Fort-de-France
Fort-de-France is a commune and the capital city of Martinique, an overseas department and region of France located in the Caribbean. This city, which had 76,512 inhabitants in 2019, concentrates major administrative, military, and cultural functions. It is also a significant economic, commercial, and port hub within the Lesser Antilles archipelago. The urban unit—that is, the agglomeration in the statistical and morphological sense defined by INSEE—had 115,501 inhabitants in 2022. However, Fort-de-France lies at the heart of a conurbation of 165,500 inhabitants, which includes the neighboring municipality of Le Lamentin, the university town of Schœlcher, and the communes of Saint-Joseph and Case-Pilote.
Fort-de-France has changed its name several times: the French first named the site Cul-de-Sac Royal. It then became the parish and later the town of Fort-Royal, before being renamed Fort-de-la-République or République-Ville following the Revolution. The town became Fort-Royal again and finally took the name Fort-de-France in 1807.
Fort-de-France is also known for its bay opening onto the Caribbean Sea, particularly the Baie des Flamands, which borders the city center.
History
The history of Fort-Royal, renamed Fort-de-France in 1807, has been marked since the founding of the colony by its rivalry with Saint-Pierre and by the natural disasters that repeatedly devastated the town. It was the eruption of Mount Pelée in 1902 which, by destroying Saint-Pierre, established Fort-de-France as the capital city of Martinique.Founding of the city
While the Caribbean Indigenous peoples favored the windward coast and the southern part of the island for their settlements, the French colonists settled as early as 1635 on the leeward coast at the site of Saint-Pierre, where they built a small fort at the mouth of the Roxelane River. However, in a context of conflicts with the Indigenous Caribs, the Dutch, and the English, the colonists soon turned their attention to another strategic site, located at the entrance to the island’s largest bay. This site was easy to defend and well protected from storms, unlike the roadstead of Saint-Pierre.Despite the unhealthy climate of the surrounding swamps, a first residential settlement was established on the site of today's city center by Governor Jacques Dyel du Parquet, nephew of the privateer Pierre Belain d'Esnambuc, who settled there in 1639. He had a first palisade fort built there, which he named Fort-Royal.
However, it was Governor Jean-Charles de Baas who decided to officially found the town under the name Fort-Royal on 3 October 1669. Work to drain and reclaim the swamps began, and the street alignment plan for the future town was approved by Colbert in 1671. This marked the birth of the 42-hectare quadrilateral, laid out in a grid pattern, which would become the urban core of the modern city: the lower town.
Nevertheless, the decision to establish a town in such an inhospitable location did not meet with unanimous support. The soft soil made construction difficult, and the swampy air led to high mortality due to malaria. The development of the town required major hydraulic works that took nearly a century to complete fully.
The year 1674 was marked by the famous Battle of Fort Saint-Louis, which saw the defeat of Admiral de Ruyter’s powerful Dutch fleet in its attempt to capture the town, and the incorporation of the French Antilles islands into the Crown of France.
In November 1677, the Count of Blénac landed in Martinique to succeed Governor de Baas, who had just died. It was he who completed the construction of the town, its fort, and who is remembered by history as the founder of the city. A determined and tireless administrator, he secured the transfer of the seat of the General Government and the Governor’s Palace from Saint-Pierre to Fort-Royal in 1692, making the new town the administrative capital of Martinique.
Fort-Royal in the 18th century
In 1738, the town was devastated by an earthquake.After the failed sea attack of 1759, the English captured Fort-Royal by land in 1762 following the landing of their troops at Case Navire. The fort and the whole of Martinique fell into British hands in February 1762.
Martinique was returned to France a year later under the Treaty of Paris. The town’s port facilities were then reduced to their bare minimum. The harbor basin was obstructed by the wrecks of eleven ships sunk by the English. Georges-René Pléville Le Pelley was appointed harbor master of Fort-Royal and tasked with its rehabilitation. During the restoration work, he drained the foul marshes surrounding the town and made the port accessible to larger commercial vessels. He abolished port access taxes and revived maritime trade. He then devoted himself to correcting nautical charts of the Antilles before being sent back to Marseille for health reasons. He was replaced by Robert Tascher de la Pagerie, father of the future Empress Joséphine.
Development of the city and rivalry with Saint-Pierre
After the period of British rule in 1794, the entry of Captain General Villaret-Joyeuse into Fort-Royal on 14 September 1802 marked Martinique’s return to France, following the Peace of Amiens signed with England. Under the Empire, in 1807, the city became the administrative capital of the colony and took the name Fort-de-France. This name was not questioned during the second British occupation, from 1809 to 1815. However, as an administrative and military city, Fort-de-France still suffered from the competition of Saint-Pierre, which was more populous, enriched by trade and commerce, and renowned for its cultural life throughout the Antilles arc. The two cities nonetheless complemented each other: while Saint-Pierre served as an anchorage port, Fort-de-France functioned as a careening port. Moreover, new port developments were carried out in Fort-de-France during the 1860s, and a dry dock was inaugurated in 1868.The present boundaries of the municipality date from 1888.
The arrival of enslaved people, freedpeople, and mixed-race populations—and then, from 1848 onward, populations that were now all free—spurred the city’s growth, which rose from about 9,200 inhabitants in the early 19th century to around 17,000 in 1876. In addition, the introduction of steam engines into the sugar-production system between 1840 and 1870 led to major changes in the agricultural and rural landscape of Martinique. This favored the concentration of land into large agricultural estates around central sugar factories and rum distilleries, while also creating a fragmentation of small properties and farms run by freedpeople or their descendants, and driving a large wave of rural exodus. At the same time, declining mortality accelerated population growth. Thus, in 1901, the census recorded 29,000 inhabitants in Saint-Pierre, compared to about 24,700 in Fort-de-France. But while the population of Saint-Pierre was almost entirely urban and spatially concentrated, that of Fort-de-France was far more dispersed: the urban area contained only 7,000 inhabitants, and most local jobs were still agricultural.
Natural and human-made disasters destroyed the city several times. A major earthquake ravaged the town on 11 January 1839. Later, a great fire destroyed three-quarters of the colonial city—nearly all of its 1,600 wooden houses, the market, and Saint-Louis Cathedral—on 22 June 1890. Then, on 18 August 1891, a cyclone struck the city, killing nearly 400 people. Ironically, it was yet another natural disaster that ultimately established Fort-de-France as the island’s leading city: the eruption of Mount Pelée, which devastated Saint-Pierre on 8 May 1902.
20th century
After the eruption of Mount Pelée, Saint-Pierre ceased to be a commercial city, having lost all the inhabitants who had remained there. Its repopulation proceeded slowly and only partially. Migrants from the northern part of the island arrived in large numbers in Fort-de-France, which then took over all the port, industrial, economic, and commercial functions of Martinique. To cope with this influx of population, the mayor of the city, Victor Sévère, revived in 1904 a project previously discussed by local officials at the end of the previous century: the reclamation and municipalization of Terres-Sainville, a vast swamp located northwest of the colonial lower town, at the time inhabited by impoverished people who had built their huts there.After a long legal battle to expropriate the inhabitants, the work was carried out in the second half of the 1920s, giving rise to a modern neighborhood intended for a working-class population. Its orthogonal street grid extended that of the city center, though with smaller blocks. Meanwhile, the neighborhoods of Sainte-Thérèse, Morne Pichevin, and Dillon, as well as other clusters of spontaneous individual housing, developed along the roads leading to nearby towns. Driven by natural population growth and rural exodus, these areas created an image of scattered, unruly urbanization.
In the 1930s, sanitation remained inadequate, as shown by the condition of the Levée Canal—a series of ditches separating Terres-Sainville from the center—the dump at Pointe Simon, and the gutters that served as open-air sewers. Outside the city center, however, upscale colonial-style residences climbed the airy heights of the Didier plateau, northwest of the city, and at Redoute, on the road to Morne-Rouge. Fort-de-France thus appeared as a city of contrasts, more heterogeneous and less wealthy than Saint-Pierre had been in its golden age.
The economic crisis of the 1930s and World War II, which limited markets for Martinique’s sugar, harmed its agricultural system. The closure of major sugar factories during the 1950s and 1960s, the difficulties faced by small landowners or farmers to live off the products of their land, and rapid population growth combined to fuel emigration to mainland France and rural exodus toward Fort-de-France.
Benefiting from the 1946 departmentalization law and now better connected to the rest of the island thanks to improved road networks, the city offered hope of finding jobs in services and public facilities. The population grew from 16,000 inhabitants in 1894 to more than 52,000 in 1936, and then 66,000 in 1946. Although the reliability of censuses prior to 1954 is questionable—the 1954 census counted 60,600 inhabitants in Fort-de-France, revealing that the 1946 figure had been overestimated—it is undeniable that demographic growth was strong until 1967, before stabilizing around 100,000 between 1974 and 1990. This growth came with the multiplication of shantytowns and other informal settlements that then surrounded the hypercenter : Texaco, which lent its name to Patrick Chamoiseau’s famous novel, winner of the 1992 Prix Goncourt, Canal-Alaric, Volga-Plage, Trénelle, Citron, Fond-d’Or, Renéville, etc.
By the mid-1970s, it was estimated that 40% of buildings in Fort-de-France had been constructed without authorization and that unhealthy neighborhoods represented a quarter of all housing, sheltering a quarter of the municipality’s population. To meet the needs, Aimé Césaire, mayor of the city from 1945 to 2001, undertook the construction of large social-housing complexes, such as the Dillon, Floréal, Bon-Air, and Calebasse estates in the 1960s and 1970s, and Châteaubœuf in the 1980s, as well as more residential neighborhoods, and supported the densification of central districts. The “hardening” of most former shantytowns—which were connected to utilities and legalized—also accompanied the public policy aimed at eliminating substandard housing.
Since 1990, the population of Fort-de-France has been declining in favor of neighboring municipalities such as Schœlcher, Saint-Joseph, and Le Lamentin, and even further south in Martinique, where subdivision housing and collective residential complexes have been developed. The population fell below 90,000 inhabitants in the 2007 census. Similarly, new employment areas have been established in these peripheral zones. This trend led the municipality to undertake urban restructuring projects in order to restore the city’s attractiveness and improve its living environment.
On May 22, 2020, the day commemorating the abolition of slavery in Martinique, the two statues of Victor Schoelcher located in Fort-de-France and in Schœlcher were destroyed by protesters who identified themselves as “anti-béké and anti-colonial heritage.” The protesters accused the French authorities and local governments of “celebrating only white men and obscuring the figures of enslaved people who revolted,” and reproached Schoelcher in particular for having allowed financial compensation to be paid to former white slave owners as part of abolition.