Kabyles in The Penal Colony The Kabyles were excluded from this pardon even though they were exiled under the same law it supposedly reversed. Some argued in the National Assembly that their exclusion was unjust, but this did not produce a pardon. The hundred-odd Kabyle men left alone on the Fifth Commune of the Isle of Pines were eventually relocated to Ducos on the mainland. Perhaps in light of the conditions of their exclusion from the pardon, some of the Kabyle prisoners of the Mokrani family apparently began to articulate a claim that they were actually descendants of a French noblemen captured in North Africa in the 17th century. A curious particularity: The Mokrani pretend—and glory in the pretense—to descend from a Montmorency made prisoner during the siege of Djijelly. Is it the blood of the first baron of France that beat in the heart of Bou-Mezrag-Mokrani when, in 1878, he gave his assistance to tame the revolt of the Kanaks? (Mimande 1897: 255) The writer of these lines is Paul Marie Armand de Beuverand de la Loyère, Viscount and former acting governor of Dahomey. In the late 1890s he was the high Penal Administrator for New Caledonia. His prose demonstrates he obviously looked kindly upon the small handful of North African “Kabyle Insurgents” still being held as political prisoners after the general amnesty Kabyle insurgents in 1895. 222

A healthy skepticism should not discount my following attempt to humor the pretense of a Mokrani claim to French descent. Historiography offers the following kernel around which their claim can be built. Bernard Bachelot’s monograph on Louis XIV’s failed effort to capture the town of Jijel, Algeria in 1664 relates that Chief Mokrani of Beni ‘Abbès was one of the local allies who participated in the Ottoman expulsion of the French (Bachelot 2003: 276). After the war it seems that Louis XIV never had returned to him either 1,127 captive Frenchmen, or the cannons his forces had abandoned when retreating from the Ottomans (Bachelot 2003:418). While the ultimate fate of the French prisoners is apparently lost to history, we know what happened to these Frenchmen’s bodily insignia as well as four of their cannons: Swords engraved with the slogans of the great French families, helmets, coats of mail, pikes and halberds had been taken as trophies by the Berbers and had been hung as ex-voto in many mosques in Kabylia. The men of Mokrani drug four superb cannons, cast with fleur-de-lis, all the way to the fortifications of Beni’Abbès where French soldiers discovered them two centuries later and in 1871 took them down to the casbah of the little village of Bourdj bou Arreridj. (Bachelot 2003: 371) The shades and possibilities offered by this history arguably offered the Kabyles in New Caledonia possibilities for an origin story that, if believed, would in a strategic and logical if otherwise dubious manner make them into full Frenchmen with an aristocratic lineage. This is, in effect, an argument of French nobility being made to a member of a well known French aristocratic family. Himself a Montmorency, Paul Marie “Mimande” Armand had traveled to the opposite side of the earth from France, and tells his readers that he has found his own aristocratic brethren in the form of a few aging Kabyle prisoners. Not a single member of the Kabyle Mokrani revolt of 1871 stayed after receiving their pardons, most of which were granted in 1895-1897. One of the revolt’s leaders, Bou Mezrag Mokrani might have been expected to stay since he had repeatedly stated a desire to install both 223

himself and perhaps his extended Algerian family in New Caledonia5 (Chauvet 1994:86; Lallaoui 1994b), and he had had some success in business ventures in Noumea and the New Hebrides. However when his comparatively very late pardon came in 1904 (he was the last unpardoned Mokrani insurgent in New Caledonia), he returned to Algeria and was accompanied home by his wife, a bagnarde named Eugénie Lemarchand who he had married at Bourail in 1882 (Mailhé 1994:414-418). He left no recognized heirs and retained no property in New Caledonia. According to a careful survey of penal administration documents by Gisèle Chauvet, a Masters student at the Université de la Nouvelle-Calédonie, with Mezrag Mokrani’s departure in 1904 every living insurgent from the 1872 Kabyle Revolt appears to have returned to North Africa (1994: 85-6), leaving no recognized descendants, property, or ties behind on the island. Despite regular claims to the contrary,6 today’s “Arabs” of New Caledonia are perhaps only slightly more related to the Mokrani mutineers of 1871 than those Mokrani were to the Baron of Montmorency as Mimande had speculated back in 1897. By 1905 the Mokrani and all other participants in the 1871 Kabyle revolt had repatriated, escaped, or died leaving no known descendants or property in New Caledonia. Yet the story of their revolt and exile has been taken up and laminated onto the biographies of hundreds of other “Arabs” and “Berbers” who were sent to New Caledonia from the Maghreb for non-political convictions between 1867 and 1897. Part of this process involved co-presence: in 1878 under Mokrani, forty arabo-berber men helped put down an indigenous insurgency. Their biographical stories and personal narratives thereby intersect with this eminent figure, and the narratives about him became their own. When the 5

Paul Silverstein incorrectly states that family members accompanied them (Silverstein 2004:43-44). They were offered the chance, only Mokrani is on record as having seriously considered it, but decided against it. 6

In 1997 an Algerian journalist tells that found in the “Arabs” he met in New Caledonia descendants of his own ancestors, living men he understood to hail from the proto-nationalists of Algeria, the forefathers of independence who opposed the French and whose legacy and destiny was fulfilled with Algerian independence in 1962 (xxxx).

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Pacific historian Douglas Oliver writes of the Algerian “Nationalist” insurgents present in New Caledonia in the 1930s, he is making this slippage. When Australian popular writer Wilfred Burchett says he encountered the aging revoltees of Kabylia on a ship from New Caledonia to Marseille in the 1930s, the men he describes are perhaps complicit in encouraging him to make the mistake (Burchett 1941:100-101).

26,000 Other Penal Colonists: Land, Settlement and Society Political deportation was, in the above examples, a resounding failure as a settlement scheme. D’Haussonville’s proposal seems to hinge on the idea that these political dissidents would develop an attachment to the land where they worked (Bullard 2000:135). Political deportation resulted in less than 25 individuals who chose to stay permanently on the island as free colonists after they received pardons. The “attachment” to the land in a sentimental sense was not established and the Penitentiary Administration could not force theme to stay against their wills as it could for other classes of prisoners. Virtually none of today’s population traces its roots to a Communard or Mokrani pedigree, although some make vague claims to this effect—based on a sense of descent in which specifics are notably absent. Certain “old families” of New Caledonia descend from the more general prison population of hard labor convicts and recidivists of European and French Colonial origins. Excessive attention has been given in academic and popular literature to the 4,000 Communard and 100 Kabyle deportees sent to the Isle of Pines who chose to leave, given that 26,000 people who had nothing to do with the Parisian Commune or the Mokrani Revolt were sent to New Caledonia over the life of the penal system from 1864 to 1897 as forced hard labor convicts and recidivists.

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As I mentioned in chapter four, the first transport of prisoners arrived in 1864. They were all men, and were sent to Ducos and Isle Nou close to Nouméa. In 1868 the Penal Administration established a relatively remote penal center called Bourail on the central part of West Coast, close to the mouth of the Nera River. Bourail’s development was intended by Guillain as the location for a model farm where men would be trained in agricultural work before receiving their own concessions (Collinet 1978:9). At Bourail starting in 1869, Governor Guillain arranged so that female prisoners would be sent from the central prison houses of France to a new penitentiary convent run by the Sisters of Saint-Joseph (Commission 1875:579-580, 589). French female prisoners up to then had been sent to French Guyana, and in 1869 they were the only class of European prisoners sent to the bagnes of French Guyana. They were diverted to New Caledonia to serve as wives for released or soon to be released convicts, and supply one crucial part of the foundation for a successfully familial domestic settlement: land, women, and children. At Bourail a male prisoner in good standing could receive training in cultivation: in 1873 the model farm was apparently being run by a private individual who “shared” the profits with the condemned men who worked the land (Commission 1875: 579), which almost exactly follows de Tocqueville’s instructions that convicts be given a share of the fruits of their labors as a means of repentance of old ways. Once demonstrably repentant he would then be able to procure a nearby land concession on which he would pay an annual rent, select a real French wife from the convent (this process, which might sound incredible, is well documented), and begin a family. The question can easily be raised: why not use native women, who are close at hand and more numerous? Why French women in particular? As discussed in Chapter Four, Governor Guillain clearly thought New Caledonia was going to become a land of “metissage” of racial mixing between the convict and native populations, and he believed this was a legitimate and 226

desirable outcome. However, given the projected size of the male prison population there simply were not enough native women to serve as brides. Moreover, even if there were enough women the Catholic Church seemed opposed to a systematic use of native women for convict marriages. Over these and other points of discord, at various points Governor Guillain and the Marists of New Caledonia were in opposition as to how colonial settlement should proceed. The end of the Second Empire of Napoléon III saw the exist of Governor Guillain from New Caledonia, who is still the longest serving high French official ever for the island. His departure did not close out the French brides program or experimental farm at Bourail. The issue of population growth remained an issue, and the program was continued, but for perhaps slightly different reasons. D’Haussonville critiqued how the penal settlement project had been run during a commission hearing in 1874 of which he was a member, complaining to the administrators reporting before him that, “We send nothing but men to New Caledonia. The flow of emigration of free women is almost non existent. Therefore we will never come to have in New Caledonia enough women to constitute families.” However, this is not a mere pragmatics brought about by a shortage of native women. From what I can tell, D’Haussonville does not share Governor Guillain’s opinion that the métis of New Caledonia born of a racial mixing of European convicts and native women be a beautiful and strong race (see Chapter Four). My evidence for this was presented in the commission hearing by Colonel Charrières, who replied to D’Haussonville’s that his objection is important, but notes that things worked out in Australia eventually through settlement by European men in a logic of settler colonialism in which men are expected to step outside their color line for lack of same-race women. Charrières draws from his own work experiences to draw the following hypothesis about how the female problem would be solved. 227

In Guyana, condemned and freed prisoners united with women of blood [femmes de sang] and even with negresses. The same thing will happen in Caledonia for the indigenous women. The tribal chiefs are not opposed to these illegitimate alliances [marriages], which are more numerous than we might think; but these canaque women must renounce returning to their village, where they are no longer received. Slaves in their tribes, they have lots of affection for Europeans…Many canaque women have had children with soldiers who they have followed to Nouméa. Soldiers are not alone in this case; we see colonists live with indigenous women with whom they have children. The métis of Canaques and of Europeans form a beautiful and strong race which will grow very rapidly. (Charrières in Commission 1874:589-99) Perhaps D’Haussonville’s question was intentionally a straw argument, merely a prompt for Charrières to make a pre-arranged statement, or perhaps D’Haussonville objected to racial mixing. However, Charrières seems to clearly contradict D’Haussonville when he implies that European women, free or otherwise, need not be sent to New Caledonia to make for a successful colony: indigenous Canaque women will do, and will produce a “beautiful and strong” métis or hybrid race. Note that this is the exact wording earlier used by Governor Guillain: although he was no longer governor, Charrières uses his exact turn of phrase to try and persuade politicians that racial mixing in New Caledonia is desirable. What then is the point of disagreement between Charrières and D’Haussonville over women and settlement? As Françoise Vergès states quite nicely, “to retrace the history of the terms métis and métissage is to retrace the history of a debate in philosophy and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries around the unity of the human species (Vergès 1999:28). As she points out, the term is loaded as part of the political tropes of race and right, filled with fears and fantasies of sterility like those that accompany hybrid species. Charrières brings up the proven fertility of mixed race unions, and points out elsewhere in the commission hearings that the children of mixed-race unions can themselves bear children: an act some hybrid species are well known to be incapable of, such as mules. 228

In Vergès locale of French colonial specialization, La Réunion, up to 1848 the colonial administration and the Catholic Church came together to try and forbid sexual congress and marriage between European men and colored women; apparently this did not work and these union remained officially legal. The attempt to outlaw this type of marriage happened just when abolitionist and liberalist politics were evidently going to succeed in eradicating slavery in the French Empire (compare the United States where some federal legislators had a similar response to the 14th Amendment after 1868—a piece of reactionary anti-mixing legislation spawned in the wake of emancipation). New Caledonia’s French settlement of course post-dates the eradication of slavery, and there has never to my knowledge been any attempt to outlaw sexual racial mixing or promulgate anti-miscegenation code in New Caledonia that might be seen as reactionary to the abolitionist movement. However, the old arguments about racial mixing remained present in French political debate, an evidence by Charrières need to give them a short lesson that such unions do actually occur. As a crucial note, Charrières has also given us details about who the land owning residents of Nouméa choose to marry and settle down with: local women. The city of Nouméa was the place of residence for government men married to Melanesian women. However, the French brides program for convicts continued into the Third Republic until 1890. Least I give the impression that the twenty-year long brides program was a great success, and led European convicts to marry French women, between 1871 and 1890 only 330 unions were registered through the penal administration at Bourail (Barbançon 2003:344-345).7 Despite these small numbers, the area around the town of Bourail more than any other commune in New 7

In January 1887 the last transportation of women arrived, and the program was discontinued when the stock of women was depleted.

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Caledonia became the location where families with a penal history tend to be rooted: there were no concessions made to them at other locations of incarceration such as Ducos and Isle Nou close to Noumea, or the Isle of Pines. These regular prisoners were not supposed to inhabit the civil commune of Noumea. There were no lands reserved to the Penal Administration within Noumea for the purpose of concessions. Settling the town of Noumea and its environs was made instead through concessions which favored officers and functionaries from a civil or military vocation, often offering land at low fixed rates and higher units of acreage to encourage them to emigrate after retirement (Delignon 1898:52). Bourail was planned as a commune of penal settlers on small but numerous plots of land, and Noumea was planned as a town of government workers and retirees of comfortably sized parcels. Rural lands were periodically assigned to free settlers, sometimes for a change and sometimes for a fee, for instance Alsatians who could document that they were displaced by the Prussian war could receive free land, but in general all land policy was written so that rural areas were supposed to be used for the permanent settlement of convicts, and the urban land of Noumea was exclusively where free state and colonial workers lived. Any free emigrants who settled Noumea or its hinterland were a-typical, and most often delegated to small rural concessions on portions of lands that had not been set aside for other official purposes. In this way, free emigration was relegated to small wedges of areas between the large tracts of lands and resources state reserves in perpetuity for itself, reserves made for the current needs of indigenous groups, and reserves set aside for the future needs of the Penal Administration. In other words, there was no place in this colonial land organization for free or spontaneous emigrants.

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The Penal Administration by the mid 1870s is often described as acting as an “administration within the administration.” What he means is that within the Governor’s civil and military jurisdictions within the colony, the head Penal Administrator largely had autonomous control of his domain and did not answer directly to the governor but instead to the ministerial government. This means that there were multiple kinds of “reserves” within this sovereign State: the indigenous reserves, the State’s reserves classified as domains of the dominions, the civil reserves or property of each administrative “arrondisement” or Commune, and those of the Penitentiary System. In 1883, at the time of the first systematic land accounting (not a survey, but an accounting of concessions and reserves recognized by the state since 1853) the total hectarage reserved in perpetuity for penal use amounted to 42,760 hectares. Of this number, 15,000 hectares were intended to be used for the purpose of supporting the prison: its farms and fields to feed inmates as well as the land on which institutional buildings used for incarceration and administration were located (see Delignon 1898:78). The remaining 25,000 hectares of penal lands were intended for future settlement of convicts within semi-civil arrondisements. The largest block of this type of penal lands, 11,312 hectares, is in the arrondisement of Bourail. In this way, Bourail was planned as a penal commune, whereas Noumea was planned as a French government town. In otherwords Noumea can be described as the residential space for a governing urban landowners and the professional center of trade and commerce and administration. Bourail is an agricultural area where a laboring agricultural class resided in very small land concessions which they sometimes owned but more often leased in perpetuity from the state. If this is the “New Society” envisioned by D’Haussonville, in which prisoners could escape their old class positions of the metropole, it sounds very much like an older feudal social form of the metropole. 231

However, as the details presented above suggest, we know that the male residents of Nouméa are French Officials and former French officials such as soldiers and retired government workers. We know that these men of Nouméa regularly married local women with whom they had legitimate and recognized offspring. In Bourail, we know that the male residents of the commune are convicts or freed convicts; we know from Guillain’s program that some of them married French women and that many others married Canaque women. What I have not yet adequately described is the actual male convicts population: contrary to almost all secondary materials I have consulted since I began studying New Caledonia in 1998, primary and archival sources suggest that the settled prison population was not necessarily French, or even European in origin as is implicitly assumed. Instead, I propose that the penal colonists who stayed in New Caledonia and took French brides tended instead to be from North African and other non-white colonial origins. This was not the intention of any written settlement policy. However, it was its unintended, and perhaps at the time unproblematic consequence of how specific policies were written and how they failed.

Argument: Penal Settlers Were Not Necessarily Europeans A change in laws in 1885 allowed for the transfer of another class of prisoners to New Caledonia alongside hardened criminals and small numbers of political deportees: recidivists and vagabonds of which around 4,000 were sent before transfers were closed in 1897. It was planned that these undesirable recidivists and hard-laborers would serve as labor, and were never apparently expected to participate in the agricultural concession schemes in large numbers. The 1885 law I mentioned above meanwhile required those convicts who had served out their sentences to stay in New Caledonia in perpetuity (Roberts 1929:519). These are the primary 232

ancestors provided by penal colonization for today’s population: once on the island they could not leave. I argue that a significantly larger percentage of the permanent penal population was nonwhite by today’s measures than is usually acknowledged. Evidence suggests that a large proportion of the persons placed on concessions and in the colony were male North Africans, sometimes called Maghrebians, Berbers, or Arabs. As M. Collinet points out, the official and semiofficial publications of the time such as the paper the France Austral and the colony’s civil voice the Moniteur Officiel do not generally make any distinction between Europeans and Maghrebians when reporting on transportees. This means that when studying the transportation regime from simple statistical archives “the Arabs are drowned in the mass of [the other] condemned”(Collinet 1978:7). This erasure is not helped by a tendency by later scholars to be unaware of the process of erasure or drowning, and they assume that the entire prison population is European unless otherwise marked. For example, in a widely circulated and official Atlas of New Caledonia, Alain Saussol claims that in 1911 there were 5,671 “Europeans” in the penal system (1981:Planche 23 ), whereas my reading of a more recent publication Barbançon shows that the figure 5,671 is instead simply the raw total penal population (2003:422), and offers no breakdown according to ethnic or racial difference or point of origin. These differences simply were not measured in numerical reports, even as individual prisoner’s dossiers carefully recorded their physical attributes and biographies. In otherwords, the raw numbers used in Penal Administration reports thereby should not be mistaken for a figure that tells anything about the race or origin of prisoners.

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More careful consultation of the penal archives shows that as many as 1,600 male Arab and Berber convicts and recidivists were transported from Algeria, Tunisia and Morocco to New Caledonia during the total life of the penal colony from 1864-1897. This number is established by a survey of prison records and ship’s lists made by Barbançon (Barbançon personal communication 2003), which are substantiated by the findings of other scholars who produced histories and land concession documents (e.g. Chauvet 1994:85). Ouennoughi’s incredible compilation of name lists fills almost forty pages of her text (Ouennoughi 2005: 317-354), which is made all the more impressive when it is pointed out that with the exception of roughly one hundred political deportees, the vast majority of these prisoners had little to no legal means to leave the colony. Of the documented 1,500 some North African male prisoners who never left the island, many retained wives, produced legal heirs, and owned property in New Caledonia at the time of their death. Like the locally famous Bou Merzag Mokrani whose political status allowed him to return to Algeria with his French convict wife, the other North African were legally able to wed the few European women brought to Bourail, even as French laws in their colony of origin prohibited these types of mixed marriages and would have required them to officially abandon their religion. The children raised from these unions of French female prisoners and North Africans men tended to stay in the area around Bourail, where their fathers regularly paid leases on lands conceded to them by the Penal Administration. These children practiced Catholicism or at least attend Catholic schools, and retain notions of Islamic practices and their family’s past. The relatively large number of people who descended from Kabyles and other Maghrebian “Berbers” or “Arabs” sent to New Caledonia are counted by the Census as having become “Assimilated 234

Europeans” or “Europeans,” as evidenced by the Atlas of New Caledonia published in 1981: the only population of “Assimilated Europeans” for the entire island are located in a very small area of Bourail where the self-identified “Arabs” of New Caledonia were settled on small plots of land. This present day population originates primarily in an 1889 flip-flop in the racial geography of penal incarceration in the French Empire. On November 12th “Arabs” convicted to hard labor would henceforth be sent to New Caledonia instead of French Guiana as was previously the policy. On the 16th of November a legal decree gave the Colonial Ministry the authority to send “dangerous” white men sentenced to forced labor to French Guiana instead of New Caledonia (Barbançon 2003:428). A political fashion in France had shifted from humanitarian perspectives like de Tocqueville’s that favored an end to the death penalty and focus on prisoner rehabilitation, to harsh penal colonization program still with the nominal purposes of rehabilitation, to a program of incarceration conceived as a form of punishment and societal retribution against the offender. What this means is that European men were again being sent to a horrid fate in French Guiana as punishment for their crimes, and “coloreds” were diverted from French Guyana and were instead rerouted to New Caledonia (Merle 1995: 63-64), where they would serve the labor hole previously filled by incarcerated Europeans. In short, there was a growing population of non-whites incarcerated in New Caledonia beginning in the late 1880s, not as “déportés simples” or political prisoners like the Mokrani revoltees, but as first-order offenders sentenced to forced labor with no possibility of repatriation or legal means to leave the island after their sentence of incarceration had ended. In terms of land concessions, a total of 216 men who were former prisoners were buried between 1872 and 1963 at the Muslim concessionaires’ graveyard in Bourail (Ouennoughi 235

2005:293). If I employ a rule of thumb estimate used by other scholars that only 6% of the total penal population ever participated in concession farming, these 216 men would represent a total population of 3,600 others (note that burial at the graveyard might not reflect ownership of a concession). However, as a temper for this proposal I would argue this total figure should be rounded down. Good evidence exists that administrators gave “Kabyles” or “Arabs” preferential access to concessions since they seemed to do well at farming, or at least did significantly better than their European counterparts. This apparent empirical fact coupled well with semi-official administrative assumptions about their fitness for assimilability. Starting in the 1870s there was an emergent theory in Paris that Kabyles in Algeria were excellent candidates for assimilation. Paul Silverstein calls this “The Kabyle Myth” (2004). Corresponding to this sort of expectation, Kabyles in New Caledonia (qua-Kabyles), showed themselves better at agricultural work and animal husbandry than their European counterparts in the reports filed by administrators. Forty “Arabs” and “Kabyles” had helped the administration put down the revolt of Chief Ataï in 1878 as a armed group under the direction of the Bou Mezrag Mokrani. Having shown their “loyalty,” and theorized in Paris as easily to assimilate, these men from North Africa were easily slotted into presumably European roles in the penal colonization project and the administration. Administrators considered them bons sujets eligible for concessions of 4-5 hectares each in the Nessadiou valley south of Bourail, an area that became known as Petite Afrique (Muljono-Larue and Muljono-Larue 1992: 97). This is the method of “assimilation” of this population, which took on a legal and material manifestation. Of the sixty-two marriages between convicts and women recorded at Bourail in the first quarter of 1882, seven were to “Arab” husbands (Mailhé 1994:414). Unlike their lives in North Africa, they were able to work 236

for wage labor, alienate property within the terms of law, and were participants in civil society and wed to French women. They were full civil subjects of the French colonial government, minus the right to circulate freely. Hence I can extract a provocative conclusion from the details of archives of penal colonization which deal with non-whites. While penal colonization of New Caledonia is regularly presented as though it dealt with white or European prisoners, the evidence I presented above suggests it was far more colored—particularly if measured in terms of permanent settlement and eventual social reproduction (i.e. families). This happens because archived statistics tend to elide non-Europeans with European, with the latter unmarked category serving as default for later analysis. Anecdotal evidence, for example that all horse carriages in Noumea in the 1900s were driven by Kabyle horsemen, suggests a significant demographic footprint of this single social type—plus it situates them in an ethicized division of labor which indicated that official assimilation to European civil status was not the same as assimilation to French blood. The Kabyle Myth suggests that the process of statistical assimilation was not accidental but was an earnest effort, or earnest wish on the part of policy makers that they would assimilate. The notion of assimilation here seems strictly civil in connotation: one does not assimilate to European race, but to European law and governing jurisdiction. The “civilizing mission” of Jules Ferry makes this point on assimilation very clear: the mission is a civil project, not one dealing with social integration and identity in the ways understood today. Consultation with actual records that show names and physical characteristics of prisoners demonstrate that the Europeanness of penal colonists is at the very least overstated. If I now repeated parts of this exercise within European-origin penal inmates, residents of the bagnes tended to be marginal Frenchmen at best, and often from Iberian and Italian origins 237

and not in any way French citizens at the time of their shipment. An 1874 report says that the number of freed concessionaires after 10 years of penal colonization number at 44, of which “five have opted for German nationality. Three…from the first convoy, have opted for French nationality”(Commission 1875:591) apparently a reference to prisoners from Alsace-Lorrain given a choice of nationality after the territorial adjustments of the treaty that ended the FrancoPrussian war. In conclusion, in terms of raw numbers, over the life of the penal colonization scheme 30,000 persons were sent to New Caledonia from 1864-1897. Of this number, I can subtract roughly 4,000 political deportees from North Africa and Paris who had full rights of repatriation, of which fewer than 25 decided to stay in New Caledonia. Of the remaining 26,000, fully 4,000 were recidivists who stayed as permanent residents because their terms of sentence for petty crimes prohibited then from leaving the island. We know that perhaps as many as 2,000 of these men were North African. Of the remaining 22,000 men transported as forced laborers, Barbançon tabulates out the data showing that approximately 7,000 left the island before dying, leaving around 15,000. These individuals were arguably sent to New Caledonia for one purpose: to labor while incarcerated, not for settlement and not as participants in social reproduction. This class of dead men tended not to leave wives or heirs or property in New Caledonia. As a matter of math 30,000 minus 4,000 communard, minus 7,000 forced laborers leaves 19,000 recidivists and forced laborers. As I demonstrated above, a much larger than acknowledged proportion of this permanently resident group is North African—firm numbers suggest at least ten percent—while a larger than representative number of North Africans from this total were apparently placed on land concessions due to ideas and policies of assimilation. If I were to repeat this exercise looking for evidence of how the origins of various groups of other 238

non-European convicts were similarly erased by statistics and reporting methods, it is likely that the European character often ascribed to the Penal Settlement population would chip away piece by piece, dossier by dossier. In effect, I argue that penal settlements—the actual population no longer incarcerated at Isle Nou and Ducos—of New Caledonia was demographically not a European place, and instead were a demographic miniature of the French Empire. Penal colonization did not proceed as its planners imagined it would. Vast tracts of land were set aside for a volume of penal colonization which never actually found its way onto plots of land. The settlement project had lead Europeans to the land, but it could not entice them to farm—or behave well enough to earn the privilege of being put out into nature to fend for themselves until they had the right to return to France or Europe.

Conclusion: In the Failures of Penal Colonization, Asian Contract labor and Land Grabs In total through these various manifestations of state efforts to supply settlers to New Caledonia, a documented number of more 30,000 men and women were sent by France to the antipodes of its empire: 22,000 convicted to forced labor, 4,000 political deportees principally from the 1870 Commune, 4,000 recidivists and other minor criminal types, and 1,000 women (per Barbançon 2003). Even with the ending of all significant transportation and deportation programs in 1897 there was a backlog of almost ten thousand inmates in the penal system who were still serving their terms. The bagne-prison remained in operation for another sixteen years processing these remaining prisoners. The penal administration was closed officially in 1913 (Roberts 1929:522). The total prison population did not benefit from the concession system supposedly available for the rehabilitation of prisoners as designed by D’Haussonville and based at least in 239

part on the theories of de Tocqueville. All said, less than 6% of the total population sent to New Caledonia by the prison administration ever participated in the advertised project of working their own concession of land (Merle 1995:63; Pisier 1971: 22, 24; Saussol 1981:Planch 22). This number is smaller still if the high rate of concession abandonment and emigration is taken into account (numbers are lacking, but perhaps 50% of all concessions ended in abandonment, and their proprietors either left New Caledonia or settled in Noumea. While French administrators in New Caledonia initially planned on using penal colonists as labor for this settlement colony, in 1864 Jules Garnier collected some mineral samples which later demonstrated that New Caledonia contained enormous reserves of a new type of laterite nickel deposits, which could be highly profitable if labor existed to exploit them. Coffee and copra plantations came into vogue in the same era. These two labor-heavy forms of production cast New Caledonia in the eyes of capitalists as a French territory with abundant mineral and agricultural potential, with nowhere near enough people to man industrial mining and plantation schemes and attract necessary capital investment and financing. From this perspective, Stephen Roberts declared in 1929 that “the discovery of nickel in new Caledonia in 1875 [sic:1865?] and the subsequent awakening to the fact that the island was the richest mining country in the world in proportion to its surface really condemned the convict system”(1929:523). What Roberts means in that administrators and capitalists felt that convicts did not supply the quality of work which advocates of the plan had envisioned, and penal convicts were simply not numerous enough for large scale emerging projects related to capital and labor heavy “industrial colonization” and “exploitation colonization. For various reasons the indigenous residents of islands were not regarded in planning phases as appropriate or sufficiently numerous to offer an adequate labor supply (Wakefield 240

1848), just as in the planning phase indigenous women were not case as appropriate or sufficiently numerous enough to offer a supply of wives for settlers by Guillain as much as D’Haussonville. Wage labor throughout the Pacific for industry and agriculture was regularly brought in under contract from places though to be suffering overpopulation and surplus labor in the 1800s. For example, large numbers of Japanese were contracted to Hawaii, and South Asians to Fiji. Pacific islanders from lightly populated atolls in turn were collected by blackbirders and contractors for plantation work far from home (Shineburg 1999). Governments regularly arranged so that in exchange for fees from outside governments and corporations, their surplus population could be contracted to work abroad. The Dutch in Java in particular pioneered the scheme, which was then adopted by the British as a model for India’s population management (Money 1861). In almost all cases of this era of contract expatriation, these Asian laborers were never expected to remain as permanent settlers—but almost everywhere they went (Fiji, Hawaii, and New Caledonia), they managed or were forced by changing home emigration laws or bankrupt employers to stay in relatively large numbers, with present day human legacies visible in the people and politics of Fiji, in Hawaii and New Caledonia as well. Jules Garnier, who discovered laterite nickel deposits in 1864 was honored in 1876 with the new mineral officially being named “Garnierite.” That same year he created a mining company which still exists today under the name Société le Nickel (SLN) which remains the largest non-governmental employer in New Caledonia. The colonial administration of New Caledonia reached out to French Indochina for labor for the mines, with the first transport of contract labor arriving from Tonkin in 1891. In 1893, Garnier and his agents abroad arranged labor contracts directly with the Japanese government, while with assistance from the French 241

consulate in Batavia the Dutch government agreed that its Javanese subjects could be recruited as labor in New Caledonia. In 1895 the first contingent of Javanese agra-mineral workers and domestic servants was sent to New Caledonia (Maurer et al 2006: 51), signing contracts and receiving French immigration forms that made it clear they were supposed to be repatriated at the end of their contractual engagement. From the 1890s to 1940s contract8 labor came to New Caledonia from Asia in relatively large numbers: 5,600 Japanese (Kutsuki 2006: 17), 20,000 Javanese (Maurer et al. 2006: 324), and 15,000 Indochinese or “Tonkinese” (Bonnemaison et al. 1981). In otherwords, upwards of 50,000 laborers came to New Caledonia as wage labors and immigrant foreigners. Their civil standing as “foreigners” would allow them to enter into contacts, including the restrictive terms of these contracted labor agreements. They could not quit their employers, their residence and freedom of movement was stipulated by their contract and enforced by French civil authorities. Foreign contract Employees who escaped from mining and agricultural camps were arrested by state forces and returned to their employer until the end of their contract and presumed repatriation. As I mentioned above, under their contracts and immigrant status, most were supposed to be repatriated to their point of origin at the end of their term but this point in their contracts— repatriation at the cost of their home government or their employer—was often not followed through with. As civil subjects freed from their contractual obligations, they then could make their domiciles in Noumea, own and alienate land, and otherwise behave as non-citizen subjects

8

The type of contract is not specified in the literature beyond the fact that they are typically between corporate and industrial entities and individuals, made for a set number of years, and contain a repatriation clause as required by the colonial administration: they were regulated as non-white immigrant laborers, not settlers.

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of colonial civil government. However until that time they were foreign “immigrant” employees, with significantly curtailed civil rights if compared to French citizens. The Second World War and post-war U.S. and U.N. backed processes of world decolonization significantly reduced the “Asiatic” population of New Caledonia from its base of 50,000 immigrants. During the war, all Japanese subjects were sent to internment camps in Australia starting in 1941, and few returned to the island afterwards (Nagata 2006: 61). When Indonesia gained independence from the Dutch, and Vietnam from the French, many families in New Caledonia voluntarily rejoined their new nation-states—and left behind growing anti-Asian sentiment in New Caledonia. Regardless, the sheer population impact of Asiatic labor is clearly larger and more recent than penal colonization, and demographically more significant for the present day population even if the history of penal colonization may be considered more foundational or significant. By this reading an unintended legacy of settlement plans for penal colonization is a mixed race and assimilated European population of various origins with a large North African element, whereas the legacy of labor plans for penal colonization is seen in how its failure brought Asian contract labor to the island who were supposed to repatriate at the end of their contract, and not become permanent integrated or assimilated elements of the New Society. Thus, in intention what was planned as a settler colony turned into an exploitation colony. The products of penal colonization as a ‘failed’ project of European settlement in the South Pacific is then more usefully recast for this dissertation as supplying the human foundations and fodder for the political present: While Europeans and Frenchmen were supposed to emigrate or be transported in large numbers and permanently settle in New Caledonia, they did not. When penal colonists did not supply the quality and quality of labor needed for nascent industry as the finances of the 243

colony floundered, Asian and Pacific contract laborers were engaged as temporary workers in mines and plantations. Although they were supposed to return to their homelands at the end of their contracts, many did not and stayed on permanently. Even as the indigenous Melanesian inhabitants appeared to colonial administrators as a perfect example of a people on the road to extinction, they did not die out. The “prise de possession” of 1853 by Febvrier-Despointes, and the subsequent establishment of Noumea by Tardy de Montravel is the starting point of many origin stories of New Caledonia as a French society, yet the Englishman James Paddon after over one hundred and fifty some years of myth-making has turned into the original settler and “founding father” of New Caledonia (Shineberg 1967:107), and in 2006 his descendant Harold Martin sits as President of New Caledonia’s elected government. While New Caledonia was a French settler colony, the settlers were not necessarily French. Speaking more historically in scope, French administrators’ and industrialists’ decision to temporarily or permanently settle outside populations in New Caledonia was one way in which they entered into a world of problems related to land and labor that were playing out on other Pacific settler societies such as Australia, New Zealand, the Kingdom of Hawaii, and the Western United States. As colonial experiences in Australia and New Zealand showed, and to which French administrators turned, if they intended for wage-labor to be affordable to patrons, the land supply would need to be systematically controlled (Wakefield 1829; Marx 1976: 939). However, if a land supply for settlement was to exist in the first place, questions about alienability of lands and native ownership would need to be addressed as well, which as we will see in the next chapter raises questions about the civil and political status of lands and peoples all co-present in the same colonial society.

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In 1883 a Mr. Guaharou submitted a report on the land situation in New Caledonia which was meant to guide a commission charged with fixing or delimiting the extent of the Penitentiary Reserves—like reserved indigenous lands and the limits of civil communes before them, these areas had not yet been delimited through surveys and cadastral mapping, and lacking such information this report sought to conduct a thorough inventory penal reserves. From this report, we obtain as a the total figure of land in New Caledonia as approaching 2,100,000 hectares—a figure which included the Loyalty Islands, the Isle of Pines and various minor islets. Of this total, roughly fifty percent (1,000,000 + hectares) was reserved for the State as defined in 1855; thirteen percent (316,434 hectares) was delimited and reserved as indigenous lands or cantonnements as defined in 1855 and revised in 1868-1876. Compared to these large tracts of land, the areas placed in reserve for the penitentiary system and its needs were a comparatively paltry 42,760 hectares (all figures from Delignon 1898:77-79). With this figure in mind, Guaharou’s report resulted in a massive ballooning in 1884 of the hectarage officially reserved for the penitentiary, resulting in an additional 67,500 hectares— for a total of 110,000 hectares composing the penal reserve out of which concessions would be made to prisoners according to the Penal Administration’s own land allocation and allotment system In his thesis published in 1898, Delignon despairs that this 1884 increase of lands reserved for future penal colonists came at the expense of free concessions and French emigrants. By his reading of the 1883 penal report, even though only a little over ten percent of the total landmass (235,777 hectares) had been distributed as private concessions, since these areas were within the five civilly governed arrondisements and small nearby islands, looking at these raw numbers on land, he fears that more than half the desirable terrains within the Sate 245

Domain had already been conceded, estimating that less than 240,000 hectares remain. He opines that the Penal Administration’s 110,000 hectares of reserves never should have been ceded, and since the additional reserves delimited in 1884 contained in his opinion the best remaining lands, these Penal reserves should be revoked and directed instead towards the interests of free emigration. Recurrent frustration voiced in his thesis mirrors those of administrators he clearly admires, particularly when he says that “free colonization is sacrificed to penal colonization” in New Caledonia’s concession system (1898:109). The first policy which sought to encourage a specifically French emigration to New Caledonia was written to benefit the displaced French from Alsace and Lorraine after the end of the Franco Prussian War. Those people who lived in areas ceded to Germany by the treaty of 1870 were compensated for their loss with agricultural land in Kabylia in North Africa, and to a lesser extent with land in New Caledonia. An 1862 law classified unoccupied and abandoned lands in New Caledonia as the domains of the State and specifically allowed for these lands to be made alienable and sold at a fixed price to emigrants (Delignon1898:39-40). An Arrêté du 2 Mai 1872 by Governor de la Richerie modified the 1862 law so that when a ship arrived from France with French emigrants, for one week plots from the State’s domain of up to ten hectares would be made available to them. They would be offered a non-transferable lease, annually reckoned at 6% of a fixed purchase price, with an option to purchase after three years. While the wording of the law does not mention Alsace-Lorraine, the law was modified with these displaced French families in mind. The specific terms of their leases are intended to encourage permanent settlement: land could not be owned without investing three years of time and money. They would also have to act quickly: this great land deal was only good for one week of disembarkation. Reading this 246

policy, Delignon declares that for the first time for New Caledonia, administrators had finally designed a land scheme that would “favor the exodus of French towards the colony”(1898:41). However, the war refugees did not take the bait. On the 19th of November 1872, the Director of Colonies in Paris took the additional step of making concessions entirely free for families coming from Alsace and Lorraine, so long as they possessed a certificate from the Société de protection des Alsaciens-Lorrains which verified their status (Delignon 1898:42). Later decrees offered further incentives, promising the war-displaced French emigrants supplies, tools and goods necessary for them to start their new lives on their new rural concession (shovels, buckets, axes, seeds, and a three months supply of goods [Delignon 1898:43]). This and other details suggest not only a growing desperation over failures of these incentives to recruit emigrants, but the wording of the texts suggests a pressing urgency to place these potential farmers as soon as possible on their own concessions. Perhaps they would find Noumea too commodious compared to rural areas where they would have to clear of brush themselves, or perhaps they would find better land and opportunities on the open land and labor market. Regardless, very few of these French refugees emigrated to New Caledonia, and the few that did often abandoned the free concessions offered by the State. As the war faded into memory, the land law was again revised in 1875, as penal colonization seemed the liable future, and the State and Colony shifted to a system of auctions and rents for land which were intended neither to encourage nor discourage free emigrants in general, or emigrants from France in particular. No specifically emigrant-designed policies were promulgated again until the 1890s—let alone a systematic and organized program to encourage settlement. In the meantime, advocates of colonization argued that the costs of getting to the colony, and the details of policies dealing with land alienation did not favor free emigration from any source. According to these critics, 247

after 1875 any policy which might have supported free emigration was curtailed and compromised by agendas favoring penal colonization. Even in the writing of successive governors of the colony like Laffon, Pardon and Feillet who I will introduce below, free and penal colonization were necessarily in competition with one another, and to their dismay free colonization was always placed on the losing end of priorities set by the Ministries in Paris. In 1894 these official priorities began to shift with the appointment of Governor Feillet whose work helped end penal colonization in 1897, and began an effort to systematically attract free French emigrants to New Caledonia and build a “France Australe” via a new land and labor regime. What Delignon seems not to acknowledge, despite his thorough knowledge of land law in New Caledonia, is that lands reserved for penal settlement and free settlement were not in competition with one another over a finite amount of land. Instead the land needs “demanded” by free and penal settlement were created by drawing off from the areas earlier reserved and delimited for indigenous needs and protection.9

9

See my treatment of Delaplanche from chapter one as how this conception of reserves nominally connects with aristocratic scholarship about their lost landed “customary” reserves.

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CHAPTER 6 ALIENATIONS (1880-1904)

La France Australe: land policy and its dynamics This chapter examines the intentions for the future of New Caledonia embodied in three types of land policies designed for the island. To better understand what these land policies were supposed to accomplish, I outline their intellectual and institutional origins in France and elsewhere in the world—the United States, Australia, and New Zealand primarily—and presents the social contexts of the politicians and administrators who backed these policies as a means to 1) better understand their projects and their intentions, while 2) showing how their personal and professional networks made it possible for them to pursue the particular goals and objectives they had in mind. For example, as I will show below, some politicians favored a protestant and secular future for New Caledonia which they believed could be reached through policy that created two separate but equal civil societies in New Caledonia: one for indigenous Melanesians, and the other for French middle class emigrants. My explanation for how this goal was pursued is presented through kinship diagrams of eminent French families, which show Protestant-Catholic marriages between sons and daughters of business and political leaders of the Third Republic— leading to the first protestant missionary—Maurice Leenhardt—arriving in New Caledonia as simultaneously the cousin by marriage of two governors, and the husband of the granddaughter 249

of a Frenchman who had served as foreign minister for the Kingdom of Hawaii under Kamehameha IV: it is no accident that Maurice in particular found himself at the head of a new and controversial mission for the island. While his work deserves high praise as ethnography, the focus in this chapter is on both the political-religious network that brought him to New Caledonia, and the motive of collecting ethnographic knowledge as a more general protestant orientation towards how indigenous peoples should be governed: material for a future separate but equal civil order for these legitimate civilizations in gestation. As in previous chapters, I highlight contextual use of the term “civilization” and its specific meanings in policy language of the French sovereign state and its agents. This chapter first presents stunning parallels between the indigenous cantonnements and réserves instituted in New Caledonian from1869-1897 with the American Indian reservations organized in the United States under the Dawes Act after 1887. The land policies of these “reservations” both sought to convert communal indigenous property into individually owned private property, and by the leverage of private property incorporate indigenous peoples into the more general settler civil society or “civilization.” Second, I present an 1890s attempt to apply in New Caledonia a modification of the Australian Torrens Act of 1857, a system for land ownership via “registered title” which allows for the “simple” and full alienation of property for purposes of sale and mortgage, modeled on the ways stocks in ships could be transferred unencumbered and used as collateral for loans. What this material shows is that individual and clear ownership of land was not the norm in Europe or the United States, even as colonial administrators were attempting to do away with indigenous communal property. While successive governors were interested in making land into “fee simple” and easily alienable sources of credit, because New Caledonia was a colony 250

that was economically "assimilated" to the metropole, the colonial government did not have the legislative autonomy to depart from the law of the Napoléonic Code, i.e. French civilization in the strict legal sense described in Chapter One. Finally, I argue that a "Wakefield Plan" for systematic colonization modeled on that used in New South Wales and New Zealand from the 1840s forward was applied in New Caledonia by Governor Feillet beginning in 1894 in conversation with French Senator Jules Siegfried. The stated objective of these men’s project was to turn New Caledonia into an administratively and financially autonomous colony (modeled on the relationship of New Zealand had with England at the time) and allow it to become its very own civilization. As I demonstrate through the social networks of the Siegfried and Feillet families, this application of the Wakefield plan and the more general program for autonomization was perceived by the Marist mission as a distinct threat to both their religious freedom in the colony and the tax-free non-civil status of the indigenous population. Given this conflict with entrenched Catholicism in New Caledonia, the family and protestant professional/political networks then mobilized to bring a European Protestant missionary to the island for the first time.

2,000,000 Hectares of State, Indigenous, and Penal Reserves Indigenous reserves were regulated through a policy of the occasional cantonnement of tribes beginning 1868 under governor Guillain. The name either comes from military “cantonments” or from the civil administrative “cantons” one finds in Europe. As John Ruedy’s Land Policy in Colonial Algeria demonstrates (1967:87) the first mentions of a French colonial policy for the cantonnement of natives appear in Algeria in 1844-1846 used for the settlement of dispersed nomadic groups. Groups which were imagined to occupy vast un-delimited areas were 251

fused into singular “tribes” who henceforth occupied a smaller and well-delimited area in which they were supposed to sedentarize. For groups in Algeria who resisted cantonization, a policy of forced removal called refoulement was used by the administration to entirely uproot the “tribe” and relocate them somewhere else, at a significant distance from their original lands. This technique was used as a punishment for revolt, and in policy rationale was intended to break a tribe's connection to its pasturage and encourage them to follow a program of sedentarization. De Tocqueville’s ideas about the fixity provided by cultivation work as necessary for civilization seem to inform these Algerian-born policy: nomadic Iroquois and Arabo-Berbers were un-fixed. From this perspective their relationship with the land needed to be recalibrated in order to make civilization possible. These motives for policy seem rudely inapplicable when later recontextualized to New Caledonia under governor Guillain in 1868, where the indigenous inhabitants were already fixed into permanent villages around which they had already been engaged in agriculturally complex irrigation and swidden cultivation. The process of cantonnement called for the identification of groups of villages as belonging to the same unitary tribe, followed up (sometimes years later) by administrative decisions to consolidate these dispersed villages and resettled them into a single concentrated “cantonments” surround by lands reserved for their needs. The New Caledonian process of cantonment is captured in exceptional detail in maps presented by Alain Saussol in his monograph L’Heritage (1979). Saussol describes in his text how Governor Guillain declared, following what he classified as rebellious acts in 1867, that nine villages around Pouébo should be regrouped into a single cantonment (1979: 164-65). Rather than a relocation or refoulement like the cantonments performed in Algeria, this consolidation was considered by administrators as more of a land-adjustment which they argued 252

reflected a recent and natural decrease in indigenous populations. However, it was apparently deployed only as a population management device in the wake of revolts and non-cooperation. In Figure 27, Saussol shows that small hamlets around Pouebo were uprooted and relocated to a centralized location. Nine village spread along three kilometers of coastline surrounded with un-delimited reserved land were concentrated into a single cantonment surrounded by a half-kilometer-wide swath of land reserved for their needs under the tribal name “Tchambouenne.” This created for the first time an administered "tribal" unit under a single identified chief. Previously, villages and language groups were identified as tribes by French administrators, but this was the first time the concept of their unity had been institutionalized by the French.1 Small cantoned lands for “tribes” were periodically created out of the vast lands previously reserved for indigenous needs. As a first order of consequence, the cantonment policy significantly reduced the number of hectares reserved for the indigenous population: in the Pouebo example above, a swath of coastal lands three kilometers wide containing nine hamlets was delimited and revised to a swath a half-kilometer wide and a single sprawling village. As a second order of consequence, after their cantonment and delimitation, the lands held in reserve for the needs of indigenous peoples could again be made smaller (or larger) at a later date ostensibly according to the population needs of the tribe as determined by the State (i.e. the High Administrator the Governor). In actual practice, this down-sizing was made not as a reflection of a decrease in tribal populations as called for in the official decrees governing lands, but was instead made in the

1

Saussol points out that this mandated social fusion of multiple villages into a single tribe with a chiefly leader is a complete administrative fiction, yet I would point out that from this time forward tribes and chiefs become an administered reality of daily governance, whose origin in French agency do not make them any less of a real social fact.

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“general interest” of the settlement of the colony as a whole (Admiral de Pritzbuer quoted in Saussol 1979:179). These delimitations were made specifically to meet demands for agricultural lands intended for settlers of free and penal origins. Officially, this process was supposed to be consensual unless the State was provoked by the "tribes," and conforming to this policy each of the procedures of was accompanied by papers signed by chiefs and exchanges of cash and goods in compensation. The number of cantonments made in the "general interest" significantly increased after 1876 following a change in policy, for which the 1878 revolt by Chief Ataï is generally attributed by professional scholars and folk historians today.2 Saussol offers a mapped depiction of the results of this second-order process of down-sizing in Figure 64, depicting survey-based delimitations that were performed between the promulgation of Arrete du 6 Mars 1876 and the lands thereby reduced up to 1903(1979:292).

I argue that instead of simply taking indigenous lands from natives (which force of arms could easily accomplish) the intent and design of the policy of cantonment was assimilative. The stated outcome of the policy was to give the indigenous population “free play according to their customs until the time that it will be possible to complete the delimitation by the constitution of individual property”(quoted in Saussol 1979:180). In Saussol’s interpretation an opposition between the individual versus collective nature of property within reserved tribal territories was erroneously created by this policy, which acted as though no lands were held in a private fashion under custom (Saussol 1979:158). However with materials I presented in a previous chapter, the

2

Speaking in 1899, governor Feillet attributes the 1878 revolt to the specific mode of settler agricultural production used at the time. Rather than the seizure of surplus lands used for settlement, he argued instead that it was the freerange cattle who wrecked natives' gardens that were the root of native discontent. Feillet implies that the small-scale family coffee farming he advocates would not create similar conditions for revolt (Feillet 1899:12)

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rights of civil subjects and customary subjects to alienate land within their respective domain were similarly limited to members of the same status since the 1850s. Under this regime, customary subjects could only alienate land as individuals to other customary subjects as regulated by customary law, and civil subjects could only alienate lands as individuals to other civil subjects as regulated by under civil law. In another similarity, communal lands were owned in perpetuity by civil and customary populations. I argue that the intent of cantonment policy demonstrates how assimilation of customary subjects and property to full civil status was thought to be made through the vector of property ownership and the development of civilly constituted individual property rights. In the theory behind policy, New Caledonia's population was supposed to be moving towards a unified civil society horizon. The intent thereby is fully at odds with policies like those designed by Henry Maine for India, in which South Asians would always live under their own “particular” laws and codified customs, creating a myriad and multifaceted set of Indian legal codes and courts for each indigenous group. It is also at odds with de Tocqueville’s proposal that dual legislatures be created in colonies like Algeria, where parallel civil spheres would have jurisdiction over settlers on the one hand and natives on the other. From this perspective the French state’s assimilative colonial project articulated as the “civilizing mission” by Jules Ferry in 1883 was already being pursued in land and property policy designed for New Caledonia in the 1870s, and the leverage of civilization was apparently the full delimitation of native lands into individually owned plots. The “civilizing mission” is too often conflated with the ends of Christian conversion of natives. Ferry himself worked for the secularization of French education, reflecting a liberal conception of governance in which state and church should be separate.

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Parallels with the “Dawes General Allotment Act” and US Reservations By the qualities outlined above, Algerian and New Caledonian policies for indigenous land and population management come very close to the United States General Allocation or “Dawes” Act3 of 1887. The Dawes Act led to a federal re-organization of Native American Reservations with the intent to make the entirety of Indian areas into privately held property. Fred Eggan (1978) offers an 1880 quote from Senator Dawes of Massachusetts after a trip to the Cherokee nation which captures key features of the Act’s motivations: They have got as far as they can go because they own their land in common. There is no selfishness, which is the bottom [rung] of civilization. Till the people consent to give up their [communal] lands and divide them among the [tribal] citizens so that each can own the land he cultivated they will not make much more progress. (quoted in Eggan 1978:169 brackets added) From this clearly stated agenda to create individual property out of communal property and step Indians up a notch on the civilization scale, the Dawes Act was written to make individually held property the norm. In an accusatory yet useful summary of the Dawes Act’s implementation a contributor to the American Indian Law Review, Scott Taylor, describes Federal administrator’s view as one in which “private-ownership-equals-civilization” (Taylor 1998:65). In 1887 Congress passed legislation designed to eliminate tribal ownership of lands and to require individual ownership. Under this system, federal officials would determine tribal membership, survey tribal lands, and assign individual allotments to tribal members based on family status. After tribal Members received their individual allotments, the remaining tribal land became surplus lands that the federal government sold…Evidence suggests that the federal policy of bringing private ownership to individual Indians was a ruse for unlocking Indian lands for the benefit of land speculators. The rapid loss of ownership suggests this was the actual intent behind the allotment process. (Taylor 1998:6669 italics mine) 3

Not to be confused with the "Dawes Plan" for post WW I restitutions.

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Taylor’s suggestions aside (which suggest a method by which effects can be taken as intentions, while appealing and often a useful starting point I would prefer he had some empirical tieback underneath his accusations of intention) from its enactment in 1887 until it was repealed in 1933 communal ownership of Indian lands was reduced from 140 million acres to 50 million acres. Some of the 90 million acres' difference was made into alienable or potentially alienable property held by individual Native Americans in the form of small “allotments,” however the majority was turned into surplus lands that were henceforth held by the US Federal government. The US government sold or conceded some of these "freed-up" lands to settlers and land speculators. In terms of the private Indian land ownership thus created, a person "entitled" to an allotment would be given a restricted “patent”4 and only after receiving a certificate of educational competence would he or she have standing to alienate his or her allotment as he or she saw fit. As Taylor points out, after being placed on an allotment Indians came under the civil and criminal jurisdiction of States rather than tribes or direct federal oversight, and were thereby expected to become citizens of the United States rather than citizens of their tribes. In the words of the Act, they would thereby join “civilization” (in my terminology I would describe it as "join civil society”). As in New Caledonia in the 1870s, in the US after the Dawes Act of 1887 tribes were consolidated into delimited areas. However, the Cherokee were forced from the Southeast all the way to Oklahoma in a move which more closely resembles an Algerian refoulement of the 4

Section 5 of the original Dawes Act, specifies that land “patents” are recorded at the General Land Office, not “titles” as Taylor refers to them (Taylor 1998:66). The importance of this distinction will be evident from by later discussion of the Australian Torrens Act for title registration.

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1840s. Those Indians who were not relocated owned atomized private land and were effectively assimilated both as owners and subjects to full U.S. civil jurisdiction, their parallel tribal “civilization” and its customary regimes and jurisdictions were erase from an official governing role. At the time, this was presented as "Indian emancipation"(e.g. see publications by the Hampton Normal and Agricultural Institute), as though tribal membership and communal lands had been a form of slavery. The parallels in US and French policies and modalities are not empirically visible or manifest in any actual connections. Looking in the usual places, I have found no discursive overlaps of the sort I will show below for the Torrens Act and the Wakefield Plan in French contexts, or as I showed earlier for the US and British influences on French Penal policy. The only academic writer in France who evidently took an interest in the Dawes Act appears to be Auguste Carlier (1890a; 1890b), but any connections he had to politicians and policy writers are non-extant in official documents where my other research tells me I should expect to find mention of his work if there is indeed a connection. On the US side, I have found no mention of French influences or models used by Dawes and his peers, or references to Algeria—let alone one from relatively unheard of New Caledonia.5 As shown in Rahima Osmane's 1988 dissertation which compares these land policies, the points of similarity between French and US policy are numerous, but she cannot show a direct link between them. I conclude that they are not intellectually closely related policies, and neither begat the other. However, there is a nominal connection. In French writing about the US in the late 1800s, even if the Dawes Allotment Act and its legislation is almost never mentioned, the US 5

Comparative work, like Stuart Banner’s (2005) which draws together New Caledonians land policy with the Dawes Act, and the Mahele in Hawaii into a single frame for analysis, is suggestive and useful to think with, but not based on any demonstrable dialogic engagement at the time of these policies’ design.

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“reservation” system is regularly described,6 and consistently rendered in translation as réserve (noun). The indigenous cantonments and their surrounding lands in New Caledonia were originally described in official documents as either lands “reserved” (adjective) for indigenous use or lands that the State “reserves” (verb) for indigenous use. After 1890 these New Caledonian lands become uniformly and without explication by their authors written about as indigenous “reserves”(noun), apparently after the American fashion. Clearly, there is cognizance in French contexts of US reservations, and the “reserved” (adj.) lands of New Caledonia easily became “reserves”(noun) with no one noting the Americanization or choosing to point out North American parallels.7 Only nominally can the US and New Caledonian native land systems be considered the same via a shift in translation which standardly elides French réserves with US reservations. In my final analysis, neither the US or the French indigenous land reserve system is derived from the other, except for this slight lexical shift. Why then to they resemble one another in so many details and intentions? The following comment by Senator Pendleton in 1880 in favor of Dawes’ allotment proposal illuminate the parallels: “We must stimulate within them to the very largest degree, the idea of home, of family, and of property. These are the very anchorages of civilization”(Quoted in McNickle 1957:11). These words could have just as easily come out of Minister Guizot’s mouth, and Delaplanche uses exactly the same rhetoric about families, civilization, and anchors in 1925 (but to make the opposite point: that communal aristocratic property is the foundation of society, not modernist 6

The nominal similarity of the French policies of “reserves” and US “reservations” comes from a much older interchange: invariably in English writing about Canadian contexts one finds the term "Reserves" and in the US one finds "Reservations" in documents written before the 1840s and back into the colonial period. 7

For reason of empirical accuracy that otherwise mask this shift, note that Saussol anachronistically writes about “Reserves” in New Caledonia when no one during those historical periods used that designation for those pieces of land.

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private property). Comparing this material is like watching two laboratory workers, ignorant of the other’s existence, travailing on the same problem thousands of miles apart armed with common assumptions and techniques. Not surprisingly they use their shared tools to construct startlingly similar yet individually original findings. The US reservations and the French reserves are analogous in this way. Alain Saussol shows us that the expanded lands reserved for the penitentiary after 1884 are clearly vast (Figure 54), particularly as compared to the very small extent of Indigenous “Réserves” in 1903 (Figure 64). This can be compared to the 1948 distributions of the total 2,000,000 hectare into what Saussol identifies as vacant, colonized, and reserved lands (Figure 85). This last maps show for my purposes an outcome of a processual shift from a balance of lands imagined by the administration as held in inalienable reserves of various governing entities, which they then intentionally shifted to a balance of land made fully alienable via concessions. Communal property reserved in common by the state or tribe or government or prison is made into private property as an intentional process instituted by administrators. The motivation for the creation of alienable individually owned lands out of communal lands is far from transparent. As I will discuss in the following section, until 1857 no technique for land alienation existed anywhere in the word that fit well with the needs felt by capitalists for real estate to be full marketable and usable as credit.

The Australian Torrens Land Act in French and Global Contexts One his way from France to his new post in New Caledonia, in 1888 Governor Noël Pardon stopped for a month in Australia to study the Torrens Land Act as requested by his superiors for reasons I will discuss below. His 1891 report on the system proposed how if 260

modified for New Caledonia and made to fit the Napoléonic Code, through the convention of registered land titles, property on the island could be easily transferred through simple alienations and used as credit for mortgages. Over subsequent decades, his ideas about the Torrens Act were instituted across the French Empire, making titled property easily registered and mortgaged almost everywhere—with the curious exception of New Caledonia itself. His proposals never received authorization to be promulgated on the island, and its civil land laws remained fully within the Napoléonic Code Civil. The question the following subsections seek to understand is why French legislators were interested in the Torrens system, and the reasons for which it was not applied in New Caledonia even though it was instituted widely in other parts of the French empire. i) Introducing the Torrens Act and its Global Spread The Torrens Act of 1857 is named for Sir Robert Torrens of South Australia, who as a customs officer and member of the Legislative Council noted how easily it was that shares of ownership in ships8 (a lovely parallel) could be transferred through a system of registration overseen by the Merchant Shipping Act. By comparison, real estate transfers were horribly complicated (Niblack 1912:7). When he became a register of deeds and member of Parliament, Torrens proposed to the South Australian legislature the “Real Property Act” which set in place a system of “registration of title” similar to that used for ships. As opposed to the existing registration of deeds system, registration of title meant that the act of registration itself constituted the basis of ownership: the registrar could then certify a single definitive owner or set of owners and lien-holders, and property title could be definitively 8

In 1830 a royal commission studying land policy in Britain reported to the Crown that a registry for property might be established on the same principle as a registry of stocks, “where title depend on an entry in a book and not on an instrument”(Niblack 1912:7).

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transferred and alienated from one owner to the next. The registrar of deeds as an agent of state would henceforth define or certify the legitimacy of property ownership via title. Property could be transferred “Fee Simple”—registered to the freeholders with no entailments—although less completely alienated transfers were allowed under the Act, such as to leaseholders of a temporary nature, or smaller “estates” cut out of a larger holding. Whatever its variations, ownership was only recognized legally as legitimate through registration with the government, on a uniform form. Niblack tells us that “the central feature of the Torrens system is the governmental register of titles”(1912:17). One has to apply for and register title of ownership. Within this system, possession is no longer 9/10th of the law when it comes to land (a principle of ownership for chattel and other property under the Napoléonic Code as well as English Common Law). The old system of deeds did not allow for easy transfers or “conveyance” of land through sale because the alienations could be contestable by multiple unknown claimants. The texts for lands transfer were non-uniform and often written and transcribed as unique instruments, and their veracity was not definitive. Supposedly, before purchasing real estate, under the deed system a prudent buyer would need to verify that the deed held by the seller was valid, then verify that the deed as held by the previous owner was valid and unencumbered, etc, etc, until it was established within reason that the person selling the property had the legal right to do so, and the buyer was assured that the property was not in some way the property of someone else through liens or entails or theft or mortgages held over the property. Deeds were in this sense “complex,” and their registers were apparently decentralized, and the instruments of transfer were non-uniform in Australia and Britain and apparently in France as well—where the register

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of deeds recorded each transaction longhand in the instrument of transfer’s own particular wording, as written by the contracting parties. From this perspective the system Torrens proposed was described as a “simplification” in the very first line of the original Real Property Act (South Australia No. 15 of 1857-58). It would “give validity to the passing, either of the whole of the proprietor’s interest in the land, or of any less estate therein”(Real Property Act 15.3) and contained the principle that a uniform certificate of title would be given to the owner if they filled out a uniform document with blanks. Ownership was effectively overseen in perpetuity by the government and no legitimate property transfers could be performed without this government mediation. Land could be bought as sold “fee simple.” The Act defined and instituted a new nature of property, or a new founding principle of ownership. This new logic called for the full survey of lands, triangulated and situated according to points on official maps on which the property could be definitively located. Land ownership would be definitive with registry, delimited by survey, and overseen by the government. While these techniques previously existed independently, in the composite of the Torrens Act they supported a new definition of ownership Within the British Empire the Torrens system was almost immediately applied in British Honduras in 1858 (Niblack 1912:9-14), and piecemeal systems of Torrens-style title registration were enacted for England in 1862 in Lord Westbury’s uptake of the plan. It was adopted and modified throughout Australia’s other territories between 1861 and 1874, and it was instituted with limited success in Ireland in 1865 (people did not widely register their transfers because of registration fees and it was not obligatory). It was applied in New Zealand in 1870, applied in British Colombia in 1871, and embodied in the Fiji Ordinance of 1876. In all these cases it 263

enacted a dualist system of official land ownership, in which older deeded or unregistered properties existed alongside titled registered properties with surveyed frontiers.9 Perceptions that marketability and other benefits established by the Torrens Act or System are nicely defined for our purposes by an 1889 circular by the US Department of State requesting reports from its consular officers abroad about mortgages in their assigned area (Department of State 1890). The Power of Sale in case of default in New South Wales for property under the Torrens Act are “foreclosed by advertisement after notice, at a very small cost” whereas foreclosure on non-Torrens property “an expensive, a lengthy and a tedious process”(Department of State 1890:773). From a creditor’s perspective, the Torrens innovations are a good thing. Along these lines all explicit10 descriptions the Torrens system by the US consuls from around the world speak favorably of the technique. It prevents the old problems of “run-holders” or “squatters” in New South Wales since possession or occupation does not constitute valid title (1890: 761); for property in New Zealand registered outside the Torrens system “nothing but fraud vitiates a mortgages” (1890: 757); and “Mortgages under this system [in Mantioba] have effect as security”(1890: 597). If any question remained as to the US diplomatic commercial division’s overall attitude, “The Torrens system is so simple and inexpensive that anyone of ordinary intelligence can do everything that in necessary in relation to his property after it has once been brought under the Act”(1890:764). We are thereby lead to believe that for lien holders

9

“Land Registration Act (Torrens),” Real Property Act of Manitoba “commonly called the Torrens system of land transfer (Department of State 1890: 597), Land Titles Act (Torrens); “The Uniform Land Registration Act (Torrens Act);” “the RP Act (Torrens' title);” “Seal Property Act (Torrens).” 10

I say explicit because the US Commercial Agent for the Fiji Islands curtly describes the Torrens system, but does not identify it as such (Department of State 1890: 791)

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and property owners alike, putting capital in a Torrens titled property is a secure investment, in large part since the government is supposed to guarantee the title with an insurance fund financed by registration fees. If effectively instituted, this system would negate the needs for title insurers and not require a lawyer any more than a car title transfer today. Full and easy alienability of real estate for the market is now achieved, as mediated or guaranteed by government oversight. ii) Land in France and the Internationalization of the Torrens Act The US Consul to le Havre, France, Mr. Defais includes in his report several appended items which spell out the mortgage laws of France and open a window onto an internationalized conversation about how the Torrens Act might change everything about property in the civilized universe (1890: 424). In France, under the terms of the Napoléonic Code, mortgages (hypotheques) are only valid if registered with the centralized authority (articles 2146). Despite this recording, the Consul warns “Land in France is only a pledge, it is not yet an instrument (authentic deed) of credit” (1890:420). However, this might soon change: the consul includes with his report a letter from Mr. de Saint Genis inviting him to an “International Congress to Study the Question of Transmission of Landed Property” sponsored by the Ministry of Commerce and Industry which will assemble Thursday August 8th, as part of the International Universal Exposition of 1889. Mr. de Saint Genis enclosed with his letter the program for the conference. The Torrens Act is mentioned a total of seven times in the one-page agenda, and is present in four out of six subsections (by this measure Torrens is the recurrent touchstone of the conference). Saint Genis informs the US consul that during this conference it is his intention to make a motion for a vote on the following internationalist proposition: 265

Whereas the wonderful inventions of science are narrowing distances and suppress time; that, therefore, the international conventions have more and more practical and useful results…that real social progress consists in simplifying, for the benefit of the entire civilized universe, relations of general interest, in order to do away with diversities of method and to forward commercial and legislative unity…that landed property is an immense and hitherto untried credit and the most solid form of social wealth in Europe as well as in America, in the most refined civilization as well as in new countries; Resolved, That the Congress appoint a committee of inquiry to propose the most expeditious and least expensive means (1) to make titles to landed property absolute; (2) to mobilize land titles so that it may be easy to sell a piece of property or to pledge such real estate as a guaranty for money lent; (3) to unify the legislation of the different countries so as to circulate such titles and mortgage acts without risk in foreign countries. (de Saint Genis in Department of state 1890:426). The resolution to “internationalize” land title proposed by Saint Genis was adopted by the various international statesmen who attended the congress. The proposal then moved to the General Assembly of the International Exposition in the form of a motion in support of a number of principles which were adopted, the key entries and my explanation of them are as follows: •

“Absolute publicity” in laws on realty (no ‘quiet’ titles like in Hawaii should be allowed, only ‘patent’ or visible titles as in Dawes allotments);

•

“Suppression of hidden liens or mortgages” (no more surprise or anxiety about off-the book liens);

•

“Opening of land registers” on which would be recorded the “real right on the land register in the order of mutation” (this would make property ownership a matter of definitive public record, showing who owned what as demonstrated by a chain of ownership visible by all).

The final point embodies the central theme of any Torrens-styled provision: 266

• “Creation of a title to property definitively settled by [registration], and irrevocably guarantied by the general authorities.” In my interpretation these provisions would eradicate the privacy of “private” property and make ownership a public matter of civil jurisdiction rather than custom or common law. The government would define ownership of an individual’s property and regulate its alienation; all legitimate property records lie in the civil public domain, open to public consultation and transparency. It is a fully civilized land regime in the sense that conventions of custom and common law and de facto situations have no standing. However, a completely different meta-description of the motion is offered in the Consular report which is either an adlib by Consul Defais or a reflection of Saint Genis’ actual opinion: “This important reform appears briefly to be a return to the common [law]11 and to the traditions of the old French law”(Department of State 1890: 427). What is meant by “old” French law is captured by a later 1899 statement by Estivant in his treatise on the Torrens system when drawing an analogy between Torrens and pre-roman Germanic laws of Gaul, “We know that one of the characteristic traits of feudal organization is the intervention of the lord with each mutation of the fief”(Estivant 1899: 7). This constitutes a historical curiously: somehow in certain French perspectives, Torrens is able to embody simultaneously the future possibilities of universal civilization as well as old French custom. Perhaps because, as a mortgage devise, the Torrens system allows land to be used easily as credit: if instituted, no longer would aristocrats need to be land rich and money poor, since a

11

Sic. This is either a transcription or translation error. “Commons” would be grammatical but not make sense. “Customs” fits better with sense, particularly paired with “traditions” later in the phrase. Perhaps an entire word is missing, e.g. “common laws” which would fit well with the meaning, but applies British legal terminology to a French legal context where custom would be more appropriate.

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technique now existed to easily turn their property into cash without need to alienate it. However this carried the new risk that property was no longer pledge or promise that would be difficult to collect: land could be lost in foreclosure or forced sale by simply advertising the procedure in a newspaper—a civil sphere for public notification. And so, in Sir Torrens’ intent to make real estate owned and alienable in the same simple way one can own and sell stocks and shares of ships, others extended and modified it global in ways that helped give real estate the fully alienable qualities of stock markets. William Niblack, the lawyer whose work I quoted from above was a stockholder, director and officer of the Chicago Title and Trust Company. He objects to the costs to owners and buyers of registering titles, and suggests the administrative complexity of the system is inefficient. Pointing out ideological objections, he points out that a Torrens system was passed in Illinois in 1895 but later declared unconstitutional by the U.S. supreme court since it was deemed to give judicial powers to title registrars and examiners (Niblack 1912:14). Despite this argument of its unconstitutionality, a similar act was passed successfully in both Illinois12 and California in 1897, and in Massachusetts in 1898. Niblack tells us that the Illinois and Massachusetts form of legislation become the model for other states’ and territories’ legislation, including the Philippines in 1902 and Hawaii in 1903: here we have the origin of distinctions between “fee simple” and other kinds of Hawaiian land, constituting today dual jurisdictions of land ownership in the Kingdom-come-State.13 The

12

Representatives of the State of Illinois voted repeal their Torrens Act legislation in 1992, effective in for the most part by 1997 but in certain ways still in effect until 2037. Cook County was one jurisdiction where the Torrens registry was used widely, following the Chicago fire of 1871

13

Hawaiian land on the Torrens side is described today as being registered in the “alternative” jurisdiction of the Land Court, in which title is never “cloudy” or “quiet” and common law transfers like adverse possession are not legitimate nor are claims based on genealogy.

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Act and its derivatives remained controversial in the US by the time New York State passed a Torrens Act 1918, perhaps because of the powers attributed to the state and the common unwillingness of owners to register their property for a modest fee. Editors of the St. Louis legal review commented on the event as follows: On the policy of the Torrens System [in New York], the CENTRAL LAW JOURNAL is thoroughly open-minded and will watch developments with no desire to see the system fail or succeed, but with an eager interest to discover what is needed to give the people the relief they demand from that most useless and ridiculous obstruction to material progress—the unmarketable title. (Central Law Journal 1918:327). As the above quote suggests, a devise for land alienation modeled on the sales of market shares and stock in ships is, predictably, a perfect fit for the total commodification of land through alienation. Even as other techniques seemed to exist, this one perhaps did it best in the trained eyes of a capitalist. iii) New Caledonia and the Torrens Act I will insert New Caledonia as the vector through which this internationalist Torrens system was first brought to bear in French civil jurisdictions. The curious point is that while New Caledonia’s administrators, Noël Pardon in particular, were instrumental in bringing property as a fully alienable market commodity to French colonies, it was not applied in New Caledonia where land remained tightly regulated, comparatively difficult to sell, and held in various inalienable reserves in perpetuity. Returning briefly to the above consular reports, the account from New Caledonia by US Commercial Agent William E. Morgan of Nouméa shows that no Torrens title system has been instituted, and the Napoléonic Codes requirements for registering mortgages are in effect. While Morgan claims that mortgages do not complicate the transfer of land titles (1890:795-796), this should not be taken to mean that others would think 269

the island needed no Torrens style simplifications. Presumably in New Caledonia, as in France, a real estate capitalist would say that land is merely a “promise” under the Napoléonic Code, and not a robust instrument of credit. We learn from the conference program that Saint Genis supplied that by 1889 the Torrens system has already been extended in the French protectorate of Tunisia. French Politician Yves Guyot claims he had been encouraging the French government to institute a Torrens system in the whole of France since 1881 when he was a Municipal Councilor (Guyot 1897:52). In 1883 he managed to convince Administrator Cambon in Tunis that he should institute a Torrens plan in that new protectorate (the protectorate was established in 1881, and like other protectorates nominally left civil internal governance under local jurisdiction outside the civil code. On the 14th of December1884, Cambon writes to Guyot, who had been recently elected deputy for the First Arrondissement of Paris. It appears to me that in inspiring ourselves with the ideas of Mr. Torrens we would be able to easily resolve all the problems that present themselves in Tunisia for the establishment of property…From here, it will happen in Algeria, and you will see it happen in France. (Cambon quoted in Guyot 1897:52) This did not happen. Tunisia was outside the official French civil domain and its new land policy had no manifestations in French Napoléonic jurisdictions aside from proposals to extend it to Algeria (Dain 1885), which at the time was a fully integrated French Department and considered officially as a fully French place.14

14

This extension of Torrens from Tunisia to Algeria was argued for by Deputy Guyot at an address to the Sociéte de Géographie Commercial (séance du 19 janvier 1885, summarized in Marbeau 1886: 189). I believe this is an association of surveyors, related to real estate and government mapping.

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In 1888 the central colonial administration in Paris bowed to pressure from figures like Deputy Guyot15 and sent a circular to each colonial governor asking them to offer their opinion of the new land regime in Australia. At this time, Noël Pardon was assigned to the post of governor of New Caledonia in 1888, and received the Torrens related circular before leaving for his post. He and his family spent a month in Australia during his transit, where he was exceptionally well received as a guest of state. In reply to the circular, in 1891 Governor Pardon sent a report to the central colonial administration based on this first-hand study in New South Wales, including a draft of a proposed decree to reorganize New Caledonia’s government under the civil code in a way that would accommodate the Torrens Act. His principal objective was to develop the credit of the land (projet du loi 29 August 1891) (see Estivant 1899:172), and my understanding is that this mechanism of credit is precisely why it was not permitted by his superiors: by changing the nature of property to make it alienable for purposes of easy credit, the government could unintentionally lose control over the land market and be subject to capitalist interests and speculators. The proposed decree for New Caledonia written by Pardon was not approved by superiors for promulgation, even as they actually seemed to like the proposal (Girault 1899:146). The Cadastral council approved his project in principle, which worked on the technique that land would be under the civil code when acquired by an individual, but once the title became definitive it “could not return under the empire [regime] of the civil code.” Unlike the civil code and its cadastral system of maps, the key again is that matriculation or registration of the

15

Deputy Guyot applauds the Torrens proposals coming out of the International congress of 1889 discussed above, in part because they encouraged free-trade (note that this allies him with Jules Siegfried who I will discuss below).

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property would constitute valid and recognized transfer of ownership, taking the place of consent indicated by signature to a contract as instrument of transfer as required by the civil code (Girault 1899:410). Governor Pardon’s report was presented and well received at another conference, the “ International Congress de la propriète foncier” held in Paris in October 1892. Deputy Guyot was an advocate of the system because of its details encouraged liberalist free-trade (he wrote extensively on economic and trade subjects as an advocate of reform, and was opposed to tariff regimes and colonial parochialization of markets). In an internationalist scheme, not only would Governor Pardon’s proposed changes open up land to easy alienation, it would also potentially open up the colonies’ land to international credit markets and finance capital: this is precisely the motive of inquiry of the US consular reports of 1890: to determine where and under what conditions mortgage investments would be secure. Pardon’s proposed Torrens reforms take property out of the jurisdiction of the Napoléonic Code—officially creating an autonomous jurisdiction similar to the special Land Courts later created for Hawaii (and Oahu in particular) after the institution of the Torrens Act there in 1903 (see above). Whether or not French administrators realized that the Torrens system could structurally aid plantation interests and capitalist accumulation of lands seems unnecessary to demonstrate: Torrens is designed with mortgages, credits, stocks and sales in mind. From this perspective, the only reason to implement the Torrens Act is to further the interests of capitalists, including French capitalists. There was significant opposition in the French legislature to opening the colonies to free-trade regimes and foreign capital. Over time this created a two-tiered system : some colonies and dependencies were economically “autonomous” and their colonial governments able to set their own import, export, and trade 272

tariffs. Others were “assimilated” to French metropolitan trade and tariff regimes whose policies were written to protect provincial agriculturalists and industrialists in France beginning in 1883 and formalized in 1892 (Girault 1916:82). In an “assimilated” colony, from the perspective of a liberal free-trade regime, its economic interests are subordinated to that of France via legislative oversight (Roberts 1929:651), whereas administrators of “unassimilated” colonies, territories, dependencies, and protectorates are autonomous from the 1892 law and autonomous in their decentralized budgeting. By this official measure, Girault counts the “unassimilated colonies” up to WorldWar One as including the protectorate of Tunisia; the French Congo until 1912; Senegal and the Ivory Coast and Dohomey and Guinea as provided in the Anglo-French conventions of 1898; later incorporated by the general government of French West Africa of A.O.F. as “unassimilated” in 1905; Madagascar shifted from “unassimilated” to “assimilated” in 1897 (Girault 1916:126, 110-114, 217). New Caledonia was an “assimilated” colony. It is no accident that Pardon’s 1891 proposed Torrens law for New Caledonia were instead instituted in other French colonies almost all of which were “unassimilated:” Madagascar in 1897, French Congo in 1899, Senegal and the Ivory Coast and Dohomey and Guinea in 1900 and 1901, and then promulgated for the whole of the A.O.F. in 1906 (and it already existed for the Protectorate of Tunisia since 1883). As Governor Pardon suggested, the Act was always instituted in these places in parallel yet outside the Napoléonic Civil Code. I argue that this was made easier to accomplish because of these colonies’ unassimilated status (with the exception of Madagascar). The Torrens Act was applied in unassimilated colonies. According to Girault particularly the A.O.F. extensions of the Torrens System were cleanly inspired by Noël Pardon’s 1891 proposed modification to make it fit with 273

the civil code, which by design would always cause the pool of registered lands to grow since lands could not revert to the older system or systems (Girault 1907:412,414, 415). All these places where a Torrens System was instituted were economically “unassimilated:” The Torrens Act was thereby, among other things, a technique to open the colonies to international capital and credit, and anywhere it was implemented in French civil and protected space, this form of free liberal capitalism was supposed to be the beneficiary. What I conclude is that the Torrens Act did not come to New Caledonia because it was understood to be an instrument for free-trade capitalism. Writing in 1901 with the benefit of hind-sight, but also with his own political axe to grind, Minister Charles-Roux offers the following reasons why such a system was not instituted in New Caledonia: the administrative intent for New Caledonia was to build a Settler Colony. The significance that New Caledonia was planned as a place for “small colonization” of settlement by penal and free colonists rather than “large colonization” of capitalist exploitation motivates Roux’s perspective that its land regime should thereby work to prevent the granting of large concessions which lead to commercial monopolies that typically drain the colony for the benefit of the metropole (CharlesRoux1901:67). He defends a wide variance in land alienation and concession schemes implemented in New Caledonia by saying “In the same colony, we must find different systems [of concession and alienation] according to the zones, climate, nature of soil, and the density of population”(Charles-Roux 1901:76). A Torrens Act would thereby be inappropriate, since by design it works to make all property into the same sort of alienable commodity. Not deemed appropriate for the French settler colony of New Caledonia (even as it seems a good fit for the settler colonies and states of Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii, and Iowa), what then would an appropriate land regime look like for this new society? 274

The Wakefield Plan for Systematic Colonization, applied in New Caledonia A colonial budget crisis came to New Caledonia in 1892 due to a fall in nickel prices. Governor Emile Laffon had only recently taken over from Governor Pardon. Laffon evoked the names of Torrens as well as a certain Edward Gibbon Wakefield as a solution to their recurrent problems with 1) the boom and bust of the nickel monocrop and 2) the failures of penal colonization as a settlement and emigration program. Governor Laffon specified that Wakefield’s plan is “known under the name of the school of systematic colonization, which consists of selling lands at relatively elevated prices in order to feed the budget”(Laffon quoted in Terrier N.D.:198). This is a somewhat inaccurate description of Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s emigration plan, but it shows a working understanding of its budgetary utility. As instituted in New South Wales in Australia and parts of New Zealand beginning in the 1840s, Wakefield’s colonization plan seem like a model to emulate from the governor’s perspective. Governor Laffon then left New Caledonia for Paris to seek aide for the colonial budget, and to presumably to push for the uptake of land and settlement laws as proposed by Pardon. Laffon never returned to New Caledonia from this trip, and was reassigned. In 1892 the Under Secretary for the colonies issued a directive, without official explanation, that the colonial government was not authorized to do anything with the island's vacant lands (Feillet 1899: 4). This meant that all new concessions were placed on hiatus. However bad the budgetary crisis of 1892 might have seemed, a major market crash in 1893 put the colony close to complete financial bankruptcy in all sectors. In 1894 Paul Feillet arrived in

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New Caledonia as its new Governor, and he had just previously been governor of the North Atlantic colony of Saint Pierre et Miquelon.16 Feillet’s aspirations as a young colonial officer are fairly easily perceived, with the potential that in taking the post in New Caledonia he would have opportunities to later become Governor of Indochina or Madagascar (Dauphiné 1989:182). Part of my intention in this subchapter is to clarify Feillet’s relationship with the politicians, businessmen, and Ministers above him, in particular the long serving Senator from Le Havre, Mr. Jules Siegfried. Jules Siegfried is only once mentioned in any published materials I have located dealing with New Caledonia: the last paragraph of Feillet's 'state of the colony' speech in which he sums up all his accomplishments over his two terms as governor from 1894-1899, and presents his plans for the next two and a half years. He specifically proposes a reorganization, made possible by a decree of 1898 which created an autonomous Colonial Ministry, separate from the Ministries responsible for Marine, Industry, and Commerce under whose jurisdiction the colonies had previously resided. Since the home ministry was now autonomous, the administration and finances of New Caledonia could now be reorganization and de-assimialted from the government of the metropole. His object is summarized: I hope that the reforms currently in preparation, with the collaboration of the Minister of Colonies and the Senator J. Siegfried will end quickly, and before long, we will be dotés of our administrative and financial autonomy. (Feillet 1899: 43-44)

16

His stated hope was that the small rock of a colony at the mouth of the Saint Lawrence River would one day become a “French Hong Kong” in the North Atlantic (obituary in Depeche Coloniale 22 September 1903). He intended that it would be a comptoir for trade and commerce with the mainland, not a colony for production, exploitation, or for settlement. Like the french comptoirs of India, moreover it would likely be economically unassimilated to the metropole.

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Without this brief mention, the impression can easily gained that Feillet is at the origin of all innovations during his tenure (see Saussol 1979:263, 266). Feillet is credited with having turned off the “dirty spigot” (his words17) of penal transportation to New Caledonia in 1897 as part of a three year fight to make the island more appealing to free colonists. He is also credited with coming up with the idea of having French families with adequate capital emigrate to New Caledonia and work their own small agricultural plots, under the plan now known in literature about New Caledonia as “Feillet Colonization” (1894-1903). However, from the first time I read the bare details of Feillet Colonization, it was immediately evident to me that it was the Edward Gibbon Wakefield’s Plan for Systematic Colonization as embodied in his Letter from Sydney (1829) and later writings. In particular both the Wakefield Plan and Feillet Colonization involve emigration of people possessing their own capital to run small farms, in which regulation of land concession prices is calibrated in terms of its effects on the labor supply, and that by signing up for the plan these bourgeois self-financing emigrants were supposed to underwrite the costs of colonial settlement. Under both schemes, educated capital possessing settlers would become a new gentry or rural bourgeois at the antipodes of Europe. However, in no location aside from Terrier’s well researched and unpublished thesis (from which I culled Laffon’s mention of Wakefield), have I been able to find Wakefield’s name or writing connected in any explicit way to actual administrators working in New Caledonia. As far as I can tell, Feillet never mentions Wakefield. This void lead me on a detective project, to figure out how and if Wakefield’s ideas were taken up in French projects in general and in New

17

Unless I’m mistaken, it is very rarely pointed out that by 1897, the “dirty spigot” of penal colonization was principally fed by a non-European source.

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Caledonia in particular, and if so with what intent. My first library search for French authors interested in Wakefield yielded an interesting result: it was the subject of a thesis published in 1904 by a young man named André Siegfried. While a graduate student he was used by his father Senator Jules Siegfried almost as a personal research scholar starting as early as 1896. I argue that via Jules Siegfried’s involvement, Feillet Colonization can be shown to be a species of the Wakefield Plan. When I then examined the relationship between Jules and André Siegfried and Governor Feillet lead, I was lead quite unexpectedly, to realize how Feillet had been selected to run New Caledonia as part of a new French legislative agenda related to liberal secularism and rising political power of French protestants. This involved a close look at how Feillet’s family networks got him his job, and what their interests were that lead him to be so closely allied with Jules Siegfried. With this context and genealogy of policies employed by Feillet, I can better present the motives which drove the project of free settlement in New Caledonia during his governorship, and better discern the ideological objectives and specific social qualities of life in the “France Austral” he repeatedly states was his objective to build, allowing New Caledonia be an autonomous and decentralized country possessing its own unique races and civilizations. Signs of the Origins of the Project: Patrick O’Reilly’s paper on Feillet for the 1953 centenary of the French annexation of New Caledonia offers a rare clue on how to piece together Feillet’s network of interests. O’Reilly notes that, in the Metropole, an organization called the Union Coloniale Francaise took charge of the cause of free colonization of New Caledonia the early 1890s, and a branch office called the Union Agricole Caledonienne was set up in Noumea after Feillet arrived to aid new emigrants from France as part of his plan (Reilly 1953:221). The Union Coloniale was a lobby 278

composed of businessmen and allied elected legislative officials. They shared the common goal of lobbying for French colonial expansions and administrative reforms that would encourage private business interests. The shipping magnate Ballande was a member: his interests were firmly centered in Nouméa, as the import and goods sales group Maisons Ballande. The lobby’s shared object, it seems from a surface analysis, was simply to promote private enterprise in the colonies through administrative restructuring (cf. Persell 1983: 4,5, 27). However, their methods were less than strictly profit oriented, since other endeavors might easily have proved more profitable that encouraging the creation of new markets abroad. Their association lobbied elected officials to aid French emigration and settlement in all the colonies (not just colonies de peuplement), and for this reason the business entrepreneurs and capitalists of the Union Coloniale were legislatively allied to a legislative group call “the party for French expansion” (O’Reilly 1953: 220-221). Eugene Poiré explains that the Union Coloniale’s lobbyist work for its settlement agenda “imitated the procedures in use in Canada and Australia” (Poiré 1897:253) relative to recruitment of settlers in the Metropole. In particular a genre of French Guides de l’émigrant were based on British items like Wakefield’s son’s Handbook for intending Colonist of New Zealand (1848). Feillet reportedly had Doctor Earnest Daville write a Guide Practique du Colon en Nouvelle-Calédonie, which was published in 1894 by the Union Coloniale (O’Reilly 1953). Daville’s guide was distributed in France by the Union Colonial that same year as part of a broad publicity campaign to expose the public to information about New Caledonia on which little was known, and much of it negative (O’Reilly 1953: 220-221). This guide contains the plan for what was later called Feillet Colonization, telling prospective emigrants everything they needed to know: how much capital they would need to receive free passage from the state, how to prove 279

that they did indeed hold such funds, and that they should deposit the money with the Bank de l'Indochine so that it would be easily available upon arrival. They are also told what to expect upon arrival and how their free concessions would be allotted. The Guide is 170 pages long, of which only 130 is text. The last forty pages of the volume are devoted to advertisements for beer, wine, rum, cigarettes, industrial construction materials, pasteurized milk, canned goods, books, export-import expediters, freight-forwarders, shipping lines, and passenger service (for example see page 160). In short there is an ad for every thing or service the emigrant might need to buy once in New Caledonia. All this would be supplied by the business interests who are lobbying for legislation and policy that will encourage settlement: what is good for settlement is good for enterprise. Of singular curiosity, the back-matter statement of a Union Colonial publication from April 1894 says the Guide to New Caledonia was already “en preparation” or on its way to the presses. In order to attribute the Guide to Feillet’s direction of Doctor Daville as O’Reilly does, given the very early plan and execution of the publication, Daville would have had to have thrown together the 130 page work in short order. The timing of publication of this book, as well as its advertising, suggests that the project which Feillet undertook had vested interests that predated his appointment, and it was these figures who supported materially the colonial lobby in its work for this agricultural settlement adventure. In other words, Feillet Colonization was not conceived and designed by governor Feillet, and instead came from elsewhere. Among the Union Coloniale’s central backers from its pre-origins in 1889 is Jules Siegfried, a man from business origins who at various points in his career was a deputé, a senator, and in 1892 and 1893 the French Minister responsible for the Colonies, Industry, and Commerce. Jules Siegfried came from a mercantile family with Alsatian roots. In 1860 at the age 280

of 23 he was sent to study cotton commerce in Liverpool, and in 1861 he made a very timely trip to the United States. Thanks to a letter of introduction which testifies to his family’s significant business interests and influence, he was invited to dine with President Lincoln in Washington D.C. In his diary he claims to have gleaned insights about the oncoming war during several dinner conversation with the President, which pushed him to precipitously rush from Washington directly to Bombay, where he establish—at the slight age of 25—a cotton brokerage and processing house on the eve of the American Civil War, ideally situated to supply cotton needs to Europe in the event that American supplies were interrupted. During his career18 Siegfried was a champion of colonial expansion and also an opponent of protectionist French trade barriers and the policy of economic assimilation to the metropole, policies which he metaphorically regarded as having unfairly trapped his interests behind a “Wall of China” (Siegfried 1946:31). Jules Siegfried also had a religious interest. He was protestant and married the daughter of a Reformed Church pastor named Puaux. Clearly, as the son in law of a Pastor, when Siegfried was Minister in 1892-93 he was not likely to aid the Catholic missions established in

18

During the four years of the war Siegfried make a small fortune sending cotton from India to Europe. Siegfried left India and returned to France at the end of the war and became involved in French elective politics for the rest of his life. In 1878 he was elected Mayor of Le Havre, one of the largest port cities in France, where he worked on social housing issues. He was later elected to the French parliament as a deputy from 1885 to 1897, and was appointed Senator by his peers from 1897 until his death in 1922. From 1892-93, he was the Minister responsible for the dossiers for Industry, Commerce, and Colonies under Prime Minister Ribot before the cabinet dissolved over a budgetary issue. From his positions as Deputy, Minister and Senator he was well known as an internationalist Anglophone—his personal letter writing is strangely not like that of a native French speaker, and has “beaucoup d’anglocisms” either as an affected or genuine register of writing. In other endeavors he was a proponent of what Latour calls the pasteurization of France, he is hailed as an activist for feminism, and embraced liberalist republican protestant policies. This lead him to be an avid advocate of the secularization of France and separation of church and state—including in the colonies.

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New Caledonia.19 The type of aid offered by Minister Guizot in the 1830s and1840s to Catholic missions would no longer be similarly forthcoming. . André Siegfried was implicated in his father's work well before he published any of his own writing. As early as 1896 André was involved in research for the Musée Social, an institution of which father Jules was president. André’s 1904 Wakefield thesis apparently comes out of a Musée Social related research mission to Australia and New Zealand, where he was present from the 27th of April until the 3rd of October 1899 (Chambelland: 1995:74; Métin 1901: i). as was part of a much longer 18 month trip with four other Univeristé de Paris students who all similarly benefited from a mysterious new scholarship for “round the world” travel, made possible by a recent gift to the university from an anonymous benefactor (Métin 1901: i). Their six months in Australia and New Zealand was Billed as a visit to a “Workers Paradise” and in scope it meshes easily into the Musée’s “singleminded [sic] concern with the labor question” (Elwitt 1980: 449). After this trip, André Siegfried produced two separate theses based on this research voyage: one presents Wakefield’s ideas about land and labor in Australia Edward Gibbon Wakefield et sa doctrine de la colonization systematique (1904a) and the second deals with democracy in New Zealand (1904b). They are both directly germane to his father’s work with the Union Coloniale, and are so patently relevant to Feillet's project to autonomize New

19

As Minister in 1892-93 he worked to separate and autonomize the Colonial Ministry, which was only achieved in 1898. Since the new Colonial Ministry had trouble finding permanent housing, it bounced around from shared space in older Ministeries and leased space, until Siegfried and his peers succeeded in 1905 in passing a law which separated Church and State. Jules Seigfried is named as one of the long term sponsors of the law, and had even sent his son André to study non-confessional education in Canada just in time for his findings to influence the new legislation. After the law passed the Catholic education service had to vacate its beautiful and stately Ancien Régime offices in Paris at 10 rue Oudjiot. The buildings were refurbished, and became the permanent home of the Colonial Ministry and today's Overseas Ministry.

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Caledonia that I suspect that these two theses were meant to be read together: as a unit they present the theoretical groundwork and practical model for Feillet's entire colonial project. The few particular instances in which Feillet Colonization departs from the “doctrine” of the Wakefield plan are actually proposed in André Siegfried’s thesis in which he works to discredit the idea that Wakefield should be applied unbendingly. While this research is clearly André’s own, I take at face value his autobiographical assessment in 195220 that “Our fathers (and we, too, in our youth) believed with unshakable faith in progress and never dreamed for one moment that the promised land was anywhere else but the future” (Siegfried 1952: 10). Clearly, the father and son were working together to the same goals, and André Siegfried can be understood as having given a robust and thorough academic voicing of his father’s ideas. André never went to New Caledonia to my knowledge, and he never met nor corresponded with Governor Feillet. The only connection between them is Jules. What I see is both these younger men being mobilized by Jules Siegfried in a division of labor: André investigated Jules’ ideas about of colonization, while Feillet put them into practice as policy, which detractors reproached as an attempt to build “promised land” or French "Eden" in the South Pacific (Le Groupils 1902:29-31). André Siegfried went on to a wildly successful academic career21 after three failed attempts to get elected as a Député. He asserted late in life during a university lecture—perhaps with a sense of irony, perhaps not— that civilization by definition is a distinctive form of

20

This melancholy tempers the glowing picture André offers of his father’s life work in Mes Souvenirs de la IIIe Réublique, Mon père et son temps (1946), suggesting a significant shift occurred for him in the post-war 1940s.

21

He became a professor at the Collège de France, and at the time of his death was seated as one of the forty immortals of l’Acedémie Française, occupying chair 29 and was succeed by its only recently deceased occupant Claude Lévi-Strauss. He is arguably the founder French political science as a disciple, although he considered himself a geographer (Siegfried 1954:7).

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administration, and success of a particular civilization rests on its ability to administer (Siegfried 1952:182-183). In this ways outlined above, I take André Siegfried’s work as reflective of his father’s ideas, particularly as pertaining to civil society and its administration by the agency of a legislator, which were operationalized via Feillet Colonization from 1894-1903. Situating Wakefield in French Policy Only one author I’ve encountered, Edgard Maguet writing retrospectively from 1930, gives Wakefield’s writing a clearly stated place in the genealogy 22 of French land and settlement policy as pertaining to New Caledonia. He says that Wakefield’s ideas are credited with parts of Deputé Louis Jules Léveillé’s proposition de loi of April 1st 1897, which established a legal organization of state domains in the colonies. This law definitively identifies abandoned and unoccupied or "vacant" lands as belonging to the State, and no-one else. The 1897 act renders all unoccupied land as ownerless and thereby within the domains of the dominion by definition.23 While this might seem to pertain most directly to indigenous lands, in terms of New Caledonia the official notification spoke exclusively about how unsettled penal reserves were no longer the property of the Penal Administration, and Feillet could proceed to use them as he was fit (Feillet 1899: 5-6). The law of 1892 which prohibited the granting of new concessions was now lifted. In my analysis, the only aspect of the 1897 law clearly resembling Wakefield’s ideas is its passages which establish the legal basis by which receipts from sales and rents of concessions

22

New Caledonia did however have Wakefield-like prohibitions against free cessions starting in 1855, and in 1857 the administration instituted a system for payment of rents in perpetuity. These latter are strikingly similar to the Wakefield inspired systems in use in nearby New South Wales and New Zealand (Maguet 1930: 107) although these seem to be more like Algerian derived policies. However, Sydney was the center of the colony's early years and the administrators likely knew its land concession systems.

23

This is not a Torrens Act: there is no unimpeachable registered title, issuance of certificates of title, or other Torrens techniques. Possession is still 9/10 of the law, which is what allows vacant or empty tracts to be classified as abandoned and thereby reverting to the State.

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on state lands could be used to underwrite the costs of colonization (Maguet 1930:72-73). Deputé Léveillé who sponsored the legislation was a professor of penal law and transportation, and a member of the lobbying group the Union Coloniale which I discussed above. Deputé Léveillé’s 1897 law is part of the final push to end penal colonization and its state-within-thestate system of penal reserves and penal concession, and reflects a long debate about how New Caledonia should be colonized. This new program of self-financed colonization was supposed to be part of the successful swamping of New Caledonia with free emigrants attracted by policies designed to be tailored to their interests, and Wakefield system for land sales and concessions is supposed to attract them. However, the ascription of Wakefield to Léveille's proposal is perhaps merely a conjecture by Maguet: he does not tell us where he gets it. Meanwhile, the content of Wakefield’s ideas up to the time of Maguet's writing was under scholarly debate in somewhat idiotic terms which sought to estimate the “pureness”24 of Wakefield Plans seems to organize assessments of whether or not Wakefield’s plans for colonization were implemented in particular French contexts. This is the perspective against which André Siegfried argues in his thesis on Wakefield: it shouldn’t be understood as a doctrine. He argues against the “doctrinal” prescriptions proposed by Wakefield, showing a nuanced understanding of how social theories are transformed into 24

Henri de Peyerimhoff in 1906 describes land policies for Algerian settlement instituted in 1864 as “la pure doctrine de Wakefield” because the Algerian policy prohibited free land concessions to settlers and organized fixedprice sales as the sole means of alienation (Peyerimhoff 1928: 36). Twenty years later Bernard Augustin uses wording nearly identical to Peyerhimhoff to make the opposite claim, asserting that the prince-president Napoléon III, via his study of economics, would be logically opposed to official state efforts of settlement and hence we can assume would be in “désaccord avec la pure doctrine de Wakefield” (Bernard 1930: 344) and therefore Algerian settlement was in no way meant to be Wakefieldian. In 1929 an Australian academic named Stephen Roberts chimes in to critique Peyerimhoff, saying that the Algerian plan for land sales was in fact “nothing of the kind” like Wakefield’s since the 1864 law didn’t use the proceeds of land sales to finance the costs of colonization (Roberts 1929: 219, 222).

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actual policy: there is significant slippage, and for Siegfried this lack of “pureness” is a good thing. Siegfried’s object is to debunk the doctrine, and instead focus on the principles and objectives which motivate Wakefield's Plan25. In his thesis, Siegfried offers a comprehensive analysis of Wakefield’s writing, and summarizes the "doctrine" using three interrelated expressions “vente à un prix suffisant pour empêcher les salaries de devenir trop tôt propriétaires” (Siegfried 1904a:57 italics original). When interpreting Wakefield’s writing, Siegfried generally hems very close to the original texts and only speaks about the Australian examples they offer, with one notable exception. Drawing on his own visit to New Zealand, he points out that the examples of Canterbury and Otago as places where Wakefield gave to churches and sects large concessions, abandoning the “sufficient price maxim” which says concessions should never be given free of charge under any circumstances. Siegfried takes this exception as an object lesson, evidence of a practice of exception employed by Wakefield in practice of precisely the type his writing explicitly forbids: land must never be conceded free of charge (Siegfried 1904a:83-84). For Siegfried, based on this evidence, there is no such thing as a “pure Wakefield doctrine”, since it only exists as a hypothetical set of axioms present in the persuasive rhetoric of the Letter from Sydney and other texts written before Wakefield ever encountered the

25

References are made to Wakefield in works in French dealing with Algeria, but are strictly retrospective and historical in nature. It is unclear from these after-the-fact accounts if there is any demonstrable connection to Wakefield in Algerian land concession schemes in the 1860s. While these works don’t help understand Algeria’s history, they do give a good sense of the tropes of French discourse on Wakefield dating from the 1890s. Deputy Yves Guyot—discussed above as a fan of the Torrens System, who succeeded in having it implemented in Tunisia— writes in 1885 in an advisory register that in terms of colonial expenditures “Je ne comprends qu’une intervention de l’Etat c’est le système du Wakefield” which he likes from his free-market perspective where the receiving colony that benefits from new emigrants should pay the costs of getting them to the colony (Guyot 1885:73-74). In 1895Arthur Girault writes that the theory of sufficient price for land is the fundamental base of the Wakefield doctrine, and that prior to 1865 the French government had already instituted a similar preference for land sales rather than free concessions in Algeria (Girault 1895: 566).

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contingencies and changes necessary for an actual project would be brought to bear on the scientific imperatives he proposes. In other words, land concessions can be given away for free within a Wakefield Plan if the particular situation calls for it. In this interpretation of class and labor in Wakefieldian systematic colonies, Siegfried shows a principal motivation of his thesis: that Wakefield’s societies do not have those anti-democratic prejudices for which “we have frequently reproached him” (Siegfried 1904a:75). Wakefield argued persuasively to his British audience that if land was kept relatively expensive and not given away for free, for lack of being able to work their own land the selling price of labor would decrease (Wakefield 1829). In this reading, Wakefield’s intention, and Karl Marx’s objection to it (Marx 1976: 939), was that the colonies should recreate gentry social classes modeled on life in rural Britain, and free lands were what kept this dream from being realized in Australia. The sales of land to those who were fortunate enough to be able to bring their own capital would “artificially provoke the desired current of immigration” of laborers (Siegfried 1904a:69), and also artificially provoke class advancement of old arrivals each time a new boatload of immigrants docked at the port and offered their labor in for an artificially cheap market price. In this light, Siegfried moves away from the “doctrinal” imperatives over which other writers pointlessly argue, and instead proposes that a central tenant of Wakefield’s thinking is that a colony does not exist for the benefit of the mother country, but for itself as a new autonomous country. Siegfried instead argues that Wakefield wanted to see something in the colonies other than a mere real estate market or simple reproduction of English society(Siegfried 1904a: 94). Siegfried’s research, after all, was conducted in affiliation with the Musée Social that assumed these South Pacific places were Workers’ Paradises.

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Crucially, Siegfried concludes that giving political autonomy to these emigrant colonies is the key to preserving an entire empire (1904a: 99). While he clearly says that Wakefield’s systematic imperatives for colonization are outdated (1904a:105) per his doctrinal critique, they had not yet fallen completely into irrelevant oblivion (Siegfried 1946b: 175). Something still remained of the theory which he argued was salvageable as sound policy recommendations. Siegfried concludes that Wakefield’s imperative that all lands should be sold and none given away for free is not necessarily the best fit for all circumstance, and proposes that land prices should instead be contextually gauged by their structural impacts, and the possibilities of free cessions should not be ruled out for simply doctrinal reasons (1904a:106). In the final pages of Siegfried’s conclusion to his text, one sentence stands completely alone as its own single paragraph, which is something he does no where else in the entire thesis. In this single phrase, he says that Wakefield’s plans will only work if the lands are truly “wastelands” that are free and ready to be turned into concessions and sold to settlers at regulated prices. Il faut enfin que le sol soit libre et prêt à être occupé, qu’il mérite en un mot le titre de waste lands”(Siegfried 1904a:106). What Siegfried fully means by this line is supplied by his second thesis on democracy in New Zealand, written concurrently but defended separated from his Wakefield thesis, in which he examines New Zealand as an example of how social and political autonomy of a settler colony from the metropole is a good thing. He states almost fatalistically that the future of New Zealand will be for white men, because the Maori are already disappearing through first conquest and then germs, yielding their place and leaving their lands where “une race nouvelle, par le droit des armes, puis par le droit de la vie, c’est emparée de leur îles…”(Siegfried 1904b:9). The “waste 288

lands” Siegfried has identified as a precondition for Wakefieldian settlement in his first thesis we learn from his second thesis can be opened up for settlement by force of arms, and die-back of natives. He does not say if this is a good thing, or a bad thing: just that it has happened and these Maori lands are now freed up for a new white race. He goes on to say that New Zealand’s new white race underwent a natural sounding process of governmental disengagement from the European metropole; “Eloignment, isolement, decentralization, violà des conditions qui prédisposaient la Nouvelle-Zèlande à devenir une colonie autonome et presque indépendante.” New Zealand in his view is a place which learned through “self rule” to be free from “la tyrannie du dehors”(1904b:7-8 italics original and untranslated). I conclude that the preceding few paragraphs outline the project for New Caledonia embodied in Feillet's overall project as presented to the Budget Committee in 1899 with which he is a partner with Jules Siegfried. Of crucial import in the history of French civilization, the objective of colonization is now not centralization, but rather decentralization. The French colonial emigration project is now conceived as a way to build a new separate “race” or perhaps a nation, in lands vacated by a dying race of people, rather than an extension of the old French race. However, on this last point the Siegfrieds and Feillet apparently diverge in expectation: New Caledonia, in Feillet’s imagination, will have two separate and distinct civilizations which will not elide into one another: one for the a new white race of settlers, and another for the indigenous peoples, and rather than forming a beautiful and strong métis race, they will only meet in the marketplace where wage labor and commodities are exchanged for money. Apparently the only significant obstacle to this plan was the Marist Fathers and their supporters in the Metropole. 289

Feillet’s Colonization of New Caledonia Feillet seems to have hit the ground running in New Caledonia with an almost fully formed plan for colonizing the island with French families possessing capital adequate to finance and labor on their own small parcel of land, freely given by the state to qualified emigrants. His emigrant settlement program was meant to ensure “capital appropriate to succeed in the enterprise that we propose; capital considerable enough if it deals with mines or large plantations, but very modest if it deals with small plantations of coffee” (J.O. 1894 p. 363). While it seems at first blush that offering settlers free land cessions would encourage their emigration abroad, colonial administrative experience by the 1870s had lead both the French in Algeria and British in Australia to firmly reject the principle of free land for settlers because it failed to lead to desired colonial development. This was one of Wakefield’s key criticisms of unsystematic colonization: NEVER give free concessions. Yet in 1894 Feillet completely turned against the conclusions of fifty years of colonial experience, and instituted a system for free concessions for the higher class of emigrant. The answer as to why he did is available from André Siegfried’s writing about Wakefield which I presented above: the plan is not a doctrine, and even Wakefield gave free concessions sometimes. Feillet to institute free passage and free concessions for capital possessing emigrants, while he simultaneously put in place a regime of paid leases for convicts to finance the costs of colonization plus an indigenous flat-tax to push customary subjects off their reserves and into the wage labor pool. “Voila!” a Wakefield plan for systematic colonization. Paul Feillet’s plan was relatively simple as presented in the various guides for emigrants published from 1894-1899. “Small Colonists” possessing “sufficient resources” would be recruited in France and settled in New Caledonia where they would raise coffee on small plots of 290

land. Why coffee and not vast herds of sheep and cattle which could fully use this surplus land? Unlike cattle, coffee would not stray and trample Kanak gardens, which was thought by Feillet to have given them cause to rebel in the past—but these sorts of details are not presented in the guides. Unlike the doctrine of the Wakefield plan, these plots would be supplied to capitalized emigrants free of charge, which amounts to a tailoring of the plan to context in exactly the way André Siegfried later says it must be done. As intended by Wakefield, Feillet Colonization will also try to prevent the problems encountered with free land concession seen in Australia and Algeria. He required that free emigrant possess their own capital of 5000 francs26—not to buy land and hire wage laborers as Wakefield proposes, but to support the colonist and his family until their farm is up and running self-sufficiently. This will apparently take about two years. Meanwhile, since free concessions of this sort are only available to new French emigrants, the cost of transporting them and provisioning them will be born by released penal convicts who must pay for concessions. As the emigrant guide specifies, free shipboard passage and food for a qualified colonist and his family would be paid at the expense of the State, and a free land cession was given to each of these petit colons of 5 cultivable hectares suitable for coffee plus 10-25 hectares of pasture land. The capital possessed by the emigrant was supposed to be enough to support a man and his family through clearing a plot of land, planting a coffee plantation, and comfortably wait for its first crop to be harvested.

26

In early drafts by Feillet he estimated the necessary capital at 3000 francs. In official publications it appears as 5000 francs, and stipulates that 10,000 francs would be needed for a colonist inexperienced in cultivation who would have to hire wage labor to assist him. In Anglo-Saxon terms, these concessions were between 40 and 75 acres, and the necessary capital of 5000 francs one needed to have on deposit at the Banque de l’Indochine was equivalent to about 200 English pounds at the time.

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The various emigrant guides make it clear that a petit colon should not expect to be able to hire additional help to improve his concession. Feillet’s plan included no provision to encourage the emigration of colonists without capital who might serve as a labor pool, and explicitly discourages emigration by individuals who do not have guaranteed work. The colonist and his family were expected to do almost all of the work to clear and improve the property. Even as the guide discourages the colonist from hiring labor, a long list of types of laborers and their wages is included in the guides, containing useful information like as condemned prisoners can be engaged for 40 to 50 francs per person per month, freed convicts for 20- 50 francs per month, “Indigenes” at 15-30 francs per month plus food. Contract laborers from the New Hebrides (present day Vanuatu), Indochina (present day Vietnam), and Java could be arranged at 15-20 francs per month, not inclusive of the cost of food, lodging, clothing and one time fees for expatriation from their homeland and repatriation of 250-500 francs, which would need to be covered by the employer. The first problem faced by Feillet with implementing this plan was that the 1892 decree by the undersecretary for colonies when prevented land concessions of empty territory was still in effect. But in October 1894, at Feillet’s request, undersecretary Delcassé suddenly gave him firm permission to lease these lands (Feillet 1899:5). The second problem Feillet faced was that penal colonization discouraged free colonization. In 1897 as the last of a long line of governors, Feillet had penal colonization definitively halted. Even so, a third problem was that significant tracts of what in most Europeans' opinion were the very best lands remained reserved for the needs and future concession of prisoners still held in the penitentiary system. In 1897 Devéille's law discussed above abolished the Penal Reserves, and made these lands available to the use of Feillet's colonial government for any concessions he and the elected Conseillers saw fit. This 292

law also solved a fourth problem: lands that could be considered abandoned by indigenous peoples could be legitimately rolled into the State's domains, and then used as alienable concessions for new settlers. Feillet then headed an aggressive delimitation and cantonization program through which indigenous tribal reserves were systematically downsized from 1896-1903 (see Saussol Figure 63). Critics headed by figures like Ballande and the Marists described as the spoliation or plundering of indigenous lands. In André Siegfried terms, they were instead creating surplus "wastelands" from indigenous reserves, and opening them up for a large-scale Feillet colonization scheme. The wage labor for this scheme would come from penal and indigenous sources: the labor pool would be created through the structure of land sales to convicts and selective taxation of natives. From the 1860s until 1894, free concessions were available to the condemned who were deemed worthy of the indulgence. These concessions became the definitive property of the convict at the end of his sentence, and if married they could be transfer to their wives (Babled 1906:57). With the appearance of Governor Feillet in 1894, free concessions for convicts immediately ceased. As published in the Revue Pénitentiaire “les concessions ne seront plus accordées à titre gratuite comme par le passé; le concessionaire…devr[ait] payer…une rente annuelle et pérpétuelle fixée.” The concessions must not be less that 3 hectares or greater than 10 (1894:400), whereas the smallest free concessions given to Feillet colonists were 15 hectares of quality land. The small size of penal concessions and the annual rent charged in perpetuity would structurally push the penal colonists into the labor market for need of money for goods and rent: by design they did not have enough land to supply their needs directly or through barter.

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As in the Wakefield plan, everyone acknowledged that the “cost of assistance for the cultivator colonists sent from the metropole, whatever those costs…are a part of the local budget”(Article 10 in proposition de loi from Laffon to Ministere). Under the Feillet plan these costs would be covered through the sale and rent of land to people unrelated to the plan: after 1894 the only people structurally forced to buy and rent land in the colony were convicts who as I discussed in an earlier chapter were also not legally allowed to leave the colony. Although penal transportation ceased after 1897, it wasn’t until 1931 that the last transported prisoner has served out his term, and a slow trickle of these men were continually released without land concessions. They had to be ready to work and pay perpetual leases, or buy lands outright from a private party on the open market. Perhaps because convicts figured out they could escape this class structure and live on tribal reserves, a law proposed the 12 July 1901 prohibits freed convicts from living in indigenous reserves. Perhaps because they figured out they could buy land from private parties (for example, failing Feillet colonists who decided to return to France) it additionally prohibited them from living in towns such as Koné, Voh, La Foa and Nouméa. This combination of laws leaves all indigenous reserves off limits to former convicts, and places almost all desirably and centrally located civil areas of communes and arrondisements off-limits to them. They would not be in competition or even residential copresence with free colonists. In fact, the only major civil area in which the 1901 law did not exclude convicts from living and owning land was Bourail. As an additional devise to create a pool of affordable labor in the service of the colony and colonists, the governor instituted an indigenous “impôt de capitation” in 1900 that required each tribal individual to pay 10 francs yearly in tax (Douyère et al. 1992:67). Feillet figures it as fifteen days work a year (Feillet quoted in Laurent 1900:52), as all that was needed to pay the tax 294

they owe for their portion of the colony's administrative expenses, equivalent in his words to the direct taxes whites pay for goods and services. The capitation tax is in Feillet’s presentation an opportunity for them to contribute modestly to their public charge, rather than a burden. He asks rhetorically, "Quel Français de France" would not joyously accept this arrangement? (Feillet 1899:14). While this might be what it does structurally, and offers a rhetoric of egality, the overall intent of the indigenous capitation tax is presented by Feillet as follows, which I decided to quote at length to give the full sense of his text: I have treated them, not as savages, but as barbarians, which is very different. They are capable of rising up, not to our civilization, which is not desirable either for them or for us, but to a civilization far superior to that which we have found with them when we conquered them. They are much more intelligent than we thought, and very capable, which gives a great charm to the study of their moeurs, to s'elever to certain part of our customs, without renouncing their ideal of living, which after all is not so sot: obligatory work under their chiefs as much as is necessary to assure a rudimentary material existence, but largely sufficient, and consecrate their voluntary labor [travail] to the conquest of money necessary for luxury as they understand it. Those who have visited the Loyalty Islands know that in certain respects notably the knowledge of the true comforts of hot countries, they render many points to colonists. In my opinion, the Loyalties, as they are organized and as our civilization has penetrated them, must be the ideal which we must more and more bring closer to the less intelligent, but very perfectible, canaques of the grande terre. (Feillet 1899: 15-16) For Feillet, unlike Wakefield and others before them, indigenous inhabitants of Pacific islands were seen as appropriate and sufficiently numerous to offer an adequate contribution to the labor supply (Wakefield 1848). Feillet also seems alone is assuming that when faced with European settlement, the natives would not necessarily die off or assimilate (cf. Roberts 1927: 58-143), but would instead need to be incorporated. Feillet's methods for how to proceed are simple (1899:18). He then declares that 1) “reminding ourselves that the Canaques are feudal,” he decided that this should be recognized 295

not just on paper but in reality: he recognizes chiefly authority and their institutions like pilous or dance as legitimate parts of government and social life. 2) He proposes developing an education program called an école normale d'instituteurs indigènes similar to that has been working in Lifou for several years. Via schooling, he proposes that we "civilizerons" (verb, first person plural) the indigenous population not to our civil society but to their own. 3) He proposes pursuing a hygiene program against leprosy and like tropical maladies that significantly impact the population. He continues with his speech in a defensive posture, says that as of 1899 the "revision" of indigenous reserves based on delimitations of surplus lands are complete27 and that the cantonments thus created will never disappear: there will always be indigenous reserves (note the variance in intention from their 1868 creation as temporary stage on the path to individual property ownership), and he does not see a future in which the cantons will assimilate to the larger land regime of privately held alienable land. On these lands he says they want "to be definitively fixed on their rights; to possess, as they say, titles and papers [papier] like the whites" (1899: 12), meaning they want to have civil property defined by law not by custom. In Feillet’s plan, the creation of property rights and titles would not constitute an assimilation to French civil society, but instead the route to civilization in general for the indigenous subjects on their own terms. While this would create a separate but equal structure, Feillet then states his intention to help natives enter into "relations etroites avec les blancs" which would assures them a working wage that "can furnish them with money for which they have need to pay for what we call their 27

He further defends the program of cantonments, saying that chiefs often ask for their own cantonment (1899: 11), and that the "palpable sign of their consent" to their cantonment is the fact that they accept cash in exchange for undergoing the relocation and delimitation procedure.

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luxuries" namely clothes, parures, wine, alcohol, and sirops (a learned alcoholism for which Feillet blames liberated convicts).

Feillet, Leenhardt and the Settlement Project in Metropolitan Context I agree with André Siegfried’s read of Wakefield’s settlement plan, and extend it to Feillet: the point of French emigration to New Caledonia was to create a new autonomous people, not for the benefit of the metropole or for the interests of Business capitalists. I argue in this section that it is no coincidence that Feillet was chosen to build this new “France Austral". Kinship and marriage can be used to explain how two important French figures in New Caledonia’s history got jobs on the island, and how their civil and religious projects are intimately related: the first is Governor Feillet. The second is his cousin by marriage Pastor Maurice Leenhardt. Paul Feillet’s Father's Mother was born Aurore Challemel-Lacour. Her Brother is Paul Armand Challemel-Lacour, a major french statesman who from 1893 until his death in 1896 was the President of the French Senate. Paul Armand never married and had no children, and despite being a Roman Catholic, in his family “only the women went to mass” —which fits well with the secularist directions he took France during Third Republic. Paul Feillet’s Roman Catholicism was similarly never particularly evident, and he married Marie-Louise Rognon, a Protestant, in 1894 shortly before his appointment to New Caledonia. Marie-Louise’s Father, Pastor Louis Rognon, died when she and her four siblings were very young. The Pastor was a member of the Reformed Church, and in a move for political inclusion of his sect he had been appointed to the prestigious position of the Oratoire du Louvre. He had married the Sister of another protestant, Charles “André Michel” a well known 297

conservator at the Musée du Louvre. Pastor Rognon wrote equally favorable words of Minister Guizot and de Tocqueville, sometimes in the same breath (Rognon 1870) and despite being Catholic, Guizot attended his sermons and was present at his funeral. This reflects how Rognon was politically adept at toeing a middle line as an official Protestant in a Roman Catholic regime. Moving off the Kinship chart and into associative activities, Rognon participated in protestant networks which put him into contact with Pastor Puaux who as I said above was the Father in Law of Jules Siegfried, and with Pastor Boegner who appointed Maurice Leenhardt to his post. Both pastors Puaux and Boegner organized Protestant missionary efforts to Oceania. At the time of Pastor Rognon’s early death in 1869 he was apparently well liked, and politically well connected: it should not be surprising that his daughter married someone with a political pedigree like Paul Feillet’s, despite their official difference of religious sect. Their marriage was indicative of the secular approach Feillet would take to the governance of New Caledonia, and likely the connection to the deceased and well liked Rognon through his wife is part of the reason he was selected for the governorship, in addition to his collateral status as the “nephew” of the President of the Senate. Retuning to the Rognon family ties, after Feillet’s early death in 1903, his wife’s brother Charles Rognon was named to the Governorship of New Caledonia in 1905 apparently in an effort to carry on his projects. Moving us to the other side of the Rognon family, via the Michel’s, we see that Feillet is related by marriage to Maurice Leenhardt, who arrived with his wife in 1904 to work as New Caledonia’s first French protestant missionizing pastor. Leenhardt was there to help Feillet’s project as outlined above, and although Feillet had left the island and died in France in 1904, it is because of Feillet’s problems with the Catholics that a Protestant

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mission was proposed in the first place. The fact that the men are related by marriage make the selection of Leenhardt more than a compelling coincidence. Governor Feillet encountered stern resistance from Catholics in New Caledonia when he instituted the capitation tax as approved by the Conseil General in 1898. After one event of native insubordination related to the capitation tax at Wagap, Governor Feillet concluded that the Marists are directly responsible for that particular instance of unrest and had encouraged the natives to revolt against his civil expansion. Feillet thereafter presents the Marists as "the enemies of Free colonization," and their reaction was to wage what one colonists at Tieti calls a "silent war, that the Marist Mission makes against colonization and the administration of the current governor, M. Feillet" (Anonymous 1902: 78). The assumption articulated by this colonist, and by Feillet, is that without the Catholic Priests' interference, the natives would happily work a few hours a month for wages to buy their luxuries and pay their tax. The indigenous labor problem is actually a problem with Catholicism. Feillet’s solution to this problem, as shown in long quote above, is to follow the example of the Loyalty islands, a place first penetrated by protestants instead of Catholics, which should be the model for all of New Caledonia. As told to a metropolitan reading public by one of his detractors, Father Charles Laurent, Feillet is cast as more authoritarian and powerful than Louis XIV. In his silent war with the Marists, when a church led investigation requested by Feillet failed to have the Marists ejected from their post, Feillet brought in native protestant "teachers" from the Isle of Pines. Father Laurent says that Feillet’s predecessors had never permitted teachers on the main land because they were too openly the toy of England (Laurent 1900: 10). In contrast, the Journal Officiel presents the importation of teachers as related to liberal "liberty of conscience" and they keeping 299

teachers out would have been contrary to liberal tropes of tolerance (quoted from Pinon in Laurent 1900: 213). The Priest includes an article by Rene Pinon from the Revue des Deux Mondes 15 Avril 1900 that Feillet brought teachers to Houailou, who he says are only Indigenous catechists converted by pastors to a very simplified religion, and who, like all the protestant indigens of these islands, have kept from the long sojourn of English reverends a sort of patois britannique and the notion of the superiority of England over all peoples. Pinon then shifts into a register of personal attack implying that Feillet has a protestant agenda, accusing him with the fact that a large number of protestants are functionaries of public instruction and education, specifically that the normal school instructors in Lifou (a family named Rousseau) whose work Feillet praises in his 1899 speech are protestants. Apparently there is a Protestant agenda. Pinon seems to conclude that the problems of the colony are a result of this protestant plus masonic production of a Culturkampf français (Pinon in Laurent 1900: 214, italics original and untranslated). Feillet’s solution the Priest accuses, was to propose that the colony be "secularized" meaning that the clergy be brought under civil jurisdiction, and despite answering to Rome priests would be made to respect civil authority by drawing their salary from the colonial budget. However, the actual language seems that the Conseil General voted, séance tenante, the funds necessary for the stipend of a secular clergy shortly before Feillet left for France in 1899 (Laurent 1900: 11). In this context, I see evidence that the entire kinship network of Protestants was put into motion to bring a pastor from France to open a protestant mission in New Caledonia. Leenhardt was eventually selected for the job in 1902 and arrived on the island in 1904 was recently 300

ordained. Up until his marriage with Jeanne Michel his career prospects appeared less than promising. When Maurice Leenhardt in 1902 married Jeanne Michel, it was important that she was the daughter of Charles “André Michel”—the Mother’s Brother of both governor Feillet’s wife and her brother the future governor Rognon. Perhaps because of the significant age difference, Leenhardt is described in the literature I have found as the “nephew” by marriage to Feillet although in terms of my generation count they are cousins. In James Clifford’s intellectual biography of Maurice Leenhardt, the most curious and exciting of all details about Jeanne Michel is scarcely hinted at: Clifford tells us that Maurice’s new mother-in-law was born in Honolulu to the French consul, which is a major understatement of importance: Marie Hélène André Michel’s father is Charles-Victor Crosnier de Varigny. He met her mother Marie Louise Constantin shipboard en route from Valparaiso to San Francisco, where they married in 1851 before setting off for Honolulu in 1855 where they would live for the next fourteen years. In 1863 Charles started working for the government of the Kingdom of Hawaii, first as the minister for Education, then Finance Minister, and finally as Foreign Minister to King Kamaehameha V from 1865-—a post described as the equivalent to “Prime Minister” and from which he encouraged the King to revoke the constitution of and withhold the power of organic law for the monarchy. Curiously again, when University of New Caledonia professor Armand Hage wrote a 2002 introduction to a facsimile reproduction of Varigny’s Fourteen Years in the Sandwich Islands there was no mention of a relation to Leenhardt or his family. Why does this matter? Varigny is described by Kuykendall as a Roman Catholic (Kuykendall 1953:108) which perhaps captures the New England missionaries’ fears of the new French-origin Minister of Education for Hawaii. His wife, the grandmother of Leenhardt’s wife, says that after their marriage he began attending her (reformed) church, and in Varigny’s own 301

writing while Catholicism gives liberty Protestantism gives women equal rights as particularly evident in the development of the United States as a Civilization (1895:13). In this way, when André Michel was married to Marie Hélène de Varginy the union was registered in the nobility directory for 1880 (Hautrive 1881:254). This shows a route taken by Protestantism into the French establishment: Catholic men with an aristocratic pedigree like Varigny and Feillet marrying Protestant women. It also explains why Jeanne André Michel might have agreed to accompanying Leenhardt to the Pacific—and once married, why Pastors Boegner and Puaux (recall he is Jules Siegfried’s father in law) would decide to give Leenhardt the post. In 1902: •

Jeanne is the cousin of the current and former Governor of New Caledonia;

•

Jeanne is the niece of the eminent and respected Pastor Rognon;

•

Jeanne is the granddaughter of the former Minister of Kahmehameha V

And it surely helped that Maurice’s father, Franz, was also a Pastor. Given this context, fivehundred people attended their wedding. The weight of a Protestant connection is furthermore manifest in the numerous “Consiels d’Administration” or boards of direction for public institutions on which the men on the kinship diagram associate with one another. Jules Siegfried’s younger brother Jacques Siegfried was an 1872 member of the Conseil d’Administration of the new Science Politique in Paris, along with Henri de Varigny (Charle’s son and Hélène’s brother: he was a Darwinist scientist) (Levasseur 1906:150). The Franklin Society, which works in the service of public libraries counts Jules Siegfried and Charles de Varigny as among the members and names André Michel—Jeanne’s Father—as its managing director (Buisson 1882:1102). I could repeat this exercise for almost all the public institutions of Paris: they are recurrently managed and populated by a small and closely related membership of Protestant men. What these materials show is how Protestants 302

connect to public elected and associative power in Paris from the beginnings of the Third Republic. This, I argue, is the project for New Caledonia advanced through Governor Feillet in 1894. If it wasn’t his intention to build a Protestant secular society, this is the politics in which it was soon mired. On these vast expanses of manufactured “waste lands” produced by Feillet through cantonment and revisions of penal reserves, a remarkably small number of colonists from France were established on the planned eighty-acres plots to grow their coffee: In round figures fivehundred families in total came, and three hundred abandoned their plots and moved on. Adequate capital but no agricultural training and no wage labor proved to make poor settlers. The Feillet Colonists often abandoned their concessions, which reverted to the state, and moved to Nouméa or left the colony for Australia. Christiane Douyère (i.e. Terrier) specified that many who were successful chose to sell their investment and went elsewhere for new opportunities—yet this is not the general outcome (personal communication August 2008). Seeking help and to reply to critics of his social agenda for the island and accusations from Marists and other Catholics that he was despotic and sought to enslave the indigenous canaques, in 1902 Feillet left for France to see his superiors. He died in France during his trip.

Siegfried and Feillet: their project as shown in a 1901 Letter Evidence of a close but otherwise invisible relationship between Siegfried and Feillet exists in the form of a single letter from Siegfried to Feillet, currently held in the Territorial Archives of New Caledonia, (Leenhardt Fonds, 12J 63 item 38). Headed “Confidentielle & Personelle” and dated 28 February 1901 Siegfried has long departed from his head at the Ministry but remained appointed Senator by his peers in government. In this letter he takes the 303

initiative to warn Feillet of a coming inspection of the colony, following “certain complaints” about him to the Minister of Colonies. Siegfried says he has intercepted the inspector, “to say to him what you have done, the results obtained, and finally the high esteem I have for you.” He conjectures that the Catholic missionaries and Ballande are at root of the complaints, and that the inspection will likely go well if he acts warmly towards the inspector, before completely changing subjects to describe wooden wharfs and electric winches he saw on a recent trip to the United States and which he thinks Feillet would be wise to emulate. The letter is odd in that it contains a significant number of anglicisms which a friend helping me read his handwriting remarked on: his lexical choices and overall grammar is markedly strange French. What is perhaps more notable is that the letter came to the Territorial Archives via a gift by the family of Maurice Leenhardt. How it got there is hazy to me, but shows a close alliance. Leenhardt’s thinking is relatively well documented by his own writings and his intellectual biography by Clifford Marcus, and the same is true of the details of Feillet’s colonization plan. Via the work of his son André I proposed above that we can gather a more robust picture of Siegfried’s aspirations for the colonies, and New Caledonia in particular, and do a better job of showing how Feillet and Leenhardt fit together in a colonial institution directed from Paris on the road to autonomous “self rule.” One the one hand, we can glean from the above material a particular protestant, if not explicitly anti-catholic, character to the program pursued by Feillet and Siegfried. This brings back in Guizot and his explicitly pro-catholic project. As agents of colonization, and authors of certain aspects of the colonial project in New Caledonia, the following question seems important: is there any part of the French colonial project of the 19th century that was not aligned and oriented by a Christian objective or motivation of some sort? 304

CHAPTER 7 NON DECOLONIZATIONS (1945-1988)

“Our Revolution” The plural society1 meets in the marketplace rather than in the bedroom, per Governor Feillet’s land and settlement agenda for New Caledonia as opposed to the métis future earlier imagined by Governor Guillain. The human legacies of both these plans—plural and métis— include what might be called a “multicultural” or “diverse” population today. In addition to the co-presence of Europeans and Natives, the failed or stop-gap settlement of Asian workers, labor and land policies contributed to the island’s ethno-racial composition. North Africans and other colonial subjects who were sometimes officially assimilated to European civil status filled to role of settlers, and Asian contract workers filled the labor demands of industry which penal colonization failed to provide. The significance given to ethnic diversity today in New Caledonia, including its importance for identity and politics, was thereby latent in how the population was built through colonial bricolage. Today’s ethnic and identity politics which sometimes present all ethnic differences as equally important (see chapter eight), of course would fail to resonate in the same way in an earlier colonial period.

1

The term “plural society” is here taken in the sense developed by J.S. Furnivall (1944; 1948), which I will engage more thoroughly in the next chapter. Here I mean to point out that Feillet’s ideas and Furnivall’s analytic hold a close resemblance to one another.

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Differences in origin were socially stratified by french state categories up to the beginning of World War Two. “Official” Frenchmen from the Metropole lived well in New Caledonia as heads of government in Nouméa on temporary sojourners—the pejorative term for them is zoreilles. Regular European and assimilated populations worked and labored on the land with civil rights that sometimes placed them at a disadvantage compared to the well paid official Frenchmen in their midst as well as to the regular French citizens of the Metropole for whose benefit the colony existed according to policy (while Feillet and Siegfried sought to change this through autonomization, they were not entirely successful). “Emigrant” European residents of the colonies generally, not just New Caledonia, often presented themselves as though they were being treated by their government as second class citizens. “Immigrant” Asian contract workers provided the industrial labor force and lived in work camps or other contractually mandates conditions with a poor degree of civil rights guaranteed to them as (in theory) temporarily resident foreign citizens. Segregated from these civil populations except for purposes of taxation and wage labor, the “Native” indigenous population—pejoratively called canaques— lived on delimited Réserves with the exception of those who through military or church service gained recognized standing to abandon their “particular status2” and assimilate to a “civil status” roughly approximate in rights to that of European women. French Officials, European Emigrants, Asian Immigrants, and Canaque Natives fill out the standard population categories identified for New Caledonia up to 1942: as imagined by Feillet the colonial society had its own more general French civilization while the natives had their own particular civilization. 2

The term of “particular” status was used to classify non-civil status natives in other French colonies such as Algeria, meaning they would follow their tribes’ own “particular” legal codes and not necessarily the civil code. Sir Henry Maine is perhaps creditable with coining the administrative label “particular” in his work on plural indigenous laws and courts in India, from which the French use of the term appears to be derived. I plan to clarify the empirical nature of the relationship between the French and Anglo colonial use of “particular” in future research.

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Then in 1942 the island underwent what is in my measure its most significant social change of the entire 20th century. As the United States entered the Second World War, New Caledonia was identified as a rear base from which to supply and reinforce the front lines in New Guinea and the Western Pacific and stop any Japanese advance on Australia. Over the course of the war more than one million U.S. servicemen were barracked on Isle Nou across from Nouméa and at the beachhead at Bourail. Up to 100,000 G.I.s were present on the island at any given time, effectively swamping the local population of only 30,000 persons in a 3 to 1 ratio. While the actual dynamics of the US presence was marked by confrontations the colonial administration and with Charles de Gaulle’s military (Munholland 2005), the war is remembered retrospectively as a time of wealth and plenty, providing a general reservoir of goodwill towards Americans that I have not experienced or heard of in any other country in the world. Trying to explain this goodwill to me, three political party staffers and volunteers at the Avenir Ensemble (the “Future Together”) told me that when the Americans arrived it was “Our Revolution,” it was a moment as important as 1789 in France of 1776 in the United States, in terms of how it changed “our way of life”(italics original and untranslated). What they mean is that it was the end of the old colonial social order. Whether or not 1942 constitutes the end of colonialism all together is a point of political contention—between anti-independence groups like the Avenir Ensemble, and pro-independence groups like PALIKA (“Party for Kanak Liberation) and the FLNKS (“Kanak and Socialist National Liberation Front”). What they can agree on is that the US presence is remembered as the vector for major infrastructure development (roads, airports, telephones), and catalyst for significant social transformation to a less French and more American way of life. Specifically, as the narrative was presented to me numerous times in sometimes factually dubious ways, Americans treated 307

“Canaques” as equals when employing them, allowed them to do things like drive heavy machinery and socialize with white soldiers. The European-origin and assimilated settlers learned that they might enjoy not just Coca-Cola and JEEP Willies, but might like actually being American, to the extent that forty years later a petition was circulated and submitted to Ronald Reagan requesting US annexation. The Asian labor camps were closed for the duration of the war, with the workers and their families doing the Army’s laundry, and the GIs threatened at the end of the war, in the form of a petition, that they would not demobilize peacefully unless Asian contractors were guaranteed that they would no longer be bound by their old contracts. The only people in the revolutionary narrative (as presently told) who did not win were the Official French and recently emigrated French. Reflecting this perspective, when I asked a fellow academic “How is social life in New Caledonia today different than in France” he immediately replied, “in France there is no anti-French racism. This perspective of major social change during the war is captured by a locally published post-war geography textbook which all school children were exposed to in the 1950s and 1960s, which depicts the European and Native population of New Caledonia over time in terms of population numbers and fashion of dressing, figures 8 for the Europeans and figure 9 for the indigenous population (due to copyright concerns by UMI these and all other figures references in the text have been removed, and are available from the author on request). What these two images reflect in the intention of the author and artist is not necessarily an American agency, but instead a change in official political status. At the beginning of the French capitulation in the war in Europe, before Pearl Harbor, the settler residents of New Caledonia descended on Nouméa and forced the Vichy governor to depart. At the end of the war, Charles de Gaulle’s government declared that all 100 million colonial subjects who had defended mother France in her time of 308

need would cease to be mere colonial subjects and would benefit from becoming French citizens (in the same non-enfranchised way French women in the metropole were French citizens). In terms of political status, in part pressed by anti-colonial figures in the U.S. like former Republican presidential nominee Wendel Wilkie3 (Wilkie 1943), the French government officially eradicated the colonies. In the place of colonies, voters in each colony as represented by their elected delegates sent to Paris would choose their country’s future relationship with France: either as a fully incorporated Department of Overseas France, a Department d’OutreMer (DOM), or as a governmentally autonomous unincorporated Territory of Overseas France, a Territoire d’Outremer (TOM). Administratively, the DOMs fell under the Interior Ministry, and the TOMs remained within the Overseas Ministry (i.e. the rechristened Colonial Ministry). As Françoise Vergès nicely outlines for La Réunion in Monsters and Revolutionaries (1999), she had to overcome her own sense of cognitive dissonance and political passions to tell how becoming a fully integrated Department of France was—in the late 1940s—a deeply anticolonial position. With the French national legislature largely controlled by members of the Communist Party (leading in part to Charles de Gaulle’s decision to resign), becoming fully French was understood by anti-colonialists as a means to undo the colonial double standard and once and for all fully assimilate to French civil status as the Civilizing Mission had always promised. In this climate, the advocates of decolonization were lead by the United States government, in what Fanon later describes as a “quick quick decolonize” agenda, based on the fear that failure to decolonize would favor the growth of discontent that breeds communism. 3

See French Colonial Minister Stern’s 1944 reply to Wilkie (Stern 1944), in which he says that the spirit of French Colonialism has been misconstrued, and he argues that the same intention is embodied by French Colonialism as the spirit embodied in French Crusader Christianity.

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From a French Communist Party perspective, by fighting to keep Outremer French, the former colonies might be simultaneously liberated from the inequities of the past and saved from the likelihood that independence would open the door for American capitalism exploitation. From the perspective of those elected officials who represented the small handful of voting New Caledonians in 1948, communism was bad, Americans were good, and their decision to become a Territory or TOM allowed for a structural independence from France of laws and economies. For example at this time, the French Pacific Franc (Comptoirs Français du Pacifique or CFP still in use today despite being part of the Euro Zone) was segregated from the home currency by Charles de Gaulle and pegged independently to the U.S. Dollar rather than to the French Franc, so that in his words “The weakness of France would not hurt the colonies.” Government autonomization and semi-independent forms of self rule chosen for the “Territorialization” of New Caledonia was in fact the opposite of the outcome desired by anticolonialists like Aimé Cèsaire, whereas total and undifferentiated incorporation into France was seen by anti-colonialists as liberating. As a TOM and not a colony, New Caledonia’s local elected government was able to operate under its own Organic Act, still under the supervision of a high administrator appointed from Paris, but able to make significant decisions about local policy and enact changes to this foundational document. In this new post-war context for new possibilities of self rule by a majority of enfranchised voters, New Caledonian political life then changed dramatically as larger segments of the population received the right to vote as successive French national constitutions were ratified—including in 1958 the extension of full voting rights to citizens such as women and “particular” status native populations.

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This population is represented by the four “elements” that compose it in the following textbook example, taken from the same geography text by Jean Le Borgne as the two previous examples. The enfranchisement of larger numbers of the adult indigenous population resulted in the election of Maurice Lenormand in 1953 to the position of Deputy for New Caledonia sent to the National Assembly in Paris. His candidacy was put forward as a strategy to overcome religious and racial differences which had fractured into political party interest groups. While himself a white French Catholic he was married in 1936 during his military service to a Melanesian Protestant who was the granddaughter of the grand chief of Lifou. Maurice Leenhardt returned to the metropole and received a diploma from Marcel Mauss’ Institute de Ethnologie in Paris in 1939, and was a collaborator with the ethnologist and protestant missionary Maurice Leenhardt (whom Mauss selected as his replacement after the Vichy and Nazi regimes forced him to resign due to his jewish background). Lenormand and others worked to increase local political autonomy and governmental independence in a 1950s context in which full decolonization and independence was not their objective: instead he sought to institute recognition of “indigenous customary rights” which would replace the body of imposed indigenous codes written during the colonial era. Up until Lenormand’s candidacy of 1951, religious divisions within the political parties which represented indigenous interests were fragmented, and the larger size of their population compared to settled populations was electorally dissipated. In a post-war context carefully described by Ismet Kurtovich (Kurtovich 2000) which this short treatment does not do justice, after 1947 citizenship was extended by the French state to the indigenous Melanesians of New Caledonia. Those new male citizens who had chosen to abandon customary particular status in favor of common civil status were eligible to participate in elections, resulting in the formation 311

of two religiously affiliated political parties to represent their interests: the Catholic seminarian oriented UICALO (standing for Union des Indigènes Calédoniens Amis de la Liberté dans l’Ordre), and the Protestant AICLF (Association des Indigènes Calédoniens et Loyaltiens [loyalty islanders] Français). As two parties, they unintentionally split the indigenous electorate to the benefit of the more unified parties representing French settler and mining interests manifest in braches of the metropolitan parties such as de Gaulle’s Rassemblement party which grew out of the Free French, the Resistance party which grew out of the war time Resistance, and the French Communist Party which had done extremely well in the metropole after the war. This structural condition of religious difference creating electoral disempowerment lead Lenormand to head the list of a new political party called the Union Caledoniénne whose motto was “Two Colors, One Single People”—although it was known by many others as Lenormand’s “canaque” party. The party platform was to achieve its goals for self rule and advancing recognition of indigenous custom in the name of its own interests within the framework of French sovereignty provided by its TOM. This is a civilization project, recognizably protestant in perspective and the legacy of other protestant projects which were brought to New Caledonia: Governor Feillet’s 1900s effort in collaboration with Jules Siegfried to build two separate civilizations or civil spheres in New Caledonia—one settler and one indigenous which only meet in the marketplace of goods and wage labor, but both separate and unique from France. Lenormand’s agenda also shows a development of this perspective arguably informed by the less racist perspective than Feillet, of the missionary and cousin by marriage Maurice Leenhardt’s ethnographic project which likewise came out of the Maussian school of sociology: ethnographic data and concern with the preservation and protection of indigenous knowledge and languages is

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at its very heart a protestant-informed perspective on life and history in this context—which quickly appeared leftist from outside interpretations made in Paris. Lenormand’s trajectory towards civil disintegration from France and multiple civil orders within France became increasingly untenable when in 1958 the elected government in Paris seemed on the verge of caving to popular support for an end to the French Algerian war, and was likely to grant Algeria independence. French Army paratroopers flew from Algeria and took the Mediterranean island of Corsica, from the position of which they made their intentions known that they were planning to take over government in Paris in order to preemptively stop Algerian independence. As a compromise that prevented an outright military coup in Paris, General Charles de Gaulle returned from retirement, and became Head of State. To the dismay of the French Algerian military, and against promises he made to the 1.5 million French Algerian settlers called Pied-Noir, de Gaulle then worked towards a referendum on Algerian independence in cooperation with the National Liberation Front (FLN) against which they were fighting. Disgruntled officers then created the OAS which made multiple attempts to assassinate de Gaulle. In this context, De Gaulle tightened control of New Caledonia’s governance. The island had had open elections for the Territorial Congress since territorialization, and the congress members would have status as a ministerial government qualified to manage the island under the constitutional terms of an Organic act. De Gaulle removed this Organic right to governance, while retaining the electoral body. On the 26 and 27 of April 1961 the offices of the allied political parties the Avenir Caledoniene and the Union Caledonienne were both bombed. After a brief and fortuitous investigation, all signs indicated that Maurice Lenormand had masterminded a plot to bomb his own political offices in a ploy to present themselves as victims of intolerant 313

right wing French loyalists like the OAS. While Lenormand never explained his motives, and died in 2006, he was protected by the legislative immunity provided by being a Deputy in the French legislature. He did not attend the trial, which found him guilty on the 9th of October 1962, but he then became the very first and only member of the French legislature to ever have his immunity revoked by his peers and his seat confiscated. Perhaps curiously, the whole event actually bolstered his level of approval in New Caledonia as measured by the numbers supporting his subsequent re-election to political office. Charles de Gaulle’s final assessment of New Caledonia was that it “is a large piece of land, populated by a large number of asses”(une grosse bande de terre, peuple par une grosse bande de cons). The 9th of October 1962 was also the day the United Nations unanimously voted to admit Algeria as its 109th member. If official French estimates were to be believed, de Gaulle’s government expected that only 100,000 Pied-Noir would choose to leave in the event of independence (La France Ausral 22 Nov 1961), and the rest would decide to stay in their new young country. Yet after the final referendum on independence approached and then passed, on July 18th 1962 de Gualle concluded that in light of a perceived “exodus” of European settlers (France Austral 21 may 1962) who were abandoning and often burning their farm houses and all other property they could not carry with them, all of the 1.5 million Pied-Noir should leave Algeria and repatriate to France or some third country. These details are important because Algerian independence in 1962 led directly to the confiscation of New Caledonia’s political autonomy. As de Gaulle and his advisors negotiated for the independence of Algeria, they reached an agreement with the FLN that the French nuclear testing program in the Ahagghar Mountains would need to close within fifteen year (by 1977). When this agreement was officially announced on the 5th of September 1962 (as reported in the 314

New Caledonian daily the France Austral), it was coupled with the announcement that rather than ceasing the bomb testing program, it would be moved one of the less populated islands of the Territory of French Polynesia. Shortly thereafter, the Organic liberties of New Caledonia were rescinded on orders of Charles de Gaulle, and while still institutionally separated from the Metropole and still classified as a Territory, New Caledonia’s parameters for “self rule” and elected officials’ capacity to make and modify policy through majority rule were significantly curtailed in the interests of the nuclear program planned to be built several thousand miles to the East near Tahiti (this is not a controversial interpretation on my part, and is in fact a standard and accepted narrative among academics of New Caledonia and thereby deserves additional scrutiny). As de Gaulle’s long time political supporter Pierre Messmer says all members of French state government were well aware (Messmer 1994) that majority rule was the post-war future of the world—and the political coloring of this future could be influenced through resettling or “repatriating” Pied Noir from Algeria to New Caledonia.

Majority Rule and Pied Noir Resettlement in New Caledonia The outcome of the independence referendum in Algeria could have been predicted well before the vote was cast, based on the numerical inferiority of French settlers compared to the more general Algerian population. At this time the population of New Caledonia was weighted by a slightly higher number of “natives” then “Europeans,” although when Asian and other immigrant Pacific populations are accounted for, no single ethnic group composes more than 49% of the total population of the island. In these terms, the native new Caledonians can be described as a “majority minority:” they are the largest group but not large enough to compose a simple electoral majority without the complement of members of the other ethnic classes. 315

General De Gaulle concluded on July 18th 1962 that all European colonists should leave Algeria. When a heated question arose in meetings as to where, exactly, 1.5 million Pieds-Noirs would be resettled, De Gaulle retorted: “Preferably in New Caledonia!” (Slama 1996:125). After leaving Algeria, most had been placed in temporary housing in the towns of southern France. Since many of these families was previously engaged in agricultural work, the government sought to place them on rural lands ideally similar to those they had abandoned in Algeria in a system officially called a prestation under an Arret from the 26th of December 1961. Under this law, pied noirs would be compensated via “prestation” for their lost property. Based on their own stated sentiments, many Pied Noir had no wish to resettle in metropolitan France, and preferred to receive a “prestation” of land somewhere else. The government of Argentina meanwhile as early as 1960 had already taken in 250 French Algerian families and placed them on rural agricultural concessions, with initial and widely praised success. The Argentina program was expanded formalized during the early 1960s.4 Other programs were attempted in the French Mediterranean island of Corsica, Apparently based on the Argentinian example, and the historical appropriateness of New Caledonia as an official settlement colony, the government in Paris sent two Pied Noirs, Mr. Corbière and Mr. Baudelot, on a semi-secretive investigative mission to New Caledonia from the 20th of January to 8th of February 1964. The two men wrote and submitted separate reports on their mission within a week of returning to Paris, Joseph Corbiere’s entitled Compte Rendu Succinct d’un Deplacement en Nouvelle-Calédonie en Janvier et Favrier 1964 and Michel Baudelot’s entitled Rapport relatif aux possibilities d’établissement d’agriculteurs rapatriés en Nouvelle-Calédonie (copies of both 4

In 1964 a bilateral Franco-Argentinean accord was signed to regularize the immigration and the terms of contracts, size of lands, and locations and nature of concessions (Santi 2004).

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documents are unpublished and held in the Territorial Archives of New Caledonia, 98W-119). The reports both offer a survey of crops and animals that might easily be grown, a survey of the local political and economic situation, and the price and availability of lands. In particular they were assisted by Senator Henri Lafleur in understanding land availability and his son Jacques Lafleur (Corbière 1964:2, 6), and both men report favorably on the possibilities for exports of cattle products offered by a derelict meat canning factory at Ouaco (Corbière 1964:12; Baudelot 1964:7) which they both neglect to mention belongs to the Lafleur5 family. They also mention Deputy Maurice Lenormand, but not in a positive sense, and indicate that he was upset by the recent State decision to suppress the “ministerial” positions held by the elected members of government (i.e. suppressing ministerial posts of the elected chamber means that they no longer constituted a government under organic law). Both report that they are in favor of proceeding with a settlement program, and one notes the success of resettlement of agricultural families in Canada and Argentina. They caution that New Caledonia will not offer the same kind of agricultural work the Pied Noir were accustomed to in Algeria. They point out that in New Caledonia, labor is very expensive, even employing a Melanesian is expensive, meaning that “the colonist is obliged to do everything himself,” and if Pied Noir emigrate “they will not be Heads of enterprise as they often were in North Africa, where they directed the work of a team of workers”(Baudelot 1964:12). This new settler colony is not the same as their old settler colony. Baudelot suggests a settlement program of 500 persons per year continued for many years to come, while Corbière suggests instead that a trial of 20 families might go unnoticed by 5

In addition to the Lafleurs’ interest in the meat canning factory at Ouaco, they also were almost to the point of agreeing with the Argentine mining company PINTO to come to New Caledonia in collaboration with the Lafleur mining group for a new exploitation at Ouaco.

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the local population and without detrimental consequence to the markets on which already established farmers. It appears that Corbière’s cautious approach was what the Minister decided to implement. Sighting Article 3 of the Arrete of the 1st of August 1963 the Minister of “DOMTOMS” Louis Jacquinot informs the High Commissioner for New Caledonia that he is of the following opinion: Territoire doit être considéré comme une region d’accueil aux termes relatif au reclassement des rapatriés dans l’agriculture. Tout le système des prestations organisé par la loi du 26 decembre 1961 sera ansi transpose. (Jacquinot to HautCommisaire of New Caledonia, April 2nd 1964) Minister Jacquinot goes on to say that it will not be necessary to actually inform the New Caledonian public of the decision to make it a location for repatriation. Il a été reconnu qu’il ne serait pas nécessaire de promulger en Nouvelle-Calédonie la loi de 1961 et ses texts d’application. Mieux vaudrait sans doute éviter, sur le plan local, des incidences psychologiques discutable qui pourraient se produire à l’occasion d’une operation qui n’intéresserait qu’un effectif restreint d’immigrants. (Jacquinot to Haut-Commisaire of New Caledonia, April 2nd 1964) While Jacquinot tells the High Commissioner that the number of immigrants would be small enough so as to not warrant the “psychological incidences” in the local population (i.e. objections) that might occur, the plan he then outlines seems instead intentionally secretive. He says that inter-ministerial meetings had set the general outlines of the “implantation,” in cooperation with the Minister of Finances. For each family, the Ministry for Repatriates’ budget would cover the cost of transportation, the costs of one year’s subsistence and supplies, and a head of household subvention of 30,000 francs (note: remember this number). Moreover, these immigrants will arrive “not in a convoy, but successively.” The reason for this trickle method of immigration 318

rather than flood is contained in Michel Baudelot’s report: the immigration of Pied Noir to New Caledonia “is all together possible and desirable, but they can not do it [successfully] without, or even less, against the wishes of those who are already here”(Baudelot 1964:14). He then sights numbers that suggest a one year immigration of 500 Pied Noir agriculturalists passes relatively unnoticed arriving as individuals or “titre individual,” saying that “It is desirable that these arrivals continue in the years to come at the same rhythm”(Baudelot 1964:15). Corbière writes in his own report more conservatively, suggesting that perhaps 20 families could be installed without upsetting local economic balances, and warns that “it is not desirable that the agriculturalists be brought in groups. Almost imperatively, they must be sent individually”(Corbière 1964:19).The Jacquinot plan then is to have Pied Noir immigrants arrive as though they were individually motivated, acting apparently as free colonists, adding their number to the island in a secret non-publicly promulgated state immigration program. In terms of land, the initial plan sent by Jacquinot informed the High Commissioner that they would need to both identify regularly alienable property up for sale, and extract plots from the lands of the dominion, so as not to disturb the market price of rural real-estate. For purposes of making these concessions and alienations, a state credit agency, Société Immobilière et de Credit, would give each Pied Noir settler a long-term loans to pay for purchase of land as well as supplies and buildings—however the funds that would pay the loans would be provided by the Caisse Nationale de Crédit Agricole. In closing, the Minister requests that the High Commissioner send maps and survey drawing of available properties, including details about their size and agricultural use, to l’Association Nationale de Migration et d’établissements Ruraux, at 89 rue de Monceau, PARIS (8eme). He explains that this association would then proceed with the selection of candidates, 319

and the final list will be made in agreement with the Minister of State and the Minister for Repatriates. On one final piece of business, he draws almost verbatim from the Corbière and Baudelot reports, and asks if the Lafleur canning plant at Ouaco might be brought back on-line, in light of new and growing markets hoped for in French Polynesia: D’autre part, je vous prie de vous enquérir auprès de M. le Sénateur H. LAFLEUR des offers concretes qu’il est aujourd’hui en mesure de faire aux rapatriés, conformément aux perspectives qu’il avait laissé envisager. Une reprise de la Conserverie de OUACO, en liason avec l’exploitation de cultures maraîchères ne semblerait pas dénuée d’intéret à cet égard, compte tenu des débouchés possibles en Polynésie. (Jacquinot to Haut-Commisaire of New Caledonia, April 2nd 1964) The two reports by Corbière and Baudelot were submitted in mid February 1964, and the Ministerial decisions outlined above were dispatched the 2nd of April 1964. On the 26th of April 1964, archival documentation shows that the director of the Société Immobilière et de Credit received a subvention of 30,000 francs, although the purpose of the subvention is not mentioned and no other details are provided. I take this to mean that one Pied Noir “head of household” was already scheduled to arrive in New Caledonia and funds had been forwarded. That same day, the 26th of April, the High Commissioner Biros wrote the following letter to Senator Henri Lafleur: À Monsieur Henri LAFLEUR Sénateur de la Nouvelle-Calédonie Palais du Luxembourg Dans le cadre de nos preoccupation commune pour encourager l’installation en nouvelle caledonie d’un certain nombre de famille des agriculteurs metro ou repatriers d;afrique du nord, vous m;aviex laissee entendre que vous etiez personellement tout dispose a faciltier cette installation en mettant a la dispositiond de ces nouveaux arrivants des terres a vocation culturale prelevees sur votre domaine a ouaco. Ce project semblant devoir prendre corps pronchaiment, je vous serais tres reconaisseant de bien vouloir preciser d’un maniere concrete les ofres que vous etes en mesure de faire aux repatries… 320

M. Biros This letter shows that Senator Henri Lafleur and his son Jacques have at least three plans for their properties at Ouaco. As I discussed in a footnote above, the Lafleurs are trying to set up a multinational mining operation at Ouaco with an Argentine firm. As other letters above show, the Lafleurs also have an idle canning factory Ouaco which they would like to bring back on-line with the help of Pied Noir settlers. As this letter shows, Senator Lafleur has shown a willingness to allow some Pied Noir to live on his property at Ouaco in some manner: whether he intends to sell or lease the land is left strangely ambiguous in the High Commissioner’s letter. If this settlement arrangement with the Lafleurs actually came to fruition is unclear from archival documents I am able to consult. However records show that on the 22nd of September 1964 drawing of twelve candidate properties were sent to Paris. Four months later on the 4th of January 1965, drawing of an additional twenty-nine candidate properties were sent to Paris. Showing additional evidence that the project was actually being implemented, on the 17th of February 1965 a formal study was planned for examining the feasibility of reopening the Lafleur canning factory at Ouaco. The only archival document that suggests the Pied Noir repatriation program might not have been implemented comes from a letter of the 25th of February 1965, from the Head of Registration and Domains Mr. G. DelBarre, to the High Commissioner essentially claiming that there are no good agricultural lands available in the states domains for the purposes of alienable concessions. He suggests however that “certain parcels which are the object of land leases might respond to the goals pursued.” As a matter of ethnographic and archival fact, I am not certain if any Pieds-Noirs were settled in New Caledonia via this program. However, as Senator Henri Lafleur aged and faded 321

from political and business life his son Jacques filled his shoes—notably in 1976/77 when his rightist French loyalist party the Rassemblement gained majority control of seats Territorial Congress allowing his peers to appoint him as the Senator to Paris. He held the seat until 2004, when his party lost control of the Congress of New Caledonia to the more moderate but still antiindependence party the Avenir Ensemble. During his thirty year career in politics, his friends and opponents noted that Pied Noir help important positions at various levels of government which his party controlled. Expressing frustration, one politician quoted in the daily paper remarks “all posts with responsibility are given to Pieds-Noirs”(Les Nouvelles Calédoniennes: 8/08/2001), or, “Despite being Pied-Noir, Mr. Maresca is not part of President Lafleur’s inner circle” (Chien Blue: 11/ 2002), implying that almost all prominent Pied Noir are very close to Senator Lafleur. Pierre Maresca is a prominent figure, and happily involved in an association for Pieds Noirs called “Sepia,” named for the dry months in North Africa, which was formed in 1974 (pictures of the first meeting are available at the territorial archives [113 Fi-34 11], but do not show Maresca, perhaps because he was holding the camera as he later was involved in local journalism as the editor of a weekly paper). My explanation as for why Maresca apparently is not as close to Lafleur as the other Pied Noir in the government, if the Chien Blue is to be believed, is his date of arrival. The newspaper the France Austral reports on the 1st of February 1963 that Pierre Maresca, who they identify as a school teacher, had disembarked from the Calédonien the previous day along with 145 other passengers (the vast majority of whom did not merit mention in the paper). In an interview I held with Maresca in his office at the Mairie du Ville de Nouméa in 2006 while he was a Vice President of the Government of New Caledonia, he informed me that he decided to emigrate to New Caledonia because one of his uncles had once been stationed on the island for his military service, and highly recommended it. I conclude that Maresca came 322

to New Caledonia on his own accord, a full year before any governmental study was conducted to examine the possibility of resettling Pied Noir on the island. Other Pied Noir came to New Caledonia, perhaps via the direct intervention of Henri and Jacques Lafleur later in the 1960s. However Pied Noir who came later report being quickly and sometimes aggressively recruited into networks of local politics and voluntary associations that were explicitly and implicitly filled with Pied Noir, leading one to say in irritation: “They are all assholes. They have that in common.” In the context of Algerian independence in 1962, Pied Noir slowly made their way to New Caledonia in relatively modest numbers ostensibly totaling around 2,000 persons. How these persons decided to come to New Caledonia and via what means of financing relocation, and what government assistance brought them to the island remains unclear to me. Paul de Deckker quickly disabused me of the notion of telling people I was studying Pied Noir migration history during our very first meeting in 2002. While I was forthright with Pied Noir with whom I spoke, including Maresca, I broadened my project to reflect a wider scope of interests about how New Caledonia’s political future came into being. However, the issue of what this settlement project was for in Ministers’ intentions is a targeted line of inquiry. Pierre Messmer was a prominent partner of de Gaulle during his World War Two campaign, and was a member of all of de Gaulle’s subsequent political activities. When Pierre Messmer was himself Prime Minister of France, on the 19th of July 1972 he wrote to the Secretary of State for DOM-TOMs with the following proposition, which makes explicit everything that might have remained implicit in the above Pied Noir settlement project of ’64. La Nouvelle-Calédonie, colonie de peuplement, bien que vouée à la bigarrure multiracial, est problement le dernier territoire tropical non indépendant au monde où un pays developpé puisse faire émigrer ses ressortissants. 323

Il faut donc saisir cette chance ultime de créer un pay francophone supplémentaire. La presence française en Calédonie ne peut être menace, sauf guerre mondiale, que par une revendication nationaliste des populations autochtones… A court et moyen terme, l’immigration massive de citoyens français métropolitains ou originiares des departments d’outremer (Réunion) devrait permettre d’éviter ce danger, en maintenant et en ameliorant le rapport numérique des communautés. À Long terme la revendication nationaliste autochotone ne sera évitée que si les communautés non originaires du Pacifique représentent une massive démographique majoritaire. Il va de soi qu’on n’obtiendra aucun effet démographique à long terme san immigration systématique de femmes et d’enfants. (Messmer to Denian, quoted in Morel 2001:150). While this passage does not speak directed about Pied Noir resettlement, an article in the Nouvelle Caledoniennes (29/05/2008) casts Pierre Messmer’s proposal as directed exclusively about Pied Noir. The resettlement attempts should be seen for what they are: the population of New Caledonia was imagined as veritably balanced between whites and blacks by administrators like Messmer. By opening the doors to emigration to New Caledonia, it would have the effect of preempting national independence based on an indigenous majority population. On another note, Messmer seems to have deeply underestimated the ways in which indigenous nationalist movement can incorporate historically immigrant populations.

Paris in Mai ’68 and the Birth of a Kanak Ethnicity In her 2002 book May ’68 and its Afterlives, Kristen Ross argues that the significance given to the general strike in Paris of May 1968 has fogged over with time. The union of student and factory strikers she argues actually had an anti-colonial foundation: that the criticisms leveraged against France’s colonial wars of independence in Indochina and Algeria could actually be 324

applied at home too, towards ends such as decentralization. From a perspective that I argue supports her argument that Mai ’68 was all about anti-colonialism, the movement for an independent New Caledonia begins that heady summer month in Paris. A question that often comes up when I am asked about New Caledonia is “Why didn’t they have an independence movement earlier than the late 1970s?” French high school history textbooks that I have consulted (which all must follow a standard curriculum) say the decolonization begins in 1945 with the close of the Second World War and end in 1962 with the independence of Algeria. New Caledonia by this measure seems like an extreme outlier. The short answer I offer is to point out where the independence movement came from: members of the first generation of indigenous native students to go on to university and seminary studies happened to be in Paris that month pursuing their studies and they took the anti-colonial message back to Nouméa on their next trip home. In abridged form, Apollinaire Anova was the first native student to finish the secondary education program offered by the Catholic Church, and go on to seminary in Europe. He wrote a well conceived treatise on New Caledonia’s history and future, identifying the leader of the revolt of 1878, Chief Ataï, as a figure who brought the indigenous people of New Caledonia together in common cause for the first time. While Anova’s original text is lost, and several radically different editions exist, a 2005 edition edited by Hamid Mokkadem (Anova 2005) appears to capture a sensibility of togetherness as he looked toward the future, although this might be written with an audience in mind of his superiors in the church. Anova died very young of disease in 1964, but his attention to 1878 and Chief Ataï in the language of “messianic discourse” (Bensa 2004) was published in a toned down version in 1969 with approval of the Catholic church. Even in its edited form it was taken up by Anova’s contemporaries in which 325

this chief was recast as a origin story for the Kanak people—who came together in a fight against French land spoliation. Through its rediscovery in his work,1878 became a central point in an independence movement in the late 1960s and 1970s, and taken as the origin story of the Kanak nation. Recall from chapter two that New Caledonia at French annexation had what the French later quantified as more than twenty definable social units that ostensibly spoke more than twenty discrete languages. There was no political unity, either in a sense of a single king or sovereign, nor were there tributary-like relations that might have centralized the residents of the island to a particular set of chiefs or outsider chiefs of otherwise provided the types of social hierarchy recognized elsewhere in the pacific as being evidence of social unity. Anova’s contribution was to point out that the figure of Ataï can be taken to supply a sort of primal unity, forged in the face of rapid land delimitation efforts of the late 1870s made by the French government. Faced with a common threat, for the first time the island’s native population came together—or so goes Apollinaire’s interpretation of history. However his solution to this history did not suggest that political independence should be the solution, even as Algeria, Indochina, and a significant portion of the rest of the world was working and being pushed toward sovereignty and self rule at that very moment. During Mai ’68 a student from the Loyalty island of Maré named Nidoish Naisseline was in Paris as a student. His father was a Grand Chef, which allowed for the educational opportunity. He participated in the events of the general strike with a few other students from New Caledonia, and went home possessing a new revolutionary perspective “youth can revolt against an established and oppressive order”(Naisseline quoted on RFO in 2009). Naisseline claims that a political group he is credited with heading, the Foulards Rouges, literally “red 326

scarves,” were born “spontaneously” on the 3rd of September 1969 at a Nouméan restaurant on the Baie-des-Citrons called Le Sydney (RFO 2009). Accompanied by Fote Trolue, Richard Kaloï, and Yeiwéné Yeiwéné all four sat down at the restaurant but were never served. When they complained, they were told the restaurant was out of food. In anger Fote wrote a tract denouncing the everyday racism of bourgeoisie whites. Richard translated it from French into Nengone, and with Nidoishe distributed the text on their trip home to Maré island. The next time they returned to Nouméa they were arrested, in part for the wording of the text which the judge described as racist. He is additionally credited with taking a Mai ’68 practice and graffitied messages on walls in Nouméa when Historian Bernard Brou writes scornfully notes that there was no vandalism6 in Nouméa before Naissiline introduced the practice as learned during the Parisian strike. Naisseline was prosecuted, and served time in prison. While a rally was held in their support at the gates of the high commissariate, he wore his family chieftainship’s red colored cloth tied around his forehead. Participants in future manifestations followed suit on their own accord “spontaneously,” and Naisseline returned to France where he obtained a masters in Sociology in 1972 from the Sorbonne. The Foulards Rouges was then taken by Naisseline as the name for a political movement (i.e. association) which self-published various texts and tracts in mimeograph form, including a sort of mouthpiece serial publication called the Reveil Canaque starting in 1970 (Connell 1987:258), which appears to follow Naisseline as he moves around and chairs various groups, including the Union Multiracial de Nouvelle-Calédonie. As I mentioned earlier the word

6

Brou exaggerates. In my careful reading of several decades of the France Austral in microfilm at the Territorial Archives, I came across a front page picture from an 1950s edition showing a Stop sign which had been graffitied with numerous small marks. The caption notes that many of the road signs installed by the US GIs had been similarly vandalized, and asks that people respect the signs.

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“Canaque” was understood as pejorative. Even though it had been used generally in pre-war administrative writing, it was no longer used politely. The point of the title Reveil Canaque “Canaque awakening” was both a call to awaken in the sense that is common in revolutionary texts, but also was part of a political move to reclaim and revalorize the term (compare for instance the decision to adopt “queer” or “bastard” by political groups who seek to advance the rights of homosexuals and adoptees in the hope of revalorizing the term). With this project in mind, this is the first use of “Canaque” as an ethno-political identifier in which the “ethno” is pan-racial and reflective of interest in unity. With the decision to reclaim “Canaque” by Naissiline and his peers, the Reveil Canaque was a platform for explicitly redefining the content of the term. A very early version recognizes the Ataï 1878 revolt as the first moment of “Canaque” self awareness of unity in difference from France, and coming into being of on. Later the “Canaque” advocacy movement moved from its strictly ethno-racial denotation, and build a ‘big tent’ multiracial definition: anyone of any race and origin can be a “Canaque” since being “Canaque” is a political perspective. This leads to the formation of a political party which called itself the Union Multiracial. Anyone from anywhere could be “Canaque” no matter their skin color, as a sign of identifying with the party platform. In a document made available to me by archivist Ismet Kurtovitch from his personal collection dating from his days as a student in Paris, this shift is captured in an edit made to a document. Where the letterhead says “Association des Edudiants Calédoniennes de Paris” the word “Calédoniennes” is crossed out in ballpoint pen, and over it is written the word “Canaque”— suggesting a change in the association’s name made at that very moment. Later documents employ the new name.

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Several years into publication, contributors to the Reveil Canaque and all other things related to the politics of revindication, the orthography of the word “Canaque” itself started to be reevaluated. Most of these articles dealing with “Canaque” have unattributed authorship, and most often can be attributed to Nasissiline for various reasons, however other figured like Déwe Gorodé who joined in 1974 did so after returning to Nouméa from university studies in France and their tract writing is almost impossible to tell apart. Here is the basis of their complaint. In terms of the word “Canaque,” any Pacific specialist should be able to recognize the similarities to the Hawaiian word “Kanaka” and variations in pronunciation and orthography that appear elsewhere in Oceanic contexts, like “tangata.” Apparently someone who attended the meetings of the Foulards Rouges realized this, and the history of the word’s spelling became a matter needing “revindication” meaning that the historical errors or perversions of the colonial past needed to be corrected in domains like land delimitations and alienations as described in earlier chapters. A tract entitled La Terre est la Sang du Morts, draws on a common native phrase which recognizes the iconicity of the redness of New Caledonia’s soil and the redness of blood and takes the relation to be indexical, implies that there is a native inalienability to the land, and its alienation was a historical mistake that must be undone. Similarly for the word “Canaque,” the differences in orthography from “Kanaka” are taken to be anything but neutral reflections of differences in conventions of writing and denotation of sound, but instead index a historical error made by the French which erase their authentic connection. Indeed, the spelling of “Canaque” can only be explained by way of a French system of writing. However, from an analytic perspective the spelling of “Kanaka” is similarly fraught, and can only be explained in terms of an English system of writing coupled 329

with ideas that protestant missionaries from the Northeast had about proper ways of representing native Hawaiians and the languages they spoke (the pieces of this argument are in a piece by me currently in preparation). These analytic objections apparently were irrelevant, in light of a political motivation to highlight the errors of French colonialism in particular. The first evidence of the spelling error comes from an article in the “non official” part of the Le Moniteur de la Nouvelle Caledonie Journal official de la colonie, 17 June 1866, (Vol 7 No 351). The author, Mr. Bougher who would later serve briefly as governor, argues that “each people has its orthography” and argues that since English conventions of writing down sounds represent different sounds then the surface identical French conventions, then it is incorrect for the French people of New Caledonia to write the town name “Kanala” when they should not “abuse” the English K and should instead write “Canala”; similarly “Numea” would be incorrect for the French reader and writer since the sound written as such in English conventions is written as “Nouméa” in France. He proposes that “ le k doit être formellement banni des mots indigènes et qu’il faut écrire Canala, Canaque, etc.” While this did not come to pass immediately in 1866, by 1880 the spellings “Kanaque” and “Kanaka” which had previously been common in the Journal Officiel are completely replaced by “Canaque”. In a long process, the “revindicators” take the spelling of “Canaque” to task. First, the arbitrariness of the spelling is performed: in the Reveil Canaque over a single two page article I identified four different ways of spelling “Canaque” in alterations like “Kanaque” “Kanac” and so on. In a draft of a speech written by Déwe Gorody in 1975, a document again made available

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to me by Ismet Kurtovich, she similarly writes Canaque with apparent intentional arbitrariness, 7 rendering it in extremely imaginative ways even though the items appears as though it was intended to be read out loud. One of the first public events of the “Kanak” revindication movement captures many of the junctures of this political era and the next: the “Kanak” take over of the New Caledonian student hostel at 12 Rue des Ecoles in Paris on September 24th 1977—the annual date of the prise de possession of New Caledonia by France. As shown in figure eleven, slogans were painted on the exterior of the building which identifies the activists as “Kanak” and identified their complaint as tied to Ataï of the 1878 insurrection. The current editor of the Journal Calédonien Pierre Maresca (the Pied Noir discussed earlier) seemed remarkably concerned with this event in terms of the number of stories devoted to it, even as the daily paper La France Australe did not carry any story on the foyer in Paris (although the self management structure of the foyer was discussed in the Parisian National Assembly at the séance of October 23rd 1977). In editorial commentary to a letter from a reader, a father of a student in Paris who suggests the students responsible for the event are primarily white, the editor replies “According to our information, Caledonians of European origin have joined the ranks of the Marxist-Leninists.” One European student who did not join the ranks of the “Kanaks” and was pushed out by those who did was later interviewed by the paper: a young Harold Martin, descendant of a sister’s son of James Paddon who sold Isle Nou to the French in the 1850s, who in 2007 was elected President of the Government of New Caledonia after a career of tutelage under Jacques Lafleur.

7

At the University of Guam I am a member of the curriculum committee which approved a Chamorro studies minor. The text of the proposal included the variants “CHamorro” and “Chamorro” reflecting disagreement among Chamorro language teachers and scholars over the ethno-linguistic term’s best orthography.

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The definitive “Kanak” as an ethnic name and “Kanaky” as a place name for New Caledonia appears to solidify around 1975, and becomes somewhat standardized by 1977 among advocates of the pro-equality and anti-colonial perspective. In particular Tjibaou’s Melanesia 2000 festival of customary performances of “Kanaké “(see Tjibaou 1976), Despite the early multiracial connotations given to “Canaque,” by the later 1970s the terms Kanak had shifted also entirely to an ethnic term in the classical sense for the aboriginal inhabitants of New Caledonia. Large public manifestations for and against this “nationalist” movement had a distinctly segregated appearance despite the deployment of “multi-racial” ideology and rhetoric by the indepenantists. This spurred a racialized public politics in which “whites” in favor of autonomy and self rule were identified in local conservative and loyalist papers as “traitors.” The figure Jean-Marie Tjibaou, who is often associated with Kanak independence as one of its founding figures, came late in the formation of the movement outlined above, and he adopted the mantle. His ideas about what a Independent Kanaky should look like differed significantly from the more Marxist perspectives of Déwe Gorody, Naissline, and Neautoyine. This reflects other divisions within the movement over its ends. A cartoon from the period coming from the more socialists side pictures a Kanak wearing a suit, sunglasses, in possession of a copy of a book by “Fanon”, and a sportscar. He is essentially a bourgeoisie. The Foulards Rouges followers instead proposed that there were deep inequities in traditional Kanak society, particularly regarding the role of women, and that property and lands in particular needed to be held and profited from communally. On this articulated divide, the former catholic priest Jean Marie Tjibaou headed Le Normand’s party the Union Caledonienne and advocated non-violent means, while in 1976 the Foullards Rouges organized under the name PALIKA “Party for Kanak Liberation and their party symbol included a rifle. 332

When the first fully articulated electoral platform for independence from France came in the 1977, the result was an electoral galvanization of French loyalists in the face of splintered factions of independence. While Naissiline was elected to the Territorial Congress, in this climate Jacques Lafleur won election to the Deputy seat in Paris. This set the stage for a coming “race war” in the 1980s over the question of Kanak independence. The terms of engagement between communities, and the logic of engagement, successfully entrenched “Kanak” as a ethnic term which refers to indigenous Melanesians and stripped it of the multiracial connotations of the early 1970s.

Intermission While significant acts transpired in the 1980s, they are perhaps the most well documented and well studied moment of New Caledonia’s history in English-language literature—even if this scholarship is journalistic, shrill, uninformed, and often otherwise highly problematic it does have its high points (for example see Connell 1987, Spencer 1988, Dornoy 1984, and Lyons 1986) For this reason I will skip ahead a half generation, past the 1980s and the assassination of independence leaders in the 1980s, and the solidification of an indigenous Kanak independence movement around the FLNKS—Front de Liberation National Kanak et Socialist. I move past the series of “events” which led to the complete emptying out of settlers from the Northeast quadrant of New Caledonia, past even those events in Ouvea in 1988 when the gendarmerie was taken hostage in a grotto by the FLNKS—ending in the death and murder of more than twenty people after the intervention of French commandos. The event led to the willingness of the French state to mediate a compromise over the independence question, which reached in 1988 by Tjibaou and Lafleur in an agreement called the Matignon Accords. It placed the question of 333

independence on hold for ten years. Tjibaou was then assassinated for this treason to the cause one on his peers in 1989. The period from 1988-1998 was a time when residents of New Caledonia lived under a state mandated ten year cooling off period, solidified according to some by the death of Tjibaou, in which he is cast in the role of having sacrificed himself for peace and is a phenomena with ample textual documentation (e.g. Tjibaou 2005, Waddel 2009) The Noumea Accords, a new organic law and constitutional charter written in a manner similar to the Matignon Accords was then ratified in a general referendum in 1998-99. It sets the stage for the current political era. It is this era that the next chapter seeks to introduce and subject to graphic analysis.

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CHAPTER 8 NEW CONSTITUTIONS (1988-2006) L’unité de la France est faite de sa diversité, de sa multiplicité, d’une harmonization des contraires par l’histoire dans le sentiment d’un commun destin. —Marc Boegner and André Siegfried Protestantisme Français (1945 italics added)

Plural Societies While most accounts of settler societies focus on a settler/native binary, I agree with Pamela Clayton’s method from her study of Protestants and Catholics in northern Ireland: accounting for British forces and administrators produces a triangulation of types of agents (Clayton 1996:xv). Without accounting for this triangulation, an account of the ongoing conflicts between catholic ‘natives’ and protestant ‘settlers’ in that North Atlantic context is empirically inaccurate, leading her to clarify her typology stating that, “not all colonies with large white populations are settler colonies”(Clayton 1996: xiii). A relationship with a metropole exists that structures the possibilities of social order, which has an agentive role in how natives and settlers stand in relation and interaction with one another. The issue of solidarity in plural societies and settler colonies in particular highlights a celebrated passage of the Noumea Accord of 1998, which states that residents of New Caledonia will come together and forge a “common destiny” out of their uncommon ethnic and historical origins. The problem of a “common destiny” are arguably recurrent in settler society politics as places whose residents are cognizant of their constructedness as collectivities as Stasousis and Yuval Davis claim (1995:19).

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However, these tropes emerge historically. In New Caledonia no one spoke about a “communauté du destin” or a “destin commun” until after those words appeared in the text of the Nouméa Accord, attributed according to my informants to the hand of Alain Christnacht. There is a salience by residents of New Caledonia that their social order and identity is based on historical contingencies and should be based on them. The sensibility to historical process is not unique to the New Caledonian context, nor is the way some residents shine1 to the idea that their lack of common origin can be overcome by a shared commitment to a common future, and level it as a weapon of political metadiscourse: accusing those one disagrees with of not sincerely working towards the Common Destiny. I argue, as a conjectural hypothesis needing additional interviews to document as fact, that the catch phrase “common destiny” has an intellectual history that is deeper than its first appearance in the Nouméa Accords. The words “Common Destiny” have many vernacular uptakes, but in an intellectual sense are associated with the work of the Austrian Marxist and social-nationalist Otto Bauer, as a translation of what he calls Schicksalsgemeinschaft. This mouthful is commonly rendered into English as “community of fate”(Herod 1976: 46) expressing the idea of a “community bound by a common destiny” (Nimni 1991:221). In language uncannily similar to that found in the Noumea Accords, Bauer’s term is commonly rendered in to French as “communauté de destin”(Bauer 1974:236), and is used in some French writing to describe the process of European integration into a single European Community with a “common destiny.” However for the purposes of Bauer’s social theory, the epitome of the

1

For a parallel, see Belich’s work Making Peoples in which he argued using historical materials his political wish that indigenous Maori and settlers or “Pakehas” constructed one another through dynamic historical interaction, producing these two peoples who both define one another and thereby legitimately compose the modern nation of New Zealand.

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community of fate is used to describe nations as an historically contingent bricolage, or “the nation without history,” a type of what he calls a community or Gemeinschaft which describes or “denotes the collective experience which finds its concrete expression in a societalized individual subjectivity”(Nimni 1991:221). In lay terms, it is a description and a theory that national character has its origin in felt solidarity. Arguably, this is the descriptive social theory which Alain Christnacht and his coauthors of the Noumea Accord mobilized as social theory. From this perspective the enemy of a felt “national” community is a plurality of felt “communities.” While to my knowledge the “plural society” of J.S. Furnivall (1944, 1948) has never been explicitly talked about in terms of plans for social integration in New Caledonia, the phrase “Plural Society” has come up in policy discussions about what is wrong with social order that created the events of the 1980s, and how ethno-racial conflict might be avoided on the future. A comparative work on the “plural societies” of Fiji and New Caledonia engages scholarship emanating from Furnivall’s study of economy and social form in colonial Burma and Netherlands India, without ever mentioning the name (Bastogi 2008, De Deckker and Fauberon 2003). As with the “Common Destiny” it appears that the intellectual roots of the “Plural Society” have been lost by the time they enter into day-to-day policy debate in New Caledonia—or at least no one has flagged them in a way that I can identify. However, the “common destiny” as a form of nation-building imagined as community and subjectivity building, is clearly supposed to be a solution to the uncommon origins that lead to multiple communities living side-by-side and never interacting outside their economic sphere due to historical and administrative segregation of social life. Whether or not this accurately describes New Caledonia is another matter from the empirical: is this theory what motivated policy? 337

The text of the Accords as presented in 1998 calls for a referendum on independence no sooner than 15 and no later than 18 years in the future. The horizon of the Accords thereby creates the possibility of independence in 2014, and in the interim states that the various “communities” living in New Caledonia will come together and “rebuild a social contract”. After 2014, the newly unified polity will hold a referendum on full independence from France. The present is the time to act towards this goal. It is now necessary to start making provision for a citizenship of New Caledonia, enabling the original people to form a human community, asserting its common destiny, with the other men and women living there…. The past was the time of colonisation. The present is the time of sharing, through the achievement of a new balance. The future must be the time of an identity, in a common destiny. (Noumea Accords, Section 4) The Noumea Accords present the project for residents of New Caledonia to participate or “identify” in the “common destiny” as a viable solution to the ethno-racial discord. It will overcome the discord of a plurality of communities living separately and sometimes unequally within the same political unit (Furnivall 1944:446), which for some observers typifies New Caledonia in the post-war period. However the Accords leave unanswered certain crucial details: Who has the right or standing to decide the rules and criteria for political participation in the referendum in 2014? In short, it does not tell what the actual Common Destiny will look like, nor how it will function. It simple creates a fifteen year window of autonomous Organic Law, during which through democratic processes the enfranchised residents of New Caledonia cad decide for themselves piecemeal what they want their sovereign relationship with France to look like: in a legal model, the State and law will no longer define society a-priori, but the society will define the State.

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A surface reading of the Nouméa Accords appear to suggest that it in no way narrowed the possibilities of where it could lead for the future of sovereignty. The residents of New Caledonia voted largely in favor of a new charter for their political future called the Nouméa Accords. However, independence seems unlikely to actually happen under the structure of the Noumea Accord. As succinctly stated by Hamid Mokaddem (2005), the stipulation that a supermajority of 60% of voters is needed to pass a referendum on independence runs head-on into the fact that previous votes on this issue have split along ethnic lines. The last census which counted ethnic origins or race says that less than 45% of the population identity themselves as indigenous Melanesians or Kanaks. Under the logics of majority rule elections this means that any politics of independence that champions indigenous rights to self-rule is unlikely to muster a simple majority, let alone the super-majority needed for legal succession from France. Moreover the terms of the Accords that that they are “irreversible” meaning for example that if the New Caledonian government takes over a function of policing or census making, the competence can not later revert to France. As Mokaddem points out, while the language of the Accords suggest these decision will be set in stone, Alain Christnacht’s later writing explicitly suggest that in almost all the participants’ opinion, anything can and will happen in politics. With its ratification by residents of New Caledonia, in 1999 the French Parliament ratified a change in its constitution that granted New Caledonia a special status within the Republic. Called “Article 77”, it authorizes New Caledonia to operate under its own Organic Law, which defines the territory as a political entity autonomous in many ways from the metropolitan government. Article 77 created new institutions for local government in New Caledonia, which involved disaggregating the governance of the territory from the French State in complicated

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ways.2 The new institutions are explicitly authorized to implement “rules relative to citizenship, electoral regime, employment, and customary civil status”—so long as these regulations do not contradict the French National constitution. Effectively, the French Constitution simultaneously authorizes the creation of the “Caledonian Citizen” as a special type of French National, while also offering a general French citizen the legal means to challenge any special rights the new Caledonian Citizen might receive through government policy. Residents have license from the State to forge their own distinct citizenship subsumed within an overarching French citizenship and nationality. In additional to authorizing new legal distinctions between Caledonian Citizens and French Citizens (but offering no way to directly qualify them), Article 77 maintains the special place outside “common civil law” that is constitutionally available to some indigenous Melanesian Kanaks. “Customary civil status” is a juridical status outside common law. It was first recognized in New Caledonia in 19203 as a “personal customary status” and later under the IVth Republic constitution Article 82 as “Particular Civil Status,”4 and the Vth Republic Article 75 more succinctly as “Personal Status”. While since 1958 all Melanesian Kanaks are natural born citizens of France with full suffrage rights, many voluntarily chose to continue living under “customary” jurisdictions that in some ways are outside the oversight of the French State (See xxxx). 2

I was surprised to discover that the Noumea Accords and the Organic Law were both far less detailed about how this transition of competences would take place than I expected. I found later that the details are spelled out in the vote by the French National Assembly to approve the Noumea accords. As a process, the Noumea Accords set out general principles for new Caledonia’s autonomy, and then the technocrats of the French State had a task of legally disentangling sovereign competences, which seems to me akin to disentangling a mess of old telephone wires. 3 4

Cour d'appel de Nouméa, 28 février 1920, Kaopue c. Huanosse The terms are nearly identical to British crown codes for indigenous Indians under Henery Maine’s classifications.

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In short, as of 1998 the French constitution creates (or perpetuates) three categories of French National Citizens resident in New Caledonia: Caledonian Citizens with special rights in civil law, Customary Citizens outside common law, and regular French Citizens with limited civil rights to vote and work. In other words, when the Noumea Accords state that the residents of New Caledonia should come together to “rebuild a social contract” it runs into some interesting categorical problems of who can participate in this project—which are the terms of political factionalism and fighting under the Noumea Accords. These three types of citizenry coming out of the Noumea Accord and recognized by the French constitution have also given rise to respective institutional bodies, even as certain individuals can arguably fall into more than one category of citizen. The following institutions of Local Government are recognized by the 1998 Noumea Accords: 1. The French High Commissariat, 2. The Government of New Caledonia, 3. The Customary Senate, 4. The Three Provincial Governments As a local lexicon, when people talk about “The State” they are generally referring to parts of the French national government and its bureaucratic agencies and employees both in Paris and in New Caledonia. The French State is represented on the island by the resident High Commissioner, an official appointed from the executive branch of the government in Paris to oversee French sovereign interests in New Caledonia as well as the territory of Wallis & Futuna. The High Commissioner’s post is the institutional successor of the colonial-era governorship. In today’s movement towards increased autonomy, the Commissariat’s duties are becoming more

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limited even as the office controls the National Police and all French military forces in South Western Pacific. In contrast to “The State”, talk about “the Government” refers to the territorial Government of New Caledonia and its legislative Congress. These bodies were created by the terms of the Noumea Accords, and were authorized by Article 77 of the French Constitution discussed above. The Noumea Accords created a Customary Senate—an institution for those indigenous Melanesian Kanaks who are outside “common civil law”. Customary Senate membership is composed of two members from each of the eight “Customary Areas” of New Caledonia—a sort of ethno-linguistic territorialization of the island. The members are chosen according to customs of indigenous sovereignty and chieftainship—often patriarchic and traditionalist in ways that activists for a Socialist Kanak independence see as undesirable. Clearly, Melanesian participation in political institutions and island life is not limited to the Customary Senate and life en tribu, since individuals can decide to enter into common civil status if they abandon their particular customary status, and even if they don’t they are born as French citizens and natural Caledonian citizens In recognition of the fact that island-wide demographics preclude a majority Melanesian polity, the Matignon Accords of 1988 and the Noumea Accords of 1998 drew boundaries for three Provinces in ways that would empower Melanesian voters. According to the most recent numbers and rules of thumb, 45% of the island’s overall population is Melanesian, 35% are European and Assimilates, 10% are Asians whose ancestors generally came as contract labor from Java and Tonkin, and 10% are Polynesians from Wallis & Futuna and Tahiti. The vast majority of the non-Melanesian population is centered around the island’s main town Noumea in the Southern Province. The much lighter populated Northern Province is majority Melanesian, as 342

is the Islands Province. The Accords empowered three Provincial governments which are generally referred to as “Province îles Loyalty”, “Province Nord” and “Province Sud”. The economy and population of New Caledonia are firmly anchored in the sole urban node of Noumea in the Southern Province. Out of a total territorial population of between 250,000 and 350,000, neither the Northern Province nor Islands Province contains a town with a population over 10,000 habitants. Noumea and its suburbs contain perhaps as many as 100,000 residents. This means that the political agenda in the two Melanesian provinces after 1998 has been centered on loosening and renegotiating their dependence on Noumea. For the Northern Province this means creating new nodes of population and industry in the northern part of the territory—particularly through development of nickel mining and processing. For the Islands Province, their plans are focus on promoting tourist development and improving State and Government support for residents of the Loyalty Islands. Unlike the Northern Province, politicians from the Islands Province express little intention of meeting or eclipsing the centrality of Noumea—however, the loyalty islands have historically provided some of the most pivotal activists of the independence movement.

Elections and Party Politics Voting after 1998 was initially opened to anyone who had resided in the territory for more than ten years, but voter roles were “frozen” and “thawed” by cycles of litigation and legislation that fought over who should be allowed to have access to suffrage in various types of elections. 5 As a result, not all elections are based on universal suffrage of French citizens 5

Currently, roles of eligible voters are “frozen” at their 1988 listing, plus children who came of age, and other individuals sometimes figured on a case-by-case evaluation to be persons whose “material and personal interests” are centered in New Caledonia.

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resident on the island. Yet, island-wide elections are how residents are expected to vote in French elections for President and other “national level” referendums, such as those on the European Community or the French constitution. According to the New Caledonian Government (2006), residents select through “direct universal suffrage” two Deputies who represent the island at French National Assembly in Paris (one for each circumspection). They also directly elect the 54 ‘councilors’ of the Congress of New Caledonia. Seats in Congress are provincially apportioned: 32 from the South, 15 from the North, and 7 from the Loyalty Islands Province. Politicians present themselves in elections for the Congress of New Caledonia as member of ‘party slates’ which then form governing collations based on the principle of “collegiality”(Chauchat 2005). The Congress of New Caledonia is a parliamentary legislative body modeled on those in Paris, replete with hemicycle party politics and other features peculiar to the Parisian institutions including how it selects its Executive government from among their members. The majority party or majority coalition forms from its members of congress the Executive of the agencies and branches of the Government of New Caledonia. This shows that while a Melanesian electorate can control two out of three provincial governments, the New Caledonian government will most likely be controlled by the voters of the Southern Province via its majority of seats in the Congress. While political parties and political slates in New Caledonia are often idiosyncratic to the island, and short lived, they are organizationally affiliated with French national political parties. For example, when the Rassemblement Pour la Calédonie dans la Republique (RPCR) was voted out of office in 2004 after being in control of the Congress and its antecedents since 1978, it lost its majority to the Avenir Ensemble. Despite almost everyone seeing this as an important regime change, both parties describe themselves as “anti-independantist” and “loyalist” to France . Their 344

National-level political affiliation is the Conservative Union pour un Mouvement Populaire party of which Presidents Jacques Chirac and Nickolas Sarkozy are members. Independence oriented parties such as the Front de Liberation National Kanak et Socialist (FLNKS) and the Union Caledonien(UC) tend to be aligned with the French Socialist or other leftist parties. All of this alphabet soups matters because political parties offer connections to their corollaries in France and throughout La France Outremer. They are representatives, but also a face for New Caledonia in National politics in France. The individuals elected to Congress and its antecedents select via “indirect universal suffrage” a Senator to the upper house of the French National Parliament (Gouvernment 2006: 17). Since 1992, the Senator for New Caledonia has been Simon Louckehote, a school teacher who comes from the Loyalty Island of Ouvéa. His predecessor Dick Ukeiwé was elected in 1983, and comes from the Loyalty Island of Lifou. He later went on to become a deputy to the European Parliament in 1989. Both these indirectly elected politicians are Melanesians from the Loyalty islands, and members of the conservative party. It is crucially important that in 1988, the island of Ouvéa was the site of a bloody confrontation between French military forces and members of the FLNKS. The attention of the world press was drawn to New Caledonia and people outside the island were passing judgment on what they saw as an anachronistic an unjust form of sovereignty. It is not a coincidence that at the level of French National and European Community parliaments, the conservative anti-independence party would then present Melanesians from the Loyalty islands as their candidates for visible national offices. The process of instituting the Noumea Accord then depended on the agency of political parties and their adherents to institute changes at various levels and branches of government. By agreement of the French State, the Northern Province was built to have an electoral majority that 345

supported the FLNKS’ reading of the Noumea Accords, whereas the Southern Province was built to have an electoral majority that supported the RPCR’s reading of the accords. As a result, even as the text of the Noumea Accords explicitly excludes the possibility that one part of New Caledonia could succeed and pursue its own independent future, today at the provincial level the Northern Province government is pursuing a trajectory that is explicitly independantist, and the Southern Province is pursuing one that is opposed to full independence. This dynamic is shown emblematically by a curious difference between French State offices in the Northern Province and those in the Southern Province: post offices and public buildings in the North fly at equal height the French Tricolor and the Kanaky flag; the gendarmeries and post offices in the South only fly the French flag. When reporting on demonstrations in the South outside city, provincial, or government offices the daily paper Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes is always careful to note it if appeared as though any demonstrators tried to raise a flag, menaced the flag pole, or attempted to do anything to the French tricolor.

Representations of the “Common Destiny” i) Tjibaou’s Legacy and the Tjiabou Cultural Center : What I’m not doing Concurrent with this long series of constitutional developments, in 1998 the French State officially commemorated his death as a martyrdom to reconciliation in the form of the Tjibaou Cultural Center—one of the “Great Works of the Republic” instigated by Mitterrand. The building was designed by Renzo Piano, who was the architect of the 1978 Georges-Pompidou Center in Paris, and would that same year receive the Pritzker Architectural Prize for his lifetime work. Piano more recently designed the newly opened (in 2009) wing of the Chicago Art Institute in Millennium Park. He is a premium architect, but apparently decided to submit a 346

proposal on his own, and in close conversation with anthropologist Alban Bensa and Tjibaou’s widow . The end of the cooling off period after the Matignon Accords thereby coincided with the opening of a monumental piece of architecture unrivaled by any other building in the insular pacific in terms of its international prestige value—although outside of architectural and Oceanic circles it is veritably unknown. There is a design element to the structure which is supposed to represent “an opening to the future” in the form of its construction which is made to took both traditional and modern. This is one among several representations of the future under the “Common Destiny” which are contested along political lines. Everyone I talked agreed that Tjibaou’s death can bee seen a martyrdom for togetherness, although perhaps as a mythification that elides his humanity (Guiart 2008). In some other’s estimates, promotion of his popular hero status is self serving to those who promote it: They are trying make him into Nelson Mandela or Martin Luther King, with international levels of recognition, that can draw tourists to the Tjibaou Cultural Center and do brisk sales in the gift shop and to the (now closed) Club Med near his hometown on the East coast. Others tell me that Kanak tell them that they have never visited the Center, do not intend to visit the center, and worry that if independence happens the government of Kanaky will not be able to afford the upkeep on a piece of premium avant-garde architecture. For now I will simply flag this debate, leave it unanalyzed and unsituated, and move on to examples of less well trodden and more particular to my fieldwork experience and training as an anthropologist: rituals and communal representations. ii) The Mwaa Ka Post: “Given to all who want to share in the Common destiny” I arrived in New Caledonia in September 2003 for three months of preliminary fieldwork, which coincided with the annual day of recognitions and protests on the 24th of September that 347

mark the day in 1853 when Febvrière Despoints took possession of New Caledonia in the name of the Emperor of France Napoléon III (see chapter three ) After the Nouméa Accords were signed by Loyalists and Separatists in a roundtable discussion in 1998, the 24th of September was revalorized as a date to celebrate togetherness in a “common destiny” despite their uncommon origins. In 2003, which marked the 150th anniversary of French possession, an 8 meter tall wood sculpture called the Mwâ Kâ was temporarily erected in the central square of Nouméa , at Place de Cocotiers, by an association called Committee 150 Ans Après “150 years later”. In statements to the press and on television which I was able to watch from the Residence Universitaire in Nouville, it was presented as a spontaneous gift to “all who want to participate in a destiny together” and they intended that the sculpture would remain permanently in the heart of Nouméa at the location they had chosen. Officials from the Ville de Nouméa objected immediately that the gift was unsolicited, and that the Place de Cocotiers had only recently been refurbished according to a new master plan. They argued that while on the surface there appears to be plenty of open space, there is extensive canalization and electrical infrastructure beneath the surface: they argued that all appropriate spots for a tall post were already occupied, and they suggested that it be moved instead to a more appropriate location such as the Tjibaou Cultural Center in the suburban golf course community of Tina, or to the Customary Senate across the port in Nouville. In the context of a debate over where it would be permanently displayed, for several days, including the events marking the 24th of September, it was displayed in the Place de Cocotiers. The 8 meter Mwâ kâ post is itself an ornately carved tree trunk. “Mwâ Kâ” is the name of the chief’s house in the southern language of Djubéa-Kapone, and can refer to the house’s center post as well as the house as a whole. Unlike the carving of a standard house post, which often 348

represents ancestors, according to the sculptor the motif on the gifted Mwâ Kâ represents all eight Aires Coutumiers in the order in which they were colonized starting from the bottom first with Hoot Ma Whaap, Iaii, Païci Cemuhi, Noje Drehu, Ajié Aroo, Nengone, Xaracuu and Djubéa-Kapone. The top is a small round house, and the eight area are represented by eight carvings of humans and anthropomorphic figures. One of the top most section depicts a half-man half lizard which comes from a well known myth. Each Customary Area is thus represented by a carved motif , and labeled with a the name of the area (all are names of languages) carved into a plank or flêche faitière projecting outwards from the trunk like branches. While the individual carvings representing each area might not be transparent in meaning, the label makes it clear for the uninformed. Counting down top to bottom, the Customary Areas are placed in order from North to South, incorporating the three Loyalty Islands into the sequence. While it thereby presents an icon of the islands that compose the territory of New Caledonia, the sculptor and the committee say that it represents the order of “colonization.” In an interview with Les Nouvelle Calédoniennes on the 3rd of October 2003, Raphael Mapou explains its significance that the carving is house’s center post. Avec le Mwâ Kâ s’ouvre une nouvelle période pour toutes les communautés du pays. De notre côté, nous considérons avoir joué notre rôle. Nous avons été le poteau central de la nouvelle citoyenneté. Et ce avec générosité, sincérité, sans aucun calcul. Le Mwâ Kâ a été apporté par le peuple kanak, il restera notre œuvre, mais il a été offert à l’ensemble des citoyens du pays. (LNC 3/10/2003). Mapou’s statement that “we” Kanak “have been the center post of the new citizenship” is presented to the press as a statement of inclusion and new beginnings, implying a big hut attitude towards the future: many other posts and supports will be needed to hold up the roof of the house and if the largest and most central post represents the indigenous peoples and their unity as Kanaks, they are after all the largest demographic block. The use of houseform and its 349

symbolism can be taken as a proposal by the committee that New Caledonians come together into a unified residential unit. On a smaller scale Claude Lévi-Strauss might describe this as a proposal to build a “house society”: here the logic of co-present residence as being the primary relational unit is projected from a domestic unit of not necessarily unrelated people onto the entire territory and proto-national Caledonian citizenry. This sounds like an inclusive project. However, a house’s center post in many pacific island contexts is also an icon of an origin story on which land claims and rights are based. In Enga province in Papua New Guinea, the center post of the men’s house is the path through which ancestors originally descended from the sky to earth (Morgan N.D.), and the house site is talked about as a manifestation of the clans claim to place: hence burning houses is a good way to erase a claim. In Maori contexts, the center post of the house represents a merging of sky and earth in an act of copulation out of which humans were created, and the center post is thereby presented in Maori myth as the manifestation of an original land claim according to Sahlins—which made British flag poles targets of attack (1984). Not all house center posts are similarly infused with this sort of salient symbolism and iconicity: usually only certain houses get to have these meaning infused into their materiality. In New Caledonia in the 1980s, traditional houses were hastily erected by Kanak political groups on lands over which they wanted to challenge colonial era claims. House building was their way to openly challenge the legitimacy of French property registration as definitive ownership. After police would intervene, the registered owners would then burn the Kanak claim houses, and often their own homes would later be burned in retaliation.6 In what was explained 6

With the result that the violent period in the 1980s euphemistically referred to as the “Evenements” is known by another euphemism as the “Years of Cinders.”

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to me as a “threat” the traditional house built within the gardens of the Territorial Museum of Nouméa was burned one night. A relatively disinterested person told me that most Kanaks suspected it was a “Metro” while most non-Kanaks thought it was probably Pied Noir, on the basis that some had threatened publicly that if ever forced to leave New Caledonia, just like in Algeria, they would burn everything and leave nothing but scorched earth.7 A more recent house burning incident was the early 2000s burning by a old Kanak man of a new chief’s house erected in Nouville as part of the Customary Senate complex. He made no attempt to hide his involvement (he stood by and watched it burn), and when asked why he did it, he informed authorities that it is inappropriate to build a chief’s house so close to the water. While he was described to me as “crazy” it seems more accurate to say that he was accusing the customary senate of not actually knowing their customs: it was a challenge to their authority and legitimacy as a body. Drawing me a quick sketch of the Place de Cocotiers, Louis José Barbançon, who once described himself to me as a “Oceanian coming from Europe” and who dates his family’s presence in New Caledonia to the first penal convoy of 1864, told me why in his opinion the suburban locations the city proposed for the post were inferior, and why the “best” location is the Place de Cocotiers: it had everything to do with context. At the center of the rectangular 400 x 100 meter place there is a whitish yellow stone fountain in a neo-classical style topped by a lifesize half-nude young woman pouring water from a vessel. It is called the Fontaine Céleste. It was inaugurated on September 24th, 1893, on the fortieth anniversary of the Prise de Possession, and

7

I recently learned that a member of the Museum’s archaeological staff in the late 1970s and early 1980s was a Pied Noir who owned rural land, and expressed frustration with working with locals of all origins. It seems completely unlikely that he actually set the fire, but I suspect he was the token Pied Noir behind others’ suspicions of Pied Noir in this specific case.

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all road distances to Nouméa were subsequently measured from it. The model was a “little Arab goat herder girl” from Bourail named Céleste Ben Yamina (Julien 1999:74; Faure-Bourdoncle and Kling 1988:92). She has been described to me variably as a métis, a Kabyle, an Arab, and a Maghrebian, but is undeniably the child of a penal convict from North Africa. One hundred and fifty meters to the West of Céleste there is a cast metal statue of Governor Olry, honoring his role as governor who defended the colony during the 1878 uprising of chief Ataï.8 After his death the sculpture was commissioned and sent from France by his family for the 1893 commemoration events, but was then “forgotten” on the dock at the Noumea Port. It was rediscovered, and erected in 1897 on a stone pedestal surrounded by lush gardens. The pedestal featured a bronze plate depicting Ataï’s insurgents lying down their arms in supplication to the governor (Faure-Bourdoncle and Kling 1988:200). Following a series of protests by Kanak culminating on the 24th of September 1974 the bronze plate was removed.9 Barbançon expressed to me how appropriate it would be to have three sculptures: one of stone, one of metal, and one of wood inclusively respectively representing the elements of New Caledonia’s population, facing the mayor’s office in the center of what is often described as the “white city” Nouméa. The “gift” of the Mwâ Kâ in September 2003 was placed in the context of these two existing structures, but that was arguably not why it was chosen. However in a later speech on the 24th of September 2005 Barbançon told the crowd how, on first blush, he immediately

8

However, Admiral Olry had Chief Ataï’s head severed from his body, and placed in display in Noumea and later sent to Paris as an anatomical specimen. While it is now officially lost, based on how museums handle sensitive remains of indigenous peoples (Ishi for example) I suspect it is still held in the closed collections of the Quai Branly ethnographic museum, or the Musée Dupuytren, after the dissemination of the Musée Broca anatomical collection. 9

The removal of the plates can be taken either as a sign of the success of the protests, or an act to protect the plates from vandalism as has happens with other controversial and uncontroversial memorials from which the thin and fragile commemorative plates are only taken out of storage and attached during official events.

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thought the best place for it would have been the gardens of the High Commissioner—since it was the State that took possession of New Caledonia in the first place. In this way he points to an interpretation that the gift of the pole was motivated as a challenge. He and everyone else speaking publicly as part of the Mwâ Kâ (or Mwââ Kââ per some orthographies) project have never identified it explicitly as a land claim in anything I have located. The motives of placing it at the dead-center of not only Nouméa but of the entire Territory seem to eclipse the importance of being placed next to two other works with an ethnically significant history. Barbançon might have preferred that live in the High Commissioner’s garden, and constitute a provocative claim against the State over their sovereignty of the entire island, whereas the tort suggested by the Place de Cocotiers is less well defined and might appears to somehow challenge everyone who is not Kanak. The unspoken and latent land claim contained in the Mwâ Kâ is clearly visible in the ways it the ways political compromises placed it at its final location, and significantly modified its symbolic message. After contentions between Noumea city officials and the donors of the sculpture over its appropriateness , the Mwâ Kâ was moved to the Province Sud office complex with the agreement of its President Jacques Lafleur (concurrently seated as Deputy in the Parisian National Assembly) until a compromise location could be prepared. Part of the vast parking lot facing the Territorial Museum off Bay de Moselle would be turned over to the New Caledonian Government via its committees. This agreement for temporary housing was threatened when in early 2004, Jacques Lafleur threatened to evict the post after land revindications were made for Gouaro Deva. Speaking of the post, Lafleur says “I was tricked…the Mwâ Kâ has become the manifestation of a step, the one revindication of all the systematic revindications yet to come” (Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes 25/09/2007). 353

Lafleur’s decision to retaliate for land revindications by linking it to the Mwâ Kâ show what he suspects the post really stands for. At about this time on the 9th of may 2004, Lafleur’s political party lost majority control of the Government of New Caledonia, and he also lost control of the Province Sud to a newer anti-independence party composed of many of his former followers. In 2004, the assumption developed that with the next round of elections for the National Assembly in 2006, Lafleur would be out for the first time since 1977. Looking forward to the 24th of September 2004, an architect would design a space in which it would be placed, and only a few blocks from Place de Cocotiers it could become the ceremonial centerpiece around which the New Caledonian Government (not the Ville de Nouméa, or the Southern Province) would be able to commemorate the 24th of September as authorized by the Nouméa Accords as neither a day for settler celebration of annexation, nor Kanak mourning of annexation. Instead it would commemorate as the day as the time these two “victims of history” (this is a statement in the Matignon and Nouméa Accords) were brought together and from which they can look to their future together as they “construct a Caledonian citizenry” in the present. The next year, in 2004 (while I was not present in New Caledonia), the committee had received an 18 acre site from the mayor’s office, and had thoroughly re-worked the symbolism of the Mwâ Kâ. While in 2003 it was an 8 meter house center post that might appear to be a confrontational claim of some underdetermined sort, in 2004 it was transformed into a mast of a 12 meter high ocean going double-canoe made of poured in place concrete. For the 24th of September it was picked up and carried in a procession several blocks long, with groups representative of each “element” of New Caledonia’s population carrying it a short distance before handing it off to the next group. At the end of the procession the giant pirogue was 354

deposited in the unfinished construction site. Then the fleches were brought up on the platform by eight kanak children paired with children who represented the other communities of the “common destiny” however the newspaper identifies only six: a ‘caledonian’ (?), a metropolitan, an antillaise, a wallisian, a vietnamese, an indonesian, a representative of the ‘non-french’ (perhaps a ni-vanuatu?), and one unidentified (perhaps a Tahitian or composite Polynesian?) . Philippe Gomès, a self identified Pied Noir who moved to New Caledonia with his parents in the 1980s and was too young to grow up in Algeria, spoke enthusiastically as the President of Province Sud and as the successor of Lafleur, saying “to display our identity, is not to distance ourselves from France”(Les Nouvelles Caledoniennes 15/09/2007). As indicated by Gomès’ participation and the participation of children, this event was well attended by a wide spectrum of the ethno-historical communities of New Caledonia—but not the Mayor nor anyone from Lafleur’s now out of power Rassemblement party whose staffs had been transferred to offices at the Ville de Noumea. Meanwhile embers of the right wing national party the Front National organized a luncheon, and deposited flowers at the Monument aux Morts in Païta. What then was the symbolism of the built monument? The sculptor of the Mwâ Kâ, Narcisse Decoire, described the symbolism of the canoe as follows in July 2004, as translated by Australian Broadcasting Corporation, as he was already preparing a wooden figure to man the tiller for the 24th of September 2005. In 2004, we put the canoe in place and we erected the Mwa Ka, which serves as a mast of this canoe. The Mwa Ka [is] a sign of our custom - it's the link between the people of the mountains and the people of the sea. So the placement of this old man, the paddler, in the canoe will show that after 150 years, the Kanak people are still here. What we're saying is that 150 years on, we're asking others to join us in the Mwa Ka… We're not saying to other communities that they have to leave. We're saying come and join us in the Mwa Ka, come and join us in this house we're building. That's the symbolism of the Mwa Ka. (Maclellan 2005) 355

Decoire starts out explaining that the canoe and the post represent the link between the people of the land and the people of the sea, describing perhaps the pre-contact presence of people from the Loyalty islands and the Isle of Pines on the mainland—migrant Polynesian clans as described in Chapter Three and Four. This indexes a division within the hypothesized unity of Kanak society which is now recognized and erased in the symbolic unity of the canoe, just as the Mwâ Kâ post symbolism unifies their territories and colonial histories of the eight distinct languagecum Customary Areas. As Decoire throws in at the end, the Mwâ Kâ is still a house symbolism, but he is defensive of what precisely it signifies: an invitation to build together. For 2005 the completed 18 acre site would be planted with symbolically imbued vegetation. Each community which had come to New Caledonia would be represented by appropriate plant, put in the ground by children. This was supposed to represent their “rootedness” in place, while highlighting the origin from which they are transplanted. Coupled with the plans, and the transformation of the Mwâ Kâ from house element into a canoe, all the communities of New Caledonia were recast as migrants. The event the 24th of September 2005 was better attended than the 2004 event, and for the first time by the Mayor.

Challenges to the social world represented by the Mwâ Kâ i) Metropolitans The symbolism of the Mwâ Kâ was transformed in a way that figured all ethno-historical communities of New Caledonia as equal partners with Kanaks in the construction of a New Citizenship. However, a federated Metropolitan group had formed which viewed the Mwâ Kâ as a communitarian, and the idea of Caledonian Citizenship as anathema to the terms of the French Constitution. A representative of the group saying in a press release that the model of Caledonian 356

citizenship presented by the Mwâ Kâ “est à l’origine un concept idéologique et discriminatoire imaginé par les signataires de l’Accord de Nouméa en tant que transition vers une nationalité autre que française, conséquence nécessaire de l’indépendance.” From their perspective there should be no distinction between the real rights of Metropolitans to vote and work in government employment in New Caledonia. As the Nouméa Accord was instituted, preference would be officially given to “emploi local” in government work, and only extended to non-residents if local talent was not available. This was coupled with a freeze on voting rolls dating to 1988 (a term fought against up to the French senate, which voted in favor of the freeze in late 2006). A constitutionally proper symbolic order from this perspective would not acknowledge differences of origin or history: everyone would be homogenously French in terms of civil rights. While this does not reflect what all recent immigrants from the metropole think. One evening loosened by alcohol, while talking about real-estate prices as well as other subjects less germane to this dissertation, he paused, sat up straight to cover a belch with a fist, and then pointed his right index finger into the air and shook it rhetorically while making the following point: “New Caledonia should have independence from France!” Then he reflected a moment longer, with his eyes closed for a few seconds perhaps drunkenly realizing the difficult position which this hypothetical future would eventuality place him, and he added, “But French people should still be able to come here and get work.” My young metropolitan friend had hit exactly and astutely on the problem: what he wanted for New Caledonia, and from New Caledonia, was precisely at odds with the objectives of both the French loyalist population, and the Kanak independence movement. Few people are certain that they want independence at any cost, but a substantial number protest that French workers who immigrate from the metropole are “stealing the bread out of our mouths.” The policies desired by the resident versus the immigrant are 357

towards exact opposite goals: the one sees their opportunities being unjustly infringed by the other in terms of access to the benefits of employment. ii) Wallisians In mid December 2005, I retuned to New Caledonia for fieldwork for the first time in two years and moved into the Maison de Vanuatu at the University of New Caledonia. One evening I tuned the television to a year-end roundtable discussion hosted by Marie-France Cubbada, and attended by several figures, (some of whom I recognized and some of whom I did not). One young woman apparently from Wallis suggested that in light of the special recognition given to Kanaks as the indigenous peoples of New Caledonia, as exemplified by the Mwâ Kâ and its eight customary areas, shouldn’t the Wallisian people be recognized as indigenous as well—in the same way as people from the Loyalty Islands? She continued to ask, that from a historical perspective, weren’t the very first migrants to New Caledonia the same as the people of Wallis? Aren’t Wallisians also indigenous? Marie-France Cubbada then took the microphone and, pointing out that there was a historian in their group asked Louis-José Barbançon to reply to the question as a historian. I was surprised by Barbançon’s reply: he made it very clear that there was no linkage between the migrants she was talking about and the present day Wallisian population. In my previous experience speaking with Barbançon he is actually very amenable to flights of fancy about historical possibilities and political possibilities. In this instance he abruptly cut her down. The discussion then proceeded, with another person pointing out that if Wallisians were recognized as “the ninth customary group” where would their customary lands be, where would one find the “ninth Customary Area”? The girl’s reply was “anywhere the Wallisians have worked in the mines” and the topic of discussion was then changed by Cubbada. 358

I remembered this program for the duration of my fieldwork: the young woman had essentially asked “Why don’t Wallisians counts as an indigenous to New Caledonia?” When I met with Barbançon later in the new year and asked him to explain what happened in the program, he explained that he could not humor the proposal since, if the Wallisian community were to push an interpretation that ancient pacific migrations (which predate those of the Kanak population) and contemporary populations of Wallisians who migrated in the 1950s were the same thing, and thereby deserving of customary status, “it would be suicide.” In the 1950s, a red indented pottery was found by an American archaeologist at a location in the North of New Caledonia at a placed called Lapita Beach. Subsequent dating and comparisons showed that “Lapita” style pottery was present on numerous other islands. It appeared to be carried by the first expansions from South East Asia that populated the Pacific Islands from the Bismarck Archipelago 3,500 years before present. The legitimate hypothesis created out of these finds was that the first people to inhabitant New Caledonia were the same as those who later made landfall in Wallis and other points in central Polynesia. However, the current Kanak inhabitants of New Caledonia appear to have arrived with a later migration just as the inhabitants of Wallis date to Tongan expansions sometime after 1200 AD. The people of the Lapita culture and the current populations are connected in indeterminate and undeterminable ways, which leads to rampant speculation. These archaeological findings, rather than bringing the Wallisian Polynesians and Kanak Melanesians closer together, deeply problematized their relationship. For example at the Noumea Museum, where one might expect to find Lapita pottery on display, there was no Lapita. A small display was put together sometime between 2007 and 2008, but at the time I was able to talk with Archaeologist Christophe Sand in 2006 there was none on display. He pointed out that some 359

older non-Kanaks have interpreted the finds to mean that the Melanesian Kanaks actually cannibalized members of the earlier and apparently higher culture that preceded them and produced the sophisticated Lapita designs. Nothing exists to suggest this happened. In terms of Wallisians, the discovery of the pottery cannot be taken to mean that there is a link between ancient and present day inhabitants in either place. However, this interpretation has apparently been popularized among Wallisians living in New Caledonia. I myself first realized that I never seen Lapita during a trip to Wallis in July 2006, when I saw a token item on a shelf at the Cultural Services offices. As I found it odd that no Lapita, to my knowledge, was displayed at the Noumea Museum I made a quick survey of the items on display and found that while the museum has expansive collections from Irian Jaya and Vanuatu and other places in Melanesia, it has very few items from Polynesia on display (despite significant and important items in its stored collection). There were three small items from Wallis and Futuna. When I shared my surprise about the absence of items from Wallis and Lapita from the Museum display, a friend corrected me saying that there is indeed Lapita on display in New Caledonia: I needed to go to the Maison de Wallis in the neighborhood of Magenta. The problem with Wallisians from a Kanak independantist perspective is that they are the “swing” vote in New Caledonia: they migrated in small numbers in the 1950s and early1960s as laborers for construction and mining projects. When their island gained French Territorial status, and they had French citizenship, they migrated to New Caledonia in large numbers with the result that there are now more Wallisians in New Caledonia than in Wallis. In the words of Gabriel Païta, which I offer here as an example, Wallisians need to realize that they have blocked New Caledonia’s independence by voting as loyalists, and he describes them as “bulldogs” for

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the French in their work as bouncers at restaurants. Less explicit is the absence of Wallisian associated artifacts in the Museum but it follows a similar political wind. Lapita archaeology and a history of mining labor are the facts behind the young Wallisian girl’s statement that a 9th customary area might be re-constituted as their customary lands. In this move she has articulated a claim on up to one third of the world’s known nickel reserves. In this move she and Wallisians are not along. At the Goro nickel mining site to the extreme sound, a sign identifies as a small Javanese graveyard just inland from the narrow road by the sea. At the old Tiebagi mine village to the far north, each year amicales or “associations” that represent ethnic communities are able to hold and open house (in 2005 and 2006 there was a Vietnamese and a Wallisian event). These events celebrate a particular ethnic group or “community’s” contributions to the present day population of New Caledonia while emphasizing the hard conditions and human toll of mining as contract and wage labor. iii). The War Dead of France In 1953 at the Baie d’Orphelinat in Noumea, a large anchor was placed by the side of the road in a ceremony to mark 100 years since the prise de possession. The anchor symbolizes the “anchoring” of New Caledonia to France. In 2005, speaking about the Mwâ Kâ, Barbançon joked that everyone knows that the anchor actually came from an American ship, and is instead an index of the American presence during the war. Beyond his pointing it out, the two commemorative locations are otherwise germane to one another. While the Mayor’s office of the Ville de Noumea obstructed efforts to plant the Mwâ Kâ in Place de Cocotiers, and did not attend events in 2003 or 2004, it was building an elaborate memorial to the war dead of New Caledonia around the anchor as part of a more general effort to “beautify” Noumea as a “garden city.”

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In addition to the anchor from 1953 which now sits in the middle of a round about, there is a low wooden bench placed beside the bicycle path in 1993 which commemorates the location in very awkward wording as “ICI, où le General DE GAULLE foula le sol calédonien pour la premier foi en 1956” on the 24th of April 1993 the President of the National Association of Francais Libre “remis à la New Caledonia” the “Medaille de la Resistance décernée par décret du 24 1946.” In light of these two wartime ties that bind New Caledonia to France, a very elaborate nautical-themed commemoration was built in 2005 by the Ville de Nouméa to remember the members of the Pacific Battalion who died in the Second World War. The message of this location now highlights a blood debt paid by “those who died for France.” In the symbolism of independence politics, this location sponsored rather than opposed by the city, argues against breaking the ties that connect New Caledonia and France. Independence is not an option, since their relation is tied by a blood sacrifice. iv) It’s Written in Stone This elaborate commemoration location appears to my eyes to be a reaction by the city to what transpired with the Mwâ Kâ, which went from being a house post in 2003 to an elaborated oceanic canoe on an 18 acres park by 2005. The city commissioned a modest monument for 2003, marking 150 years of French sovereignty, which is a difficult to find and relatively small marble stele with no landscaping around it what so ever. I saw it in the red dirt by the side of the road while driving, and in order to read what it had to say I needed to drive a
mile to the nearest parking spot and then return on foot. The caption reads: Hommage au Contre-Amiral 362

August Fébvrier des Pointes Grand officier de la legion d’honneur Sur instructions du gouvernment de la France Le 24 Septembre 1853, il scella, à Balade, le destin de la Nouvelle-Calédonie à celui de la France en presence de grands Chefs, des autorites coutumières, des populations de la region, des missionaries maristes, et des officiers et equipages du Phoque, commandant Edmond de Bovis La Ville de Nouméa Séptembre 2003 The stele is about five feet tall, of colored marble, with the inscription facing the road a black marble plate. On the reverse side from the inscription, facing the sea there is a etching in the marble of three steamships at anchor at Balade, with the blockhaus flying the French tricolor in the background. The Ville de Noumea has a over the last twenty years placed several steles like this around the city’s waterfront, paying homage to various maritime expeditions: one erected in 1989 commemorating Laperouse’s lost expedition contains human remains found at Vanikoro and subsequently repatriated to New Caledonia. These steles are important sites of memory, and this one paying homage to “Febvrier des Points [sic]” is the least accessible The closing wording of the inscription speak back to, and appear to contradict the opening paragraph of the Nouméa Accords, of which an semi-official translation reads: On 24 September 1853, when France claimed "Grande Terre", which James Cook had named "New Caledonia", it took possession of a territory in accordance with the conditions of international law, as recognised at that time by the nations of Europe and America. It did not establish legally formalised relations with the indigenous population. The treaties entered into with the customary authorities in 1854 and subsequent years did not represent balanced agreements but were, in fact, unilateral instruments.

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The point of the text on the stele presents the prise de possession on the 24th of September 1853 as legitimate though a list of witnesses I have seen nowhere else. In contrast the Noumea Accords points out its problems. In this light, the stele appears to do work similar to a extract of text on a mirror-smooth top of a rough hewn rock, which was placed at the Mwâ kâ in 2005: …The past was the time of colonisation. The present is the time of sharing, through the achievement of a new balance. The future must be the time of an identity, in a common destiny… This text is taken verbatim from the Noumea Accords, Article 4, and if one were to read beyond the final ellipse, only the last line of the article has been removed. It reads “France stands ready to accompany New Caledonia on that path.” In both these cases, the ‘writing on the rocks’ presents a motivated version of the “common destiny” contained in the Noumea Accords. This seems to prove a point made by Bernard Cohn: texts and treaties can be interesting, but if you want to know what people care about look at what they choose to carve into stone. v). 2006 On September 24th 2006, the commemoration events at the Mwâ Kâ almost did not happen. As I heard often during fieldwork, 2006 was the halfway point of the “project for a common destiny.” Unlike in 2005, the Mwâ Kâ ceremony did not draw the large pluri-ethnic crowd it is meant to celebrate. Instead of attending this year’s event, some key political organizations and voluntary associations made press statements saying they would not come (but seemed to still wish to participate by making their objections public). This included the “pioneers” group of New Caledonia which presents itself as the representative voice of old rural settler families, and the self described Federation of “Metropolitans.” The New Caledonian government official Déwe 364

Gorody who had been delegated to direct this and other symbolic aspects of the “common destiny”—such as selecting the flag and a national hymn—was herself away in Madagascar for a conference on music. Even with these pre-announced and expected absences the parking lot between Nouméa’s Quartier Latin and the yacht marina was unexpectedly empty of people. Within the sparse crowd who showed up to be counted, dance, sell goods, and drink, there were very few people off center-stage who could be identified as “belonging” to the Franco-European, Asian, or Polynesian “communities” that officially compose 55% of New Caledonia’s population. The crowd was almost entirely composed of Kanaks. In part this is why I left almost as soon as I arrived: it seemed like a good place for me to get into a fight. On the day that plainly seeks to construct a “common destiny” for the pluriethnic groups historically resident in New Caledonia, a critical mass of token residential types failed to materialize before their iconic representation the Mwâ Kâ. This ritual did not meet its objective of togetherness. Even the Mwâ Kâ statue was missing most of its fleches, which had been stolen since last year’s events and no one in charge had bothered to replace them. A certain grimness characterized the words of the president of the New Caledonian government, Marie-Noëlle Thémereau, when she spoke: “Next year we’ll do better…” The following day being a Sunday, residents of New Caledonia still had time to prepare each in his own way for a general strike called for Monday which offered a different way to commemorate the 24th of September. Under the direction of the fifth largest union in the territory, some New Caledonia suppliers of goods and services would stop supplying goods and services on Monday morning, and do their best to impede non-union workers from going to work. A few weeks before the strike was made public (i.e. published) knowledge, I was told by a 365

non-union manager that union reps were saying that if their demands are not met “it will be civil war” and “will be just like the evenements of the 1980s.” I head similar statement repeated on the news during the actual strike. The union leader Sylvain Néa made several demands, among which I noted: 1) The immediate construction of a 2.2 billion U.S. dollar nickel smelter in the Northern Province of New Caledonia; 2) The unconditional halt of construction on a nickel smelter in the Southern Province of New Caledonia, and expulsion of several hundred Filipinos who were brought in on labor contracts to build the smelter; 3) New laws preventing the “massive arrival” of outsiders who come to New Caledonia seeking work in the private sector, not just Filipinos but also Europeans and Metropolitans 4) cheaper gasoline. The planned strike would center around the mining industry and its offices, but through unionization would include the international port, the hospital, and a hodge-podge of other industrial storefronts. Bread, gasoline, and other “staple” commodities would be unevenly available depending on who made or distributed them. If the port is blocked long enough, products from the exterior would no longer be available and almost everything in New Caledonia is either imported or is made from imported components. On Monday morning the strike got off to a very slow start because it was raining, and everyone knows it is no fun manning road blockades when it rains. Yet, by the middle of the week there was no more bread to be purchased in Noumea and gasoline was being hoarded. On its own, the strike did not explain why the 2006 Mwâ Kâ celebration failed to live up to the levels of participation of previous years. Most people blamed the upcoming national 366

elections in 2007, which would bring a new president to France and a new deputy from New Caledonia to the National Assembly. Many local politicians with national ambitions then took the opportunity to advance their own interests, and stopped working well with their colleagues. I was told informally that some government projects were put on hold until after elections had passed, to avoid working for goals that might change. One long term proponent of the Common Destiny opined that it was probably already too close to 2014, and that nothing substantive in terms of institution building could happen until after the next referendum.

Representing The Métis Society to the Plural Society? As a closing to this chapter, I will dwell on how Furnivall classifies the United States and South Africa as plural societies, in which racial and ethnically and religiously divided communities can live side by and never integrate. Advertisements from 1950s South Africa (South Africa Yearbook 1954) represent this reality: dark figures in the background are shown moving cargo off ships in port, and another shows black shirtless men cutting cane in a plantation. Advertisements from any U.S. magazine show a different sort of pluralism: couples enjoying one another’s company are almost always the same phenotype racially speaking, but depictions of social groups are almost imperatively mixed. The logic of these advertisements make sense: we know what they are trying to depict (open minded consumers, preferably upper class) and why (sell stuff to any and all race of consumer), and if these depiction of multiculturalism is absent from an ad, there is usually an explanation (it might be in Ebony for example). After returning to the United States from New Caledonia in 2006, I have not found a single advertisement in a mainstream magazine that depicts an interracial couple, with the 367

exception of college recruitment materials. In college recruitment materials, interracial couples are shown walking together smiling and having fun in a media semiotics that I interpret as representing the openness and liberal sensibility of the campus. The reason I was looking related to the tropes of advertisements made for markets in New Caledonia which depict a normalization of “métisage” or racial sexual mixing which on a surface read would appear to undo any thesis that New Caledonia is plural society, or that race is organized the same way as in the metropole. I compiled advertisements and expository images in an appendix which was supposed to follow the body of the dissertation, but was removed due to copyright concerns and is available from the author. Figure 13 in the appendix presents two representations of New Caledonian’s population as a “plural” society. Figure 13:A depicts the four “elements” of New Caledonia’s population as represented in a 1959 geography textbook which I presented in an earlier chapter. It implies that there are four separate populations (European, Melanesian, Indonesian, and Vietnamese) while other materials in the text tell children how these different communities can be told apart by their dress or their relative percentage involvement in labor for the mining industry (Le Borgne 1959:169). Figure 13:B is from a 1998 edition of a popular graphic novel series, and depicts a set of four friends from four different communities in New Caledonia: a Melanesian Kanak, an Asian of unspecified origins, a Metropolitan Functionaire, and a local rural white. The texts of the graphic novel follow them through a series of misadventures. The two depictions serve to present an impression of distinctness of populations. While the 1998 image cuts the social body into different segments, and does so to show that friendship can bridge these distinctions, I conclude that it analytically represents much like depictions of multiracial friend groups in US advertisements and Disney morning cartoons. While depicting an ideal of friendship that crosses ethnic and racial lines, it built its popularity as a series in the 368

1988-1998 period, on the heels of ethnic and racial hostility. This depiction of friendship as ideal has a readership with anxiety about its actuality as a viable future. Figure 14 is another “pluralist” depiction, that implies that the social world can be divided into distinct social categories based on race and ethnicity in the same way that chocolate can be racialized. Here chocolate and other additives are converted into totemic operators that help distinguish between sea-snake varieties. The sea-snakes on the wrappers have no racial identifiers except for those things and qualities indexically associated with particular ethnoracial groups via what they eat and what they do for work. The color of the actual chocolate and milk is presented to the eater as iconic of grades of skin color, while the additives like rice and coconut are indexical to the community depicted. Again, this depiction suggests that plurality exists objectively, but I cannot point out a parallel from a U.S. supermarket since anything that treats race this overtly would likely be unpalatable. Figure 15 represents interracial intimacy: both images are supposed to be humorous, while “The Snack Between Friends” offer plausible deniability that it suggests that the white cowboy and the very dark fellow wearing the sombrero are about to share the Indian girl in the same manner that they might all share some hazelnut spread. A snack or goûter is literally a treat that comes in the early evening between meals: a sort of French tea-time. The skin color shift from White to Indian to Black is also readable as iconic of the end of the day. I argue that these readings are intentionally vague: a recent billboard ad with a picture of a chocolate bar that looked like a piece of excrement, with the caption “Love overcomes everything.” Apparently, implied interracial sex can sell chocolate in New Caledonia as well. The flyer for “The Last Virgin of Paradise” leaves nothing ambiguous. I later learned that the play was co-written by Teresia Teaiwa and Vilsoni Hereniko, the latter of who is the current direct of Pacific Islands 369

Studies at the University of Hawaii. While the theme of a white psychologist attempting to deflower an island virgin might seem difficult to produce, as the list of sponsors of the play shows, it will be performed at the Tjibaou Cultural Center with support from the Ville de Noumea, the Province Sud, the Government of New Caledonia, and the French Republic (as shown earlier, these governing bodies do not necessarily agree easily on the content of public displays but they are ready to cooperate this work of racial commentary). Financing is provided by the “Nickel at the Initiative” grant program which is offered competitively each year by Société Le Nickel. As can be easily seen from the flyer, this is no true love story, and tells another narrative of interracial sexuality and its motives. Figure 16 represents interracial families and couples in a non-scandalous and banal context. The first simply suggests that families and couples might enjoy attending one of New Caledonia’s annual firm festival. There is nothing remarkable, and this is one of several other ads I could have shown. I noticed it and selected it because a South African friend who describes himself as “colored” and has lived in New Caledonia for several years stopped and pointed it out to me at Baie de Citrons (the same location where the Foulards Rouges were born in 1969 after being refused service at a restaurant which has since closed). The second image is from a large billboard a few feet from Place de Cocotiers for a store called “Home” which sells household products that are moderately upscale. The billboard depicts a light skinned father and dark skinned mother in bed together with two children who in that context appear ambiguously raced. In these images, the claim that New Caledonia is “plural” in the sense offered by Furnivall and often suggested in academic writing about New Caledonia is clearly not operating: in the self representations offered to the public by advertisers (who would not use them if they did not

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work), New Caledonia’s communities meet and interpenetrate in the bedroom. I have not encountered any ads employing these tropes so explicitly anywhere else but New Caledonia. Figure 17 shows yet another Biscochoc ad, a young blonde girl who appears to be in a blackface hazelnut spread. “In my country, we’re all Noisety” is a reference to a very earnest local ad for the beer brand Number-One: “In New Caledonia we’re all Number-One.” Biscochoc is locally owned and directed chocolate factory, and ad agencies like Tam Tam are locally staffed and employ local models. People like the parents of the girl agreed to participate in he own self representation as somehow dark on behalf of the products. This ad was used widely, and placed on a sign board on a major public thoroughfare without incident or remark or vandalism. Speaking with a Biscochoc publicist, this was a very successful ad campaign and she talked about the model using her first name. In the second image, the girl holding the working end of an arc welder is as explicit self-representation of the island: she was briefly Miss Nouvelle-Calédonie 2006 before nude pictures of her surfaced after her election which disqualified her from the Miss France competition. She explicitly noted her mixed racial composition, which angered the supporters of other participants because she is from La Réunion. While racially mixed, her mixture comes from elsewhere, rather than the historical specificity of New Caledonia’s racial mixtures. In Figure 18, I attempt to contextualize the New Caledonia ads in a more general logic of representations of ethnicity and race in Overseas France more generally. As these images taken from cartoons and sugar for sale in the metropole, the tropes of racial mixing are supposed to apply in Overseas France, and are consumed in Metropolitan France. I am using these two images as a means to argue that Overseas France is stereotyped from the Metropole as being a “mixed” place, a “mixed” France, where the borders of plural communities blur into one another. 371

This advertising logic is not unique to New Caledonia, and is actually directed from outside it: there is a prominent advertising logic prevalent in the metropole that products from French places the never decolonized represent a sort of “mixed France”—an argument of authentic indigeneity and legitimacy of belonging in those places through hybridity which appears to sell products successfully—much in the same way that a televised Garbit ad campaign for taboulé and other middle eastern processed foods in the metropole featured a speaker say “good like over there” in a marked Pied Noir accent. Food ads are strange locations through which anxieties and revisions of the French colonial past are reexamined and revalorized, and the advertising logics of New Caledonia presented here are derivative of those logics—and arguable sell to the same consumer sociologically speaking. Clearly the trope that racial mixing is something fit for valorization is a cross-empire phenomena, and the appeal of Hereniko and Teaiwa’s play for the Tjibaou center points to a resonance of Pacific discourses of indigenous race and opportunity within the liberal framework of nation-states and potential nation-states. I do not know if the critique couched in the comedy of the play fully registered for an audience of settler Frenchmen metropoles including artsy bohemian transplants who staff these productions along with an aspiring bourgeoisie Kanak. Returning to New Caledonia: do these ads demonstrate that New Caledonia is no longer a society composed of a plurality of communities? No. Instead, taken in context of who consumes what and how, the totemic chocolates were for sale only at a store called Casino Johnston, and I had to procure my own at the factory because they were sold out. Johnston carries a unique variety of products that appeal to Australian and other foreign tourists whose cruise ships dock directly opposite the storefront: I suspect the chocolate sold well with tourists, and like all things made by tricot-raye they were probably mostly marketed to Metropolitans. The Noisety spread is 372

likewise marketed primarily towards the people who might buy it: it is a cheaper locally made substitute for a global brand called Nutella that people from France like—but might not be willing to pay full price for. The tickets for plays and movie festivals and boutique furnishings are all similarly targeted in terms of income, class, and age: these are activities and products for young families with disposable incomes. Nothing better described the vast majority of Metropolitans, who arrive in New Caledonia early in their careers often recently married with young children and a excellent income. Most events in Noumea, such as Carnival, are strikingly designed as activates appropriate for school age children as the primary participants. When I asked business owners and manufactures who buys their products and who they design their products for, they were immediately universalistic: everyone buys their products! The one exception was a t-shirt manufacturer who spent significant time trying to figure out why particular shades of green sold well with Kanak youth and others did not: his conclusion is that shirts close to the green shade of Number One beer bottles were what they wanted in addition to brown and red earth tones. The ads and images presented in the appendix represent a wished for, or ideal social order in which the problems of plural communities are sidelined—without needing to address the root politics of the injustices of the colonial past. The images and their logics do indeed appeal to and are targeted at Metropolitans, but these images and ads are nonetheless proudly produced by members of local industry. I take them to instead reflect a trope that is present from photos taken at family reunions and placed in sometimes self-published books either about specific families or particular communities. The last page of a monograph on the Javanese experience in New Caledonia is of a group of children, and the caption encourages the read to notice the “high level” of evident racial mixing. The same trope appears in a monograph on the Japanese, with a 373

picture of a family reunion in which the reader is told to notice generations of racial mixing. When prominent families such as the Daly clan have a reunion, their pictures are published in the paper with the same passive voice pointing out that the picture shows high levels of racial mixing. This I take as evidence of a system of cultural values that embraces intercommunal marriage. It also enters as politics rhetoric against an accusation of foreignness: the ads seem to suggest that racial mixing is an authentic foundation for a civil form of legitimate indigeneity. Since this claim is being made recurrently, there are necessarily also recurrent denials that this constitutes legitimate belong which its claimants fights against: these local ads, like their counterparts in the metropole, reflect a process of figuring through the anxieties of colonial legacies. As Lévi-Strauss told us years ago, food is good to think with. Between the family photos that are given as evidence of mixing communities, and a political reality of governance that suggests unity is wanting, a high rhetoric of overcoming difference was infused in the language of the Noumea Accords. What I suggest is that perhaps this is a misplaced fetishism of identity. The political problems faced by New Caledonia are not born from plural communities or any evident lack of intercourse between them. No problems will be solved through attempting to unify “communities” that are already unified by kinship, and attempting to overcome their community boundaries and make them into equal citizens through instruments such as a tax, as some have suggested (Chauchat 2005), has misidentified the actual social dynamics of this very unique place through the optics that apply in other places. If the island must be described as a plural society, New Caledonia is more unified than any parallel I know of and its residents are aware of this every time they attend a family function. Unity and togetherness is not the solution: they already have plenty of it.

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CONCLUSION PREDICTIONS, ECONOMIES, CONJUNCTURES AND OTHER PERSPECTIVES

Predictions: Independence Referendum of 2014-2018 In 1998 the Noumea Accords offered a status-quo solution on the question of independence: wait fifteen to eighteen years, and then between 2014 and 2018 the question can come up in a referendum. It was negotiated in 1998 by representatives of three official political interests in New Caledonia, specifically the independence movement, the loyalist movement, and the French State (which cast itself as mediator, but was more accurately a participant). Building on their roundtable derived consensus, the text of the Nouméa Accords was later approved by a general referendum in New Caledonia gaining more than 70% approval, and made legal by a change to the French constitution ratified by the French parliament—approved in anonymous voting: 377 to 23. While “support” is universally strong for the Nouméa Accords, this strength masks serious differences in why people say they support the Accords, and what they think the future should look like for New Caledonia. Perhaps the clearest documentation of the indeterminacy contained in the text of the Accords is shown by the floor speeches given in the French National Assembly when representatives of each major political group stood up and gave a brief explanation for why they support changing the French constitution to give New Caledonia increased autonomy. Amid significant backtalk and limited heckling, leaders of socialist, 375

communist, and conservative political groups spoke in favor of the Accords but in importantly different ways. The communist Deputé Jacques Brunhes articulated the following version of what the Accords allowed: These agreements open a new step, marked by the introduction of Caledonian Citizenship for all the communities [resident in New Caledonia], and for a sharing of sovereignty with France, on the path to full sovereignty, if that is the choice of Calédoniens. At this point in the record, Mr. Jacques Lafleur, the Deputy who has represented New Caledonia in the French National Assembly every year since 1978 and is co-signer of the Nouméa Accords, is recorded to have uttered one single word, loud enough for it to be officially noted: “Non!” Lafleur’s explicit objection was initially surprising to me, since Brunhes was making a fairly literal reading of a text which Lafleur had personally negotiated and to which he had signed his name. It makes me speculate that Lafleur might count among the remarkably small cohort of Deputies who chose not to support the Nouméa Accords when they cast their anonymous votes. Yet, as I learned more about the Accords, Lafleur appears not to be alone in his dissatisfaction with some aspects of the text. Others involved in the process have downplayed the binding power of the agreement and its policy language of irreversibility including Alain Christnacht (these perspectives of policy that nothing is certain and everything is possible in politics is nicely outlined in Mokaddem 2005). Anything is possible, and nothing is settled about the meaning of the Accords: it almost works as a shifter, in that its content and consequences change radically depending on speakers and contexts. Additionally, many aspects of the Accords have been modified through politically motivated legal challenges to their constitutionality sometimes on grounds of their discrimination between citizens of the French Republic, as well as legislative interventions in Paris. A proposal 376

to “freeze” the electoral roles of New Caledonia at its 1998 membership, effectively closing the right to vote to newcomers—which is strongly supported by independantists and appears to be authorized in the text of the Accords—necessitated an additional change to the French constitution in 2006. A loyalist co-signer of the Nouméa Accords, Senator Simon Loueckhote, argued in the Senate against the freeze saying it did not fit with his intentions or understandings of the document when he signed it. In otherwords, the Nouméa Accords were written in cooperation across political factions, but should not necessarily be taken for consensus between those groups. The voluntary associations that claim to represent Wallisian, Metropolitan, and Caldoche interests are also those same groups that let the newspaper know they plan to boycott celebrations which recognize the Nouméa Accords— in particular annual events around the Mwaa-Ka post The consensus of a 70% New Caledonian vote in favor of the accords is shown to have its limits by maps of electoral returns. A “no” vote of dissent correlates with areas with a Loyalist stronghold ethnically speaking. The areas where the Accords had the lowest levels of support the communes of Greater Nouméa where many Wallisians, Metropolitans and older colonial settler families have established their homes (include Dumbéa, Mont-Dore, and Paita). The accords also faired poorly in the rural communes that are considered “Caldoche” strongholds: Bourail, Koumac, Farino, Saramea, and La Foa. Looking at maps of commune by commune election returns for the Accords, the history of settlement and land ownership presented in this dissertation is brought to life. In the vast expanses of “yes” votes outside Nouméa, the small islands of high “no” percentages are found in the former penal establishments, around former mines, narrowly focused on small pieces of land like Saramea and

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Koumac where Feillet colonists received their coffee plantation concessions. As a prediction, history will likely be just as easy to read into the returns for the 2014-1018 period. Since previous elections are supposed to be the best predictors for future elections, support for the Noumea Accords did indeed cross ethnocommunal lines, but the locations where it did not garner support could almost be predicted through a cursory knowledge of where settlers were placed on rural lands beginning in the 1850s. However, with the benchmark of the Noumea Accords now in the past, the goalposts have moved and the terms of the Accords are presently embraced by loyalists faced with the prospects of a referendum on full independence. The Noumea Accords are the current status quo, and the protocol for holding elections has two curious features: and it leaves it up to the elected officials of the government of New Caledonia to decided when in the three year window to hold the vote, and it does not specify what to do if a referendum on independence fails to pass after several rounds of voting. As a structural feature, since independence requires a supermajority of “yes” votes it is impossible that independence will pass based on sheer demographics of the electorate presented above, unless the question of independence is watered down to a referendum on “shared sovereignty” or “partial independence.” Part of the popularity of the Noumea Accords is that everyone could claim to be a winner due to the ambiguities of what it stood for: it could be spun and was spun as a loyalist victory and independentist defeat, and as an independentist victory and loyalist defeat. What the Accords clearly accomplished was the creation of the possibility of a possibility of independence. What they will stand for in the coming referendum is the opportunity to turn the supposedly temporary regime of the Noumea Accords into a permanent default position.

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The timing of the vote on the Accords came at the absolute latest point in the window prescribed ten years earlier by the Matignon accords of 1988. It seems unlikely that the New Caledonian government will hold a referendum in 2014, in part because it has historically been and is presently controlled by parties which describe themselves as conservative pro-French “loyalist” or as more moderately “anti-independence” in objective. There is no reason for this elected body to push up the date of the referendum, short of independentist pressures. As the Accords stipulate, if the government fails to put together a general referendum by the end of the 2014-2018 window, the State with do it for them. What then if a referendum does not pass? Few indicators suggest it will: recent elections tend to empower a governing majority coalition that describes itself as “anti-independence” and there is no large population bump about to enter the electorate (the timing of the referendum 15 to 18 years in the future seemed curious to me as an attempt to head of strategic pregnancies and other attempts to change the majority outcomes). As the charter document for 1998-2014, the Noumea Accords do not stipulate what will come next. My expectation is that after a series of referendums on Independence fail to pass, the temporary character and language of the Noumea Accords and its Organic Law will be swapped. It will be then be institutionalized permanently as the status-quo organic constitution for New Caledonia. In social context, this outcome can lead to almost anything in New Caledonia—plausibly an extended period of general strikes leading to a renegotiation of the status-quo via the less than disinterested mediation of the French State. However, lacking a general referendum vote showing a supermajority in favor of independence, the French State cannot be expected to leave regardless of whether a Socialist or Conservative holds the French Presidency .

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What then will become of the co-existence of co-habitation of “civil” and “customary” social orders? More than 100,000 residents of New Caledonia live under a particular personal status—which means they retain a legal status as a customary individual, even if they do not necessarily live on tribal lands or customary reserves. After the passage of the Noumea Accords, the Customary Senate was created as a body of tribal governance, which represents the interests of the nested set of 341 Tribes, 57 Districts, and 8 Customary Areas who compose the indigenous particular status population. A recent push has tried to make an individual’s abandonment of Particular or Personal Status reversible, noting that minors whose parents entered civil status would potentially benefit from being able to opt back into holding particular status. Particular status can giving access to customary benefits which they did not consent to give up. For example, it can grants access to a program of land reform begun in 1978 meant to increase or “develop” the lands under Melanesian communal ownership. In 1986 the Agence de Développement Rural et d’ Aménagement Foncier (ADRAF) was created by the territorial government to acquire lands and redistribute them to Groupments de Droit Particulier Local (GDPL) which for purposes of economic incorporation had standing as “statut de personne morale” (Gay 2003: 146). While in 1978 only 10% of the main island of New Caledonia was counted as “customary land” under these land reform programs by 1996 this total had grown to 17%. ADRAF is controlled by the State, it is answerable to the Senate. With this creation of a senatorial representative, and growing body of customary lands, the direction for the future seems to trend not towards eradicating customary or particular status, but instead entrenching and expanding its institutions. Where this becomes contentious is the direction this institutionalization will take. For example while customary institutions are 380

historically the antithesis and opposite of civil organization, some advocates want to civilize it: create a “statut civil coutumier” modeled on French civil status, establish a regime of customary land titling and registry, and civilize customary law and courts (i.e. procedures and codes). This is sometimes inflected with a socialist party political perspective from which traditional kanak society is seen as exploitative of women, hierarchical in its chieftainships, and sometimes engendering unfair distributions of resources and fruits of the land. A conservative Kanak corollary calls for the defense of ancestral oral traditions and customs, a recognition that chiefs are historically men. While these are stereotyped oppositions which I present as composites based on interviews and other materials collected during my fieldwork (using composites is a technique of masking my informants prescribed in review by the Internal Review Board of the University of Chicago), very few who articulated these sorts of attitudes to me were ready to concede that the intellectual history of their position is rooted in the sorts of oppositions which oriented Catholic versus Protestant ideas of how indigenous subjects should be governed under a liberal regime. Despite its lack of saliency as historical artifact, the fact remains that among Kanaks a larger number are practicing Protestants than are Catholics, and a larger number have a family history of protestant schooling and upbringing. The Kanak independence movement is socialist in objective, supported nonetheless by many former Catholic Kanaks such as Tjibaou who himself left the priesthood. Its objectives for the civil political future seeks to avoid the production of a Kanak Bourgeoisie built on nickel wealth, through communal ownership of dividends and mineral resources at the provincial level. A plausible horizon I can imagine for New Caledonia might include a Kanak civil government at the Provincial government level in the North and Loyalty Islands provinces (this is already the case) which supports a protestantcum-socialist model of liberalism, and a Kanak customary sphere that inhabits the organizational 381

legacies of Catholicism and perspectives akin to bourgeoisie conservatism. There will of course be individuals who deftly negotiate both spheres and their stereotypes and are actually more the case than the exception to it (for example Nidoish Naisseline counts as a founder of the socialist Foulards Rouges and PALIKA, is a former Grand Chef Coutumier de Maré, a former President of the Loyalty Islands Province, and the current President of Air Calédonie). This would perhaps substantiate an experiential public/private distinction built on the same liberal correlates as a civil/custom distinction.

Critique 1: Bringing Economies into Political History The historical materials in the body of this text are punctuated and periodized principally by regime changed in the French Metropole. Dates like 1830, 1848, 1871 are the brackets I selected, showing that forms of governance and their ideological underpinnings are particular to specific regimes and eras, and that this metropolitan politics constitutes a structure for the agencies and policies which were brought to bear on New Caledonia with lasting effect. I could have easily punctuated the narrative with accounts of how the local economy is tied to global booms and busts of capitalism. Piecing together how a major drop in the price of nickel empirically impacts New Caledonia perhaps would give a more robust account for things like the methods of Feillet colonization as devised in 1893. His choice of coffee as an appropriate crop for his European gentry was due as much to its (short lived) perceived global market profitability, as to his observation that unlike cattle, coffee plants will not trample native gardens and spur indigenous revolt. If engaged with a similar level of detail as the exposition on government policy, I would demonstrate the vectors of connection between sales and markets of actual nickel and traces its connectivity to the prosperity of the colony’s treasury .Within this 382

dissertation filled with historical details, New Caledonia’s veritable monocrop of nickel does not figure centrally, even as in local chronotopes of history the price of nickel is all determining actor in the push-pull that lead to high levels of migration in the late 1960s, and the nickel crash of 1972 is what occasioned the solidification of discontent around the independence movement. A closer examination of how nickel is constituted politically by French state actors is a useful inroad to understanding this commodity in a global political economy. This can lead easily to questioning the ways in which its value is established in pit trades at the London Metal Exchange (which I often imagined as a location to start answering this question ethnographically) into the French ideologies and discourses of resource scarcity and national security—in which nickel seems to figure prominently, at least from a perspective informed by time spent in New Caledonia. Market agencies are of course mediated and structured, but this analytic observation does not adequately capture the dynamics of nickel price during my fieldwork in 2005-2006. While the contract price of nickel per ton on the London metal exchange was $5,400 USD at the time the Noumea Accords were signed in 1998, at the start of my fieldwork it went up to $30,000 and in the next six months topped out at over $54,000. The effect in the local economy was different than a trickledown—perhaps a flood would adequately describe the degree of administrative inaction and stock price wrangling that essentially infused huge amounts of cash into New Caledonia just as its industry was stymied by local union strikes and global mergers of multinationals who were now more interested in corporate cannibalism and quick profitable sales than in resource development. Coupled with the nickel question is another unexamined aspect of the vectors of connection between New Caledonia and France, namely the structuring of the economy. While 383

one might quickly be aware of the “indexation” policy through which the State pays functionaries and retirees in New Caledonia a full 72% salary bonus over their metropolitan counterparts (tax free). What is absent from this present work, which would be present in an ethnographic presentation are those signs and smells and banter which would bring alive the sheer level of relative wealth and State structured prosperity which is possible in this parochial tariff protected and heavily subsidized economy. This is not unique to New Caledonia but an aspect of the economy of La France Outremer generally. As shown by a publicity campaign to discontinue this structural over-pay for expatriation, some metropolitans are extremely displeased with this disparity in benefits paid in favor of their co-citizens en outremer (e.g. an ad in Figaro, 30th November 2006, p. 14) There are other questions about this relationship between France and its overseas possession which are likewise structural and address its historical shape and transformation— including the logics of parochialization versus freedom of colonial markets, policies of economic assimmilation versus autonomy and why some like Griault thought that autonomy of colonial economies and free trade would lead to global peace. This data about the historic political shape of the economy of New Caledonia as a French place entailing the assumptions, ideologies, intentions, and agencies which informed its design and execution would provide a place in this manuscript to present the mise en valeur genre of colonialism via value-added and development oriented projects, as well as post-colonial French aid and investment projects not necessarily directed at New Caledonia and its outremer sisters.

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Critique 2: Conjunctures versus Civilizations Historical ethnographic work suggests that before European exploration and colonization, many of the groups indigenous to New Caledonia constituted a meaningful relationship to the land through relationships with their ancestors. While the phrase “La Terre est la sang de morts” resonates analytically as an indexical claim premised on an iconicity between the redness of iron laden earth and the redness of flowing blood, it also situates individuals a landscape dotted with secret and semi-secret locations now often referred to generally as lieux saints or lieux de memoire often grottos or caves where in the past human remains might be kept, and more mundane locations with a more quotidian or banal sacredness. Kanaks often have an esoteric knowledge of where these locations are and how the location or its objects manifest what might be described as traditional ownership or indigenous tenure, and Europeans often roll this practice of secreteness and sacredness into the category of “taboo” religious practices seen in nearby pacific contexts but not accurately applicable to the people of the land of New Caledonia. In 2004 when the Avenir Ensemble “non-independence” political movement put forward an electoral slate for the Government of New Caledonia its policy platform was published in a document entitled 75 propositions pour un destin commun. One of the points sought to find a solution to what is often called the “problem foncier” dealing with the “patrimonie coutumier”— the existence of hundreds if not thousands of unregistered and unsurveyed lieux. The problem apparently is that these lieux complicated land transfers from the state domain to the public alienable domain, specifically when developers and individual buyers found themselves faced with a quiet claim that was previously unarticulated and unverifiable that some sacred use of the land qualified it as a part of the patrimonie coutumier. The proposal in the list of 75 proposes is

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that, once and for all, a thorough survey should be made which clearly identifies all sacred locations, allowing them to be preserved, and no longer hampering development projects. The direction I could turn to in analysis of this proposal might examine the miscommunication over the nature of land and ownership in Western versus Kanak systems, and how it leads to a proposal which the Avenir Ensemble seems to think would contribute to the “common destiny” by way of making a compromise: you can act now to preserve these locations as part of your cultural patrimony, so long as we can conduct land surveys and archaeological work that seeks me make this information into public disseminates knowledge about sacred lieux. Instead, before undertaking this type of task, as I demonstrated in my analysis of the Torrens Act for registered property, a better starting point is to realize first that the idea that land ownership is and should be a matter of public record is itself a relatively new proposal in European States (still being argued over circa 1880). The cadastral and other surveys and systematic methods of documenting registration and definitive ownership of land in order to make this information publicized are instead projects of civil law efforts to erase the legitimacy of common law land claims and the quietness and ambiguities they entail. From the perspective of civil versus common law and customary ownership, what I hope to make visible in this example is not only that concepts of the nature of land ownership which are now easily taken for granted are relatively new, and that curiously from the perspective of these concepts Kanak “traditional land tenure” is rendered not so terribly different from that practiced by certain aristocratic Northern Europeans in the last hundred years. What this reveals is a commonplace inability of categories of liberal governance, manifest in land policies, to structurally account for other possibilities of ownership or modes of 386

human relation with land and other objects. The subjectivities this civil liberal perspective engenders thereby curiously renders the nuance and particularity of 18th century European, present day Kanak, and Australian aboriginal relations with the land as everywhere the same by dint of being different from the liberal default. It is either civil and owned, or non-civil and market as customary or otherwise common law equivalent. There appears to be little room for the idea that land is a private family matter beyond civil jurisdictions and taxations (as it seems to have been in France in the recent past), or for a concept that another’s knowledge of your relationship with the land provides them with the means to destroy that relationship—for instance through disruption or removal of items through which the relationship is constituted, and which registered title does not offer a persuasive translation. I agree that concepts of land before and after colonization of New Caledonia likely shift in ways that are unaccounted for in this dissertation. The Torrens Act is an example which shows what fully civil ownership would look like, in which common law and custom and societal traditions completely ceases to exist as a type of valid land claim. This Torrens Act did not exist in European civilization, although something like it might have been fantasized about. This new convention for redefining the nature of land ownership did not take root except in outlandish areas far from European civilization: New South Wales, Iowa, Chicago, and Oahu. In terms of the ethnology of land, what I propose is as follows: 1) settler colonies and settler states are the most civilized in terms of the elaboration of civilizational law, and in terms of its rigorous dialectic segregation from common law and customary law. 2) Present day and historical settler states and colonies are the most explicit in allowing common law and customary law exceptions and in institutionalizing these alternative regimes. In short, what is produced in the colonial conjuncture in policy and social worlds is a refined civilization in the legal sense and its 387

opposite. While an earlier literature might suggest that colonialism constituted a “clash of civilizations” or an encounter in which “cultures and customs are consumed by outside civilization” what I suggest is that on its own terms—defined on its own criteria, from the inside out—civilization is quite literally what is produced in the colonial conjuncture where Europeans enter the World around them and attempt to rule it with a new book of civil governance. This future work can help examine two recurrent themes within liberal subjectivities of governance, which I argue are subscribed to today in many forms by indigenous cultural revival movements: “culture” as an older Boasian anthropology conceived of it, was in danger of dying out in the face of outside civilization and anthropology is essentially a salvage mission. Sahlins nicely explains why this is not so, and others can cleanly identify the idea that languages and cultures are dying out as a species of ideology. Within this liberalist ideology writ globally, we have a concept that indigenous cultures are threatened by an outside agency or “civilization”, and only agentive reaction and intervention can save them. Meanwhile, the conceit of those who speak in the interest of “civilization” (Huntington for example) is even more curious: they believe it will fall under its own weight, due to its own mistakes: civilization will be the agent of its own demise, and there is evidence of dead civilizations throughout the march of history. How then do we reach this curious situation: When it’s dead it was a civilization, but when it’s dying it is a culture? Unpacking this ideological riddle of the relationship between civilization, culture, and history might provide the leverage for understanding liberalism.

Critique 3: Other Perspectives of Colonial History There is one final question remaining: why land? Why not present this history of politics and governance in which civil and customary dialectics are made visible by using any of a myriad 388

plausible object of policy concern? One argument is that on a certain basic level, this dissertation is a study of social policies of a liberal state, and might have conclusions with social policy applications. A study focused on hygiene might prove equally informative: the colonies I suspect are more rigorously pasteurized than France itself, benefiting from new sewerage systems which remove human waste from the road’s surface in exactly the ways Paris does not necessarily benefit from today. There are multiple other technologies and techniques of policy which can perhaps similarly lead to the limited conclusions I draw here. However, as I mentioned in the introduction, property has a special place in liberal ideology. It is believed to be the reason for existence of society and all social contract, and land is the most special type of property. Individual ownership is also the basis of constituting ones standing to have voting membership in a polity: this was the French case during the vast part of the 1800s. With the Dawes Act in the United States, private property for the individual Cherokee meant that they entered “civilization” in a very concrete way: they became citizens. If this idea is tracked through its historical trajectories of the short durée, the basis of voting as a full citizen with full civil rights shifts from being the domain of a male head of a landowning household, to being a natural born or naturalized citizen. It we retain the historical origin point that land ownership is the foundation of political participation and citizenship in a liberal framework, than citizenship as a requirement to vote is also genealogically a land issue, and that majority rule and self rule is conceived of as a right based in not documented ownership of a specific piece of land, but being “of the land.” From this perspective, the rise of nationalism in liberal state contexts in the 1800s is no mysterious accident: full civil participation requires being of the land and landless migrants or migrants with land elsewhere are the prime example of an illegitimate subject and illegitimate resident. The nation-state form of government and sovereignty arguably 389

is a land issue, and the independence of New Caledonia and the rights to reparations for colonialism are routinely and unsurprisingly talked about in terms of land claims and complaints. As I argued in the dissertation that beliefs are factual in their results, perhaps no belief of liberal governance has wrought more results through the factual implications of policy than conventions of property and its alienability. The ways in which objects can stand for their owners as a fetishization or substitute in the technical sense means that land stands for people, that land can stand for a nation: they are coterminous with their property from a liberal standpoint, whether communal in ownership or individual. In this way I can argue that policies about land can accurately be seen as policies about people and their social relations. With this observation, the principle of land alienability and its policy intentions which I dealt with in the body of the dissertation can be used to structure an inquiry into include other types of alienation and their legal and ideological possibilities as allied in policy to New Caledonia. An examination of alienability ones labor for example to use a classic case which I briefly touched on necessarily occurs in a context of regimes of possibilities of alienability of land and taxation: without pressure of taxation or desirability of commodities Feillet learned that the populations under his control would not alienate their labor. The ideological backing in French contexts—of which Durkheim’s division of labor thesis is a species—is that work makes you free, that work is liberty, through the possibilities it provides and the emancipations it creates from want as well as family and custom. Within the rubric of alienation in a liberal framework, when indigenous lands are alienated to others it amounts to a political loss their nation. This is not an indigenous belief about land in New Caledonia, in fact they claim to believe that land cannot be alienated and is by nature inalienable (a dialogic and dialectic formed in relation to liberalism under the protective guidance of the Catholic church). Whatever their beliefs about sacred lieux, the Kanak more than 390

anyone else are in a position to realize that the regime enforced upon them is what sets the terms of engagement and the possibilities for action. In this context, asserting the inalienability of land is the best way to assert the inalienability of their nation in the face of a colonial history which has largely deprived them of the latter by dispossessing them of the former.

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