Wartime Tahiti placed

on the record

When Hitler’s war broke out in Europe in September, 1939, the French residents of Tahiti and the surround ing islands could not work up much excitement about it.

As Dr Emile de Curton, one of the residents of the time, explains in his new book Tahiti 40, there were no newspapers in Tahiti in those days, and those received from France were generally two months old. The only news items that appeared in the government news bulletins were the rare official despatches received by the radio station, and these were re peated in a few lines and without commentary. Such radio receivers as existed in Tahiti did not regularly pick up the news broadcasts from Australia, America and Japan; most Frenchmen, in any case, did not know enough English to make much sense of them; and the few residents who did took the view that it was not “their” war—that they had not come to Oceania to worry about affairs on the other side of the world.

“Seen from Papeete,” Dr de Curton says, “the phoney war could not but seem other than dull and the battles whose feeble echo occasionally reached us from time to time were not sufficiently important or dramatic to maintain a state of continuing tension that could overcome the unchanging calmness of the Islands climate.”

In the circumstances, everyone went about their daily affairs much as they had always done. In Dr de Curton’s case, his business was to administer and provide medical assistance in the Leeward Islands of the Society Group —Raiatea, Tahaa, Borabora and Huahine—in the dual role of Medicin administrateur. There, life went on at an even more relaxed pace than in Tahiti. Inter-island communications were non-existent and the lack of economic development in the archipe lago was “accentuated by chronic under-administration,” which, as Dr de Curton puts it, “paralysed every individual initiative.”

It was in this atmosphere that Dr de Curton, not knowing anything of the dramatic events that preceded it, heard the news that France had fallen, that the armistice with Germany was signed, and the war “finished”. How ever, in continuing to go on his rounds, he found the local Poly nesians remarkably optimistic; and far from having to convince them of the need to continue the combat, it

was they who inspired him with the idea of doing so.

Three weeks after the armistice, at a somewhat mournful party on Raiatea to celebrate Bastille Day (July 14, 1940), one chief after another made the point that, although the Germans had overrun France, they had not defeated France’s over seas territories, that the islands’ people were not vanquished, etc, etc.

From this point onwards, Dr de Curton became one of the leaders of a movement that soon rallied the people of French Polynesia behind the Allies and the Free French forces of General de Gaulle.

It is the story of this movement — a somewhat blundering movement at first, for no one was quite sure who they should rally to—that Dr de Curton tells in his book.

The broad details of that story were outlined, uniquely, in the pages of PIM at the time—how Governor Chastenet de Gery issued a proclama tion on June 25, 1940, stating that French Oceania and the rest of the French empire would fight on, but how he failed to do anything positive about it; how a Committee of Free France forced his government to hold a plebiscite on Tahiti and Moorea in which only 18 people voted to re main under the Petain government and 5,564 threw in their lot with de Gaulle; how Governor de Gery was thus forced to resign; how a pro visional government of four men was then formed; how the government was later taken over by a military officer, Edmond Mansard; and how Dr de Curton himself took charge when Mansard became incapacitated through sickness.

Dr de Curton supports his story with reproductions of 30-odd key documents —proclamations and the like—which he apparently preserved through the turmoil and has kept down the years. In many cases, his copies are very likely the only ones now in existence so their publication in his book gives it a particular value.

Among the many interesting points he makes is that in the plebiscite to decide the alignment of the territory, those who voted for de Gaulle were mainly Protestants, the Catholics having abstained. This, he says, was a carryover from the days of religious rivalry dating back to the famous Pritchard affair of the 1840 s.

Subsequently, the various authorities

had to tread warily to ensure that there was not a second Pritchard affair.

Another point that the author makes is that one of the most enthusiastic supporters of the Free French movement was Francis San ford, now French Polynesia’s re presentative in the French parliament, a leading autonomist, and a devout anti-Gaullist.

Dr de Curton’s book unfortunately stops short at, and barely mentions, what was undoubtedly the most extra ordinary side of his career in French Oceania. In June, 1941, after he had held the governorship for eight months, he and several of his top aides were arrested by a Gaullist envoy, Commandant Richard Brunot, who had been sent to the French Pacific as Governor-General.

Dr de Curton and his confreres were interned on Moorea, and Brunot himself assumed the governorship, until he, in turn, was removed from office three months later by another Gaullist envoy, Rear-Admiral d Argenlieu.

The background to the so-called Brunot revolution” and its after math is still something of a mystery.

In one of his books, General de Gaulle dismissed it all in a few lines and Or de Curton says in his: “But that s another story.” He goes on to say that the Brunot affair “no doubt merits ... a more detailed study and a less summary analysis. ...”

And it is more or less on this note that he ends his book.

One can only hope that one day Dr de Curton will also favour the world with his side of that strange other story.”

Tahiti 40 is the 31st book (in French) to be published by the irrepressible Societe des Oceanistes, Musee de I’Homme, Paris. Another of its recent publications is Archeo k)gie des Nouvelles-Hebrides by Jose

Garanger, a thorough-going analysis

of archeological work in the Anglo- French Condominium. Prices for the two books are not available. —Robert Langdon.