FORT-DE-FRANCE, Martinique (AP) - French Interior Minister and presidential hopeful Nicolas Sarkozy sought to ease tensions on Friday with the country's Caribbean islands, where locals are outraged over a French law forcing textbooks to put a positive spin on colonialism.

Sarkozy was on the final day of a two-day tour of Guadeloupe and Martinique, former colonies that are now French departments with budgets funded and laws set by Paris, and where islanders carry French passports and spend euros.

Yesterday he met with Martinique's top elected official, Regional Council President Alfred Marie-Jeanne, whose calls for protests were in part responsible for Sarkozy's cancellation of a Caribbean trip in December.

Marie-Jeanne and others were angry over a law passed last year that forced France's textbook publishers to put a positive spin on the country's colonial history.

The uproar over the law embarrassed the conservative government, already shaken by three weeks of rioting this fall that was widely blamed on France's failure to integrate ethnic minorities. French President Jacques Chirac said in January that the law would be rewritten.

"I hope that the barriers of misunderstanding will fall," Marie-Jeanne said after meeting Sarkozy in Fort-de-France.

Marie-Jeanne offered Sarkozy a symbolic gift: a three-volume history of Martinique.
"We do have a history," he said.

Sarkozy, in turn, called Marie-Jeanne a "man of peace and conviction" and gave him a book called Peace.

Many in the Caribbean equate the colonial period with slavery, which in France was concentrated in its Caribbean colonies, with Africans captured and brought across the Atlantic to toil on plantations. France abolished slavery twice. It was outlawed in 1794, and re-established in 1802. Definitive abolition came in 1848.

In a speech Thursday in Guadeloupe, Sarkozy - whose Caribbean tour is seen geared to boost his image ahead of next year's race to replace President Jacques Chirac - saying France could not separate colonialism from slavery.

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