Between bites of croissant and sips of café au lait, from a table on the tiled terrace where Rue Jolie meets the bay-side esplanade, I watch the French flag flying above Akaroa’s volcanic beach. The tricolour is faded by the sun and wind, and disrespected by seagulls. It has clearly seen better days. But still, whenever the breeze sends a puff of air into it, unrolling the blue and the red, and the white mouth in between, it oddly and uncannily reminds me of French lips pouting with that unmistakeable irreverence. All that’s missing is the equally characteristic shrug of the shoulders and perhaps the words “Mais oui, pourquoi pas? Why not? It was a good idea. Pity that it did not work.”

Pity, indeed. Oh, Monsieur Langlois, if you had only hurried! How different things could have been, how drôle! We could have had topless beaches and chocolate from Côte d’Or, bœuf and coq au vin instead of pies and KFC, champignons not mushrooms, vineyards thick as native forests, scholarships at the Sorbonne. The New Zealanders from the North Island would be coming down to visit us, in our beautiful Nouvelle-France of the South, crossing Cook Strait the way the Brits traverse the English Channel, likewise looking for a place in the sun. Oh, Monsieur Langlois, instead you have left us with a vestige, a relic, a nostalgic remembrance of things past. Wonderings on what could have been.

Admittedly, being a closet Francophile in a country with a consensus distaste for things French is a tough proposition. The trans-Channel rivalry is almost genetic, its roots deep and tenacious no matter how far from its source it is transplanted. Who, in any case, can forget the Rainbow Warrior and President Chirac’s defiance at Moruroa, after which even buying ink cartridges for a French-made fountain pen was seen as an act of national treason? But in Akaroa, a quaint riviera town nestled in the nook of an ancient volcano, a holiday-makers’ hotspot and an international must-see, a closet Francophile can safely come out. Moreover, she or he can find kindred spirits, which is what originally attracted me here.

To get to my café table—where I work each morning in true Proustian fashion, sniffing pastries and filling the pages of notebooks—I walked down Rue Grehan, turned left into Rue Lavaud, and passed La Croix and Rue Balguerie. I saw des maisons and des hôtels, places with names like Ça Bouge and La Folie Jolie, even a garage offering réparations d’automobiles. I took my time, for this enclave of French connection is tiny and largely notional. Still, my morning promenade was long enough for the novelist’s perpetual question, What if?, to take hold in my mind. What if the French had made it to the South Island before the English? What if M. Langlois had driven his ship the way the French usually drive—with little regard for what speed they are going and overtaking everyone in their way?

I shall not argue the validity of the act. Arriving in an already inhabited land; planting a flag on its shores; claiming it as one’s own or buying it with trinkets; inviting the natives to join the new colony—this was standard operating procedure for acquiring large tracts of land when Captain Jean François Langlois, an adventurous and enterprising man of 29, anchored his whaler, Cachalot, in the shelter of Port Cooper (the old European name for Lyttelton Harbour) in August 1838.

This was the heyday of whaling, when the stock of ocean giants seemed inexhaustible and France alone had some 60 ships prowling the South Pacific. At that time, France did not yet have any colonies down under—no New Caledonia, no Marquesas or Tahiti or parts of Vanuatu—but Banks Peninsula was already an established and strategically located international port of call, busier than Wellington or Nelson. With its many sheltered coves, each with its own river and strip of beach between rocky headlands, it offered safe, attractive harbourage close to the whaling grounds and centrally located in the South Island. As Langlois saw it, the peninsula was an ideal piece of antipodal realty, a “foot in the door” to colonise l’Ile du Sud, a perfect base for the French conquest of the South Pacific.