Saint Pierre and Miquelon

Origins

French fishermen used the islands from the 16th century. Under the Treaty of Paris of 1763, which ended New France on the mainland, Britain allowed France to keep Saint-Pierre and Miquelon as an unfortified shelter for its fishermen on the Grand Banks. Settlers, many of them Acadians, arrived soon afterwards.

Rule and society

The colony depended almost entirely on cod fishing and salting. Britain seized and emptied the islands during wars in 1778, 1793 and later, and French rule was only lasting from 1816. In the 1920s Saint-Pierre prospered by smuggling alcohol into the Prohibition-era United States. In 1941 Free French forces took the islands from Vichy control, an early Gaullist success.

To the present

The islands became an overseas territory in 1946, an overseas department in 1976 and a territorial collectivity in 1985. The collapse of the cod fishery and a 1992 maritime boundary ruling in Canada's favour hit the economy hard; the islands still rely on French state support.