The key singularity in the relationship between the French Republic and Brazil lies in the existence of a shared land border extending over 730 kilometres. A rather small stretch for Brazil, but the largest frontier in the French territory, which is more than sixteen times smaller in area than the Brazilian giant. This unique neighbouring relationship between the European Union’s second-largest economy and South America’s largest country, a founding member of Mercosur, is underscored to highlight the affinities between the two nations. The Amazon region is today, in truth, a global geopolitical challenge. Long deemed peripheral, it has gradually acquired an importance it was once far from possessing, for Brasília and Paris alike.
Before it was cherished, such proximity was long marked by conflict, having even given rise to bloody clashes during the nineteenth century. In 1900, the arbitration of the President of the Swiss Confederation settled the dispute, ruling in favor of Brazil on the basis of the arguments presented by the Baron of Rio Branco, Minister of Foreign Affairs from 1902 to 1912.
The Franco-Brazilian frontier, finally fixed along the Oyapock River, like any international boundary, separates two sovereign nations whilst also serving as a place of exchange and movement. The two banks of the Oyapock share a historical background that has shaped their society and culture, such as the subjugation of Indigenous populations, slavery, colonization, and all their social and environmental consequences. They face the same harrowing challenges: regional integration, improving living conditions for the majority of inhabitants, respect for multiculturalism, development that does not endanger ecosystems and biodiversity, the combating of drug trafficking and illegal gold mining…
A Disputed Frontier
Territorial disputes between the Portuguese and the French go back a long time. In 1713, the Treaty of Utrecht, which ended the War of the Spanish Succession, designated the river “Japoc or Vicente Pinzon” as the boundary between the two domains. The problem is that, for the French, that river is the Araguary, located in the present-day state of Amapá, whereas for the Portuguese, and subsequently for the Brazilians, it is the Oyapock. In the absence of maps and precise knowledge of those regions, which were far removed from the interests of either government, the “disputed” region was neutralized from 1840. In the 1880s, while France was actively participating in the great imperialist expansion and extending its colonial empire in Africa, the claims became more precise. Tensions degenerated with the discovery of gold in the Contestado in 1893 and the influx of thousands of prospectors. In May 1895, clashes between French and Brazilian troops caused around fifty deaths. The “Amapá massacre,” as the episode became known, led the French government and the young Federative Republic of Brazil to resort to Swiss arbitration, which placed the disputed territory under Brazilian sovereignty and fixed the frontier along the Oyapock River.
A “Republic of Counani”
The territory under dispute was neither French nor Brazilian until 1900. The region of the Cunani River was explored by Henri Coudreau (1859–1899), who considered it promising. Prospectors settled there, and fugitive slaves took refuge there (slavery had been abolished in 1848 in the French colonies). On July 23, 1886, the “Independent Republic of Guiana” or “Republic of Cunani” was proclaimed by a group of French citizens. The microstate adopted a flag, an anthem, and minted its own currency. The journalist Jules Gros (1829–1891) expressed his support and was appointed “lifelong president.” Neither France nor Brazil recognized this independence. The end of the territorial dispute did not prevent another adventurer, Adolphe Brézet, from maintaining the fiction of a “Free State of Cunani” from 1904 until his death in 1911.
“Madame Coudreau in traveling attire (1898)”
Octavie Coudreau (1867–1938) accompanied her husband Henri Coudreau on several explorations in the Amazon, in the service of the government of French Guiana and the provinces of Pará and Amazonas. After his death in 1899 near the Trombetas River, she decided to carry on the profession of explorer.