Another European demographic within the population of New Caledonia are expatriates from metropolitan France who have arrived recently or live there temporarily as French government civil servants and contract workers.

Code de l'indigénat, introduced in 1887, provided the free settler population with an advantageous status over the indigenous Melanesian peoples, known collectively as Kanak.

Caldoches settled and gained property on the dry west coast of the main island Grande Terre where the capital Nouméa is also located, pushing the Kanaks onto small reservations in the north and east.

The most widespread story, as told by the collective lexicon 1001 Caledonian Words, attributes the term to local journalist and polemicist Jacqueline Schmidt, who participated actively towards the end of the 1960s in the debate concerning the Billotte laws (in particular the first law, which transferred mining responsibilities in New Caledonia to the state[1]), and signed her articles with the pseudonym "Caldoche", a portmanteau of the prefix "Cald-", referring to her strong feeling of belonging to New Caledonia, where her family settled almost 100 years earlier, and the suffix "-oche", referring to the pejorative term "dirty Boche", having been called that by some of her schoolfriends' parents due to her German heritage (the Schmidts form part of an important German community from the Rhineland, having fled Germany to escape Prussian domination in the 1860s[2]).

Examples of different waves of settlement include the following: As well as these planned colonisation projects, many other settlers arrived through their own initiative, for various reasons including poverty at home (such as in the case of Irish and Italian settlers, as well as peasants from mountainous areas of France which were hit hard by the rural crisis of the 19th century), the possibility of acquiring wealth, politics (e.g. republican militants who fled Metropolitan France during the 1851 Coup, or people from Germany and Alsace who refused to live under Prussian rule), or simply overstaying their posts in the civil service or the military.

[citation needed] Many of these participated in the Paris Commune of 1871, 4250 of whom were sent either to Île des Pins or Ducos, including Louise Michel and Henri Rochefort.

Notable French immigration waves include those who fled Alsace and Lorraine following the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Creole people from Réunion who fled during the sugar crisis of the 1860s and 1870s, merchants and ship owners from Bordeaux and Nantes drawn to the island at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th centuries by economic opportunities related to the discovery of nickel reserves, and colonists from the Nord and Picardy regions.

Other French people who settled the island included sailors and adventurers from Normandy and Brittany, as well as settlers from the poorest regions of France in what is now the empty diagonal.

The term Broussard refers to people of European descent in the countryside who live a rural lifestyle, usually raising cattle but also cervids, poultry and rabbits.

Smaller communities also exist on the East coast, notably in Touho and Poindimié as well as in the mining villages of Kouaoua and Thio, where the proportion oscillates between about 7–20% of the population according to the 2009 census.