History of French Guiana

Pre-Columbian stone drawings in Kourou

Pre-Columbian period

Originally French Guiana was settled by indigenous tribes of the Caribs and Arawak .

Around the 6th millennium BC First traces of an indigenous American population appear: pottery, rock engravings and the like. These first known settlers practiced agriculture and began to create the fertile terra preta , which over the millennia created the basis for a population density that would otherwise not have been possible due to the relatively sterile natural soils of the region.

Towards the end of the 3rd century, members of the Arawak language family , coming from the west and south, penetrated the coastal area and expelled the local population.

Towards the end of the 8th century, Caribs occupied the coastal strip and the east of what is now Guyana.

Discovery and settlement by Europeans

In 1498, the area of today's French Guiana was first visited by Europeans. Christopher Columbus supposedly called the area "Land of the Pariah ". It was first settled by the Dutch around 1600, and then by the French and English from 1604 .

The Peace of Paris in 1763 at the end of the Seven Years' War stripped France of almost all of its American colonies , apart from French Guiana and a few islands (e.g. Guadeloupe , Martinique , Saint-Pierre and Miquelon ). King Louis XV thereupon sent thousands of settlers who were lured by promises of vast amounts of gold and wealth (see also El Dorado ). Instead, the settlers found a land with hostile indigenous people and tropical diseases . Most of the first settlers died within the first year and a half. Only a few hundred survived and fled to three small islands off the coast, which they called Îles du Salut ( German for "Islands of Rescue"). The largest they called Île Royale (German about "royal island" or "large island"), the middle Île Saint-Joseph (after the patron saint of the expedition ) and the smallest Île du Diable (German about "Devil's Island").

Beginnings as a penal colony

The terrifying reports of survivors who managed to return to France left a centuries-old negative impression of the area there. Therefore, after Robespierre's execution in 1794, 193 of his followers were exiled to French Guiana. In 1797, after the coup d'état of the 18th Fructidor , they were followed by General Jean-Charles Pichegru and numerous MPs and journalists. When they reached French Guiana, only 54 of the original 193 exiles remained - eleven had escaped, the rest had been carried away by tropical and other diseases.

A little later, Pichegru was able to escape to Paramaribo in Dutch Guiana and from there to the United States and England, from where he returned to France and finally died there in 1804 after a plot against Napoleon Bonaparte .

Napoleonic Wars

During the Napoleonic Wars surrendered Governor Victor Hugues from French Guiana in 1809 before a British-Portuguese expeditionary force under James Lucas Yeo . In 1817 France regained French Guiana.

First economic success

Later, slaves from Africa were taken to French Guiana and plantations were created along the rivers, which are less dangerous for tropical diseases. The export of sugar , precious woods , cayenne pepper (named after Cayenne , the capital of French Guiana) and other spices led to a certain prosperity in the colony for the first time. Several thousand slaves worked in some of the plantations around Cayenne.

abolition of slavery

In 1848, slavery was abolished in France . The released slaves settled in the jungle and founded settlements there based on the model of their homeland from which they had been abducted. The settlements of the former slaves formed a kind of buffer zone between the settlement areas of the Europeans (mainly along the coast and the larger rivers) and the natives (in the hinterland). In the absence of slave labor, many plantations soon had to be abandoned and overgrown again, the plantation owners were largely ruined.

In 1850 several ships with plantation workers from India , Malaya and China landed , but due to the decline of the plantation economy, they mostly settle as traders in Cayenne and other European settlements.

"Renaissance" of the penal colony

In 1852 the first shipload of prisoners in chains arrived from France. The influx of prisoners continued to increase from 1885 when the French parliament passed a law according to which everyone ( men and women) convicted more than three times for theft to a prison term of more than three months as relégué (German roughly "deported") in French -Guayana was to be banished. There the convicts were supposed to serve six months of their sentence in prison and then be released as settlers in the colony. The purpose of this law was to get rid of habitual criminals, but also to increase the number of settlers in French Guiana. However, this experiment failed completely because the prisoners proved unable to create a livelihood for themselves in the barren land, so that many became criminals again or struggled to survive on the fringes of society until their death. In reality, the "deportation" to French Guiana as a relégué was equivalent to a life sentence, which, however, usually soon led to death due to malnutrition and illness.

The country was also loaded with World War I prisoners of war . Alfons Paoli Schwartz from Alsace was the last German prisoner of war to return home on April 4, 1932.

The local population was massively suppressed by the apartheid- like system of the Code de l'indigénat .

From 1930 to 1946 the interior was administered as an independent colony Inini . This division was intended to attract French settlers who did not want to settle in a penal colony, and to promote the economic development of the undeveloped hinterland.

Ascent to the overseas department

After the Second World War , with the establishment of the Fourth Republic , the regime of the French colonies was also reorganized. By law of March 19, 1946, French Guiana became an overseas department and as such an integral part of metropolitan France.

The notorious penal colonies, including those on Devil's Island, were formally closed in 1951. Since not all released prisoners could afford to travel home to Europe , many settled in French Guiana, causing major social problems there. At the beginning of 1954, the remaining former convicts were therefore repatriated to France, with the exception of a group of mentally ill prisoners who remained interned in French Guiana under dire circumstances and who soon died because of the desolate conditions.

Problems in the present

With the decentralization laws of 1982, the overseas department of French Guiana simultaneously became an overseas region ( région d'outre-mer , DOM-ROM ). Despite a constitutional amendment in 2003, as in the other overseas departments, the duality of the now doubled, co-existing administrative structures of the department and the region has not yet been eliminated.

French Guiana’s biggest problem is its underdeveloped economy, which is also barely growing. The social standards (and the price level) correspond to the standards of the mother country, but French Guiana is dependent on (heavily subsidized) imports of food and all other everyday goods from Europe. Unemployment in French Guiana has remained at a consistently high level for decades (officially always over 20%).

The only significant development impetus in 1964 was the establishment of ESA's European Space Center ( Center Spatial Guyanais ) in Kourou , from which the Ariane rockets are launched. The economy of French Guiana benefited primarily indirectly from the space center with the immigrant technicians and the additionally stationed military contingent ( Légion étrangère ).

literature

Rudolphe Alexandre: La Guyane sous Vichy . Éditions Caribéennes, Paris 2004. ISBN 978-2-876-79032-2

Collectif: Deux siècles d'esclavage en Guyane française, 1652-1848. Éditions L'Harmattan, Paris 2000. ISBN 978-2-858-02633-3

Bernhard Conrad, Christine Willimzik: French Guiana as a travel destination . Edition Aragon, Moers 1995. ISBN 978-3-895-35046-7 (detailed list of literature pp. 353–358)

Bernhard Conrad (Ed.): Between Ariane, Merian and Papillon: Stories from French Guiana and Suriname. BoD, Norderstedt 2015. ISBN 978-3-734-79814-6 (Part I: French Guiana pp. 11–140; on ESA and Foreign Legion pp. 101–108; on penal colony pp. 125–134)

Bernhard Conrad: French Guiana . BoD, Norderstedt 2018. ISBN 978-3-748-19903-8 (on history, pp. 60–74; on politics, pp. 81–89; on population and ethnic groups, pp. 90–110)

Blair Niles: Condemned to Devil's Island . New American Library, New York 1971. ISBN 978-0-451-04536-2 (first edition: 1928; German first edition: Teufelsinsel , 1928)

Web links

Commons : History of French Guiana - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

↑ WDR reference date , accessed on December 21, 2015.

[1] WDR reference date , accessed on December 21, 2015.