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Caldoche is the name given to European inhabitants of the French overseas collectivity of New Caledonia, mostly native-born French settlers. The term "caldoche" has a pejorative connotation. The formal name to refer to this particular population is Calédoniens, short for the very formal Néo-Calédoniens, but this self-appellation technically includes all inhabitants of the New Caledonian archipelago, not just the Caldoche. Another "white" demographic element (although they may well be French people of different ethnic backgrounds) in the territory is expatriates from metropolitan France who live there temporarily as civil servants. Caldoches are keen to differentiate themselves from these inhabitants, underlining their position as the permanent locals, referring to them as métros (short for métropolitains) or as Zoreilles (informally zozos) in local slang.
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New Caledonia was used as a penal colony from 1854 to 1922 by France. From this period and on, many Europeans (particularly of French and, to some extent, German origin) settled in the territory and they intermingled with Asian and Polynesian settlers. Code de l'indigénat, introduced in 1887, provided the free settler population with an advantageous status over the indigenous Melanesian peoples, known collectively as Kanak. Caldoches settled and gained property on the dry west coast of the main island Grande Terre where the capital Nouméa is also located, pushing the Kanaks onto small reservations in the north and east. With the superior position, they constituted the ruling class of the colony and they were the ones who widened the usage of the word Canaque as a pejorative.
Caldoche culture is often compared to cultures of rural Australians and Afrikaners. They are, on the political level, typical loyalists (in the context of New Caledonia, they oppose independence from France). They were seen as supporters of the strongly Caldoche Rally for Caledonia in the Republic (Rally for Caledonia inside the Republic) until 2004, when their support shifted considerably towards Avenir ensemble ("Future Together"), which has the vision of a multiracial New Caledonia within the framework of the French Republic.
Etymology
There are many theories on the origin of the term "Caldoche". The most widespread story, as told by the collective lexicon 1001 Caledonian Words, attributes the term to local journalist and polemicist Jacqueline Schmidt, who participated actively towards the end of the 1960s in the debate concerning the Billotte laws (in particular the first law, which transferred mining responsibilities in New Caledonia to the state), and signed her articles with the pseudonym "Caldoche", a portmanteau of the prefix "Cald-", referring to her strong feeling of belonging to New Caledonia, where her family settled almost 100 years earlier, and the suffix "-oche", referring to the pejorative term "dirty Boche", having been called that by some of her schoolfriends' parents due to her German heritage (the Schmidts form part of an important German community from the Rhineland, having fled Germany to escape Prussian domination in the 1860s). The owner of the newspaper D1TO, Gerald Rousseau, found the name amusing, and popularised it.
Penal colonists
The first 250 prisoners arrived in Port-de-France on board the ship L'Iphigénie. Alain Saussol estimates that 75 different convoys brought around 21,630 prisoners to the penal colony between 1864 and 1897. By 1877, there were 11,110 penal colonists present in New Caledonia, making up around two-thirds of the European population at the time. The last prison colonies were closed in 1922 and 1931.
The prisoner population could be divided into roughly 3 groups. The 'transported' were convicts sentenced under common law, ranging from 8 years up to life, for crimes ranging from physical and sexual assault to murder. These were mostly taken to the prison at Île Nou and worked on the construction of roads and buildings in the colony. Political prisoners, or the 'deported', made up the second group. Many of these participated in the Paris Commune of 1871, 4250 of whom were sent either to Île des Pins or Ducos, including Louise Michel and Henri Rochefort. After they were all granted amnesty in 1880, less than 40 families decided to stay in New Caledonia. Another group of 'deporteds' were participants in the Mokrani Revolt of 1871-72 in Algeria, the majority of whom decided to stay in New Caledonia following the granting of amnesty in 1895 and from whom the majority of Algerian New Caledonians in Bourail are descended. Recidivists, or the 'relegated', made up the third group, 3757 of whom were sent from 1885 onwards to New Caledonia, particularly to Île des Pins, Prony or Boulouparis. The 'transported' and 'relegated' stopped being brought to New Caledonia in 1897.
Following being condemned to forced labour, the prisoners had to 'atone' for their crimes by working on penitentiary farms, and once freed were given a portion of the land. Overall around 1300 pieces of land, totalling around 260,000 hectares largely taken from the indigenous Kanak people, were awarded to freed prisoners, particularly around Bourail, La Foa-Farino, Ouégoa and Pouembout, where many of the descendants of the prisoner population remain to this day.