Plucked From Obscurity, a French Outpost Navigates the Spotlight

ST. PIERRE and MIQUELON, France — The last outpost of France’s once-vast colonial empire in North America, the tiny archipelago of St. Pierre and Miquelon is nearly encircled by Canada and far closer to the United States than to Paris. Marooned, perhaps, but safe in the anonymity of the world’s lost corners.

Then, three recent events yanked it from obscurity: a hit television series from Canada, a political insult from France and tariffs — of course — from the United States.

“All of a sudden, these three developments have made us very much in demand,” said Yannick Abraham, a vice president of the territory’s government, in his office in St. Pierre, a few blocks from the ferry that links the islands to Canada’s Newfoundland, 16 miles away. “Too much so.”

Tourists boarding the ferry to the islands — so close to Canada but a far-flung territory of France — are now warned to secure lodging first.

“Everything is booked solid,” Abraham said, adding that many visitors were unable to find places to stay or even eat.

Capping a year of unusual attention, the territory will be the setting this weekend for a meeting between President Emmanuel Macron of France and Prime Minister Mark Carney of Canada with the aim of “reasserting national sovereignty” in the face of American expansionism. The visit on Sunday by Carney — whose push to make Canada less dependent on the United States rests greatly on his ambitions to forge closer ties with Europe — will be the first by a Canadian leader to the islands.

The archipelago of three islands and a few islets is sheltered from the open Atlantic by the far larger Newfoundland. A small fraction of the territory’s 6,000 French citizens live on the biggest island, Miquelon, with most in St. Pierre, the site of the local government and the representative of the French government.

St. Pierre rises gently along fog-shrouded hills behind its harbor, along streets and squares named after Charles de Gaulle, Louis Pasteur and Molière. Bistros, bakeries, cafes cluster in surprising numbers in the commercial center. At the same time, St. Pierre’s brightly painted wooden houses recall those of Newfoundland, and Canadian hardware chains have gained a toehold on the French island.

“It’s the kind of place you hear about in your high school history class, but then you forget about it,” said Catherine Quimper, who was visiting from Montreal with her husband, Andrew Winger, a colonial history enthusiast. “I had to look it up on a map before coming.”

At the heart of St. Pierre and Miquelon’s identity is a paradox. Among the far-flung French territories that speckle the planet, it is one of the oldest. It is also, Abraham noted, “the least distant” from Paris — about 3,000 miles away, but far closer than Tahiti, Guadeloupe or Réunion.

Yet St. Pierre and Miquelon is probably the least known, even among the French, said Abraham, who lived for a decade in mainland France.

“Everywhere I went, people would say, ‘Oh, you’re from St. Pierre and Miquelon — that’s nice — but where is St. Pierre and Miquelon?’” he recalled. “Many people think we’re in the Caribbean.”

The first event to draw the territory out of obscurity took place in January 2025, when a television crime series, “St. Pierre,” began airing. Filmed on location with locals serving as extras and the territory’s insularity turned into a brooding presence, the series was, surprisingly, a Canadian production for the Canadian Broadcasting Corp., the national broadcaster.

Now a hit in its third season, it is credited with drawing Canadian tourists, though some things sound a bit off, including the show’s English dialogue and a murder rate of roughly one per episode.

“We don’t really have breaking news here — mostly soft news,” said Telesia Vaivaikava, editor of the local France Télévisions station, part of the national public television network. Vaivaikava was posted to the territory after working in mainland France and in her native Wallis and Futuna, a French territory in the South Pacific.

Then, in April 2025, two back-to-back events catapulted the territory into the global spotlight.

Given the place of immigration in politics worldwide, few locals were surprised when a hard-line, conservative French politician proposed sending migrants awaiting deportation to St. Pierre and Miquelon. The territory’s government turned the idea into a satirical ad campaign that ended up drawing French tourists instead.

The shocker came when President Donald Trump put the tiny territory on the map.

As Trump unleashed tariffs worldwide on what he called Liberation Day, St. Pierre and Miquelon found itself lumped in with the world’s so-called worst offenders — slapped with a 50% tariff. The news perplexed residents, but drew global traffic to the local France Télévisions’ website.

“People were only just discovering that St. Pierre and Miquelon existed,” said Mehdi El Ghazouani, who oversees the broadcaster’s digital news.

Local officials eventually figured out what had happened. The year before, the territory had exported an unusually large shipment of halibut to the United States. More significant, though, was that goods it buys from the United States transit through Canada and never appear as direct American imports, Abraham said.

A few days later, Washington quietly dropped the 50% tariff and imposed a baseline 10% tariff instead.

“It made us laugh that they were talking about us like that in the White House,” Abraham said.

It was not the first time the archipelago had found itself at the mercy of greater powers. It changed hands between France and Britain half a dozen times in the 18th and 19th centuries and is now what is left of New France, the vast colony that once stretched across much of what is Canada and the United States today.

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During World War II, the territory alarmed Canada and the United States after falling under the collaborationist Vichy regime. Its radio station sent weather reports that could aid German submarines and broadcast Vichy propaganda heard as far away as Quebec, said Marc-Albert Cormier, a local historian.

Fearing that Canada might take over the territory, de Gaulle, the Free France leader, ordered its seizure on Christmas Eve in 1941 — upsetting the U.S. government over what it perceived as interference in North America. The next day, a banner headline in The New York Times read: “Free French Seize St. Pierre and Miquelon.”

“We made the front page of The New York Times,” Cormier said, “and then we were forgotten.”

The territory prospered quietly for decades as a hub for international fishing fleets. But the industry collapsed in 1992 after a dispute with Canada shrank its fishing grounds and overfishing depleted cod stocks.

Today, the territory is pinning its future on tourism. More investment is needed to keep up with demand, said Patricia Detcheverry, who opened a travel agency in 2024, noting that the territory has only 100 hotel rooms.

The islands never recovered from the loss of fishing. Many shops sit shuttered in St. Pierre, and the population is among the oldest in France.

Last February, Raymond Ruel closed the territory’s last bookstore, Lecturama, citing declining sales and no successor.

“On Saturdays, many people came to talk about books,” Ruel said. “It was a gathering place. It’s a shame.”

About half of all jobs are in government, and the territory relies heavily on support from the French government and the European Union.

“If France dropped us, I think we’d become Canadian,” said Jean-Luc Cuza, a retired maritime radio operator.

That is unlikely. Though France spends billions on its sprawling overseas possessions, they give the country the world’s second-largest maritime domain, after the United States.

Marc Didio, the prefect who represents the French government in the territory, said St. Pierre and Miquelon sits in an increasingly strategic part of the world — pointing to Trump’s pressure on Denmark over Greenland and the trade tensions between Canada and the United States.

“Having a French voice in this part of the world on polar strategy is certainly valuable,” Didio said.

For many locals, though, the quiet anonymity remains preferable. Detcheverry said one of her children was already working in mainland France, and another was headed there.

“I know that if things really go wrong in France, if there’s a war, if Russia attacks, if they can’t find jobs because of a severe economic crisis, they can always come back here,” Detcheverry said. “They’re really lucky to have this lifeboat.”