Rosie Millard on the forgotten corners of France’s empire

What is a DOM-TOM?

DOM-TOMS were invented after the Second World War when France was thinking about how to deal with its colonies. Britain came up with the idea of the Commonwealth and granted independence to most of its colonies. France did exactly the opposite and bound its colonies even closer to the Mothership. I think it was possibly because of their humiliation in the Second World War. They were occupied. They wanted to instil a notion of their global importance.

The bigger colonies like Algeria and French Indochina rebelled in the fifties. But the smaller ones, the tiny little islands, the uninhabitable jungles, the ones that had been used by France as a penal colony or a sugar colony or as a place to get fish or fur, they realised there was no point in becoming independent. Not when they had France basically to pay their way.

So they were quite happy to remain part of France. And they were much more than just a colony. They were made into a départements d’outremer (DOM) or a territoires d’outremer (TOM), so the DOM-TOMS. For reasons of brevity the South Pacific ones were meant to be the TOMs and the Atlantic ones tend to be the DOMs, apart from La Réunion. That’s in the Indian Ocean but is also a TOM.

They sound pretty obscure…

There’s one, an island called Clipperton, which is off the coast of Mexico and completely uninhabited – an uninhabited atoll, named after a British pirate and the French have got that for some reason. They had a falling out over it with Mexico.

The French say that if you look at the amount of ocean around each of these islands and the marine sovereignty it gives them, it makes them the world’s second maritime power. They’ve got all these tiny islands scattered around the world, including Polynesia, which is the size of Europe.

They also quite like saying that the sun never goes down on the tricolore. They love saying that to British people because of course that was the slogan of the British Empire – you know, the sun will never set on the British Empire.

What appealed to you about the DOM-TOMs?

I was fascinated when I found out about them because I find France very alluring as a country. I love its culture, I love Paris and to find that there were these places where France had replicated itself, turned into mini-versions of itself – albeit in tropical areas – was just so interesting. I liked the idea that wherever you are in the world, at twilight, there will be a bunch of French men playing pétanque – there are pétanque squares all around the world, the tricolore flies on all around the world.