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Caldoche
Caldoche (French pronunciation: [kaldɔʃ] ⓘ) is the name given to inhabitants of the French overseas collectivity of New Caledonia of European ethnic origin who have settled in New Caledonia since the 19th century. 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 European demographic within the population of New Caledonia are expatriates from metropolitan France who have arrived recently or live there temporarily as French government civil servants and contract workers. Caldoche emphasise their own distinct identity and position as permanent locals who have lived in New Caledonia for several generations by referring to the temporary French expatriates as métros (short for métropolitains) or as Zoreilles (informally zozos) in local slang.
A majority of the Caldoche are of French descent and have their origins as free colonial or penal settlers, with smaller but significant numbers of Caldoche being of Italian, German, British, Polish, Belgian and Irish heritage. French is the main language spoken by the Caldoche.
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.
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.
Many colonists either came to New Caledonia through personal initiative or were supported by government programmes and policies to populate New Caledonia. Examples of different waves of settlement include the following:
As well as these planned colonisation projects, many other settlers arrived through their own initiative, for various reasons including poverty at home (such as in the case of Irish and Italian settlers, as well as peasants from mountainous areas of France which were hit hard by the rural crisis of the 19th century), the possibility of acquiring wealth, politics (e.g. republican militants who fled Metropolitan France during the 1851 Coup, or people from Germany and Alsace who refused to live under Prussian rule), or simply overstaying their posts in the civil service or the military.
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.
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Caldoche AI simulator
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Caldoche
Caldoche (French pronunciation: [kaldɔʃ] ⓘ) is the name given to inhabitants of the French overseas collectivity of New Caledonia of European ethnic origin who have settled in New Caledonia since the 19th century. 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 European demographic within the population of New Caledonia are expatriates from metropolitan France who have arrived recently or live there temporarily as French government civil servants and contract workers. Caldoche emphasise their own distinct identity and position as permanent locals who have lived in New Caledonia for several generations by referring to the temporary French expatriates as métros (short for métropolitains) or as Zoreilles (informally zozos) in local slang.
A majority of the Caldoche are of French descent and have their origins as free colonial or penal settlers, with smaller but significant numbers of Caldoche being of Italian, German, British, Polish, Belgian and Irish heritage. French is the main language spoken by the Caldoche.
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.
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.
Many colonists either came to New Caledonia through personal initiative or were supported by government programmes and policies to populate New Caledonia. Examples of different waves of settlement include the following:
As well as these planned colonisation projects, many other settlers arrived through their own initiative, for various reasons including poverty at home (such as in the case of Irish and Italian settlers, as well as peasants from mountainous areas of France which were hit hard by the rural crisis of the 19th century), the possibility of acquiring wealth, politics (e.g. republican militants who fled Metropolitan France during the 1851 Coup, or people from Germany and Alsace who refused to live under Prussian rule), or simply overstaying their posts in the civil service or the military.
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.