Grove Koger
Perhaps you’re familiar with the French word outremer (oo-truh-mehr). Until recently, I think I’ve encountered it only once, in the 1974 novel, Monsieur; or, The Prince of Darkness by Lawrence Durrell, who did, in fact, spend most of his life outremer.
In its most literal definition, the word simply means “overseas,” but it has other definitions as well, although I didn’t know about them until I started investigating the word further.
In their Introduction to The French of Outremer: Communities and Communications in the Crusading Mediterranean (Fordham UP, 2018), Laura K. Morreale and Nicholas L. Paul write that the word “has been used for centuries to designate various ‘overseas’ territories, and to this day outre-mer is associated with a variety of legal, administrative, and cultural relationships between France and its former colonies throughout the world.”
More precisely, outre-mer can refer to what the French know as their Départements et régions d’outre-mer, their Collectivités d’outre-mer, and their Territoire de’outre-mer—those former colonies that are now parts of France but that lie beyond the European, or Metropolitan, part of the country. The categories have changed over the past few decades, as the political world has evolved, but as I’ve tried to sort through them all, I’ve wondered whether a kind of bureaucratic mania for political taxonomy might also be at work.
At the present time, the Départements include the island of Réunion and the archipelago of Mayotte, both of which are in the Indian Ocean; Guyane, or French Guiana, on the northeastern coast of South America; and the islands of Guadeloupe and Martinique in the Caribbean.
France’s Collectivités are Saint Pierre and Miquelon, an archipelago in the Gulf of S. Lawrence; the island of Saint Barthélemy and the northern part of the island of Saint Martin, both in the Caribbean; and French Polynesia and the Territory of Wallis and Futuna, in the South Pacific Ocean. In addition, French Polynesia (which is made up of more than one hundred islands and atolls) has been a particular kind of collectivity, a Pays d’outre-mer or overseas “country” within France, since 2004.
Then there’s France’s single Territoire de’outre-mer, the Terres australes et antarctiques françaises, or French Southern and Antarctic Territories, which is composed of five districts, none of which has a permanent population. This fragmented entity is made up of the Îles Éparses, or Scattered Islands, which lie in the tropics near Madagascar and are all nature preserves; Terre Adélie, a narrow wedge of land claimed by France on the continent of Antarctica; and three archipelagoes in the southern Indian Ocean: Crozet Islands, Kerguelen Islands, and Saint Paul and New Amsterdam Islands.
(In the interests of accuracy, I’ll mention that there are at least two other pieces of overseas France that don’t fall into any of the political categories I’ve discussed: the uninhabited atoll of Clipperton Island in the North Pacific and the much larger island of New Caledonia and its dependencies in Melanesia. According to The World Factbook, the latter is considered a sui generis collectivity of France—a “unique status falling between that of an independent country and a French overseas department.”)
As Morreale and Paul point out, “In the francophone West of the central and later Middle Ages, la terre d’outremer [also] designated a similarly complex patchwork of principalities forged in the eastern Mediterranean in the context of the First Crusade in the decade from 1098-1109 and lasting until the fall of the last bastions of Frankish dynastic power in Cyprus and mainland Greece in the late fifteenth century.” These territories, which are usually referred to as the Crusader States, were the Principality of Antioch, the County of Edessa, the Kingdom of Jerusalem, and the County of Tripoli. They’ve been the subject of a number of books and studies, and deserve their own post sometime down the line.
The image of the constituent lands of the French Republic at the top of today’s post is by Godefroy, while the map of Polynesia (with French Polynesia on the right) is by Hobe/Holger Behr. The two flags are those of New Caledonia, which is one of the few countries or territories in the world to have two national flags. The map of the Crusader States is by Amitchell125 and, like the other images, is reproduced courtesy of Wikimedia Commons.
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