The hillsides surrounding the harbor of the tiny French territory of Mayotte have been transformed into barren mounds of leafless, uprooted trees. Sailboats lie on their sides, consumed by the warm waters of the Indian Ocean.

Piles of twisted metal, bricks, insulation and other debris line the steep, narrow streets of Mamoudzou, the capital of this archipelago along the east coast of Africa. Amid all this destruction caused by Cyclone Chido, which struck last weekend, a few residents sat on the sidewalk in a downpour on Thursday, setting out buckets to capture water, which has become a valuable commodity with taps dry since the storm.

“Tell Macron that God gave us water,” said a shirtless man, raising his arms, referring to the French president, Emmanuel Macron, who had just arrived to tour the devastation.

As residents pick through the wreckage where dozens have been confirmed dead and thousands may be missing, the deeply impoverished territory of Mayotte is attracting rare global attention and generating renewed debate over its treatment as part of France.

More than a century and a half after France colonized Mayotte, which mainly comprises two larger islands and a series of smaller ones with about 320,000 people, it is the poorest place in France and faces some of the greatest social challenges.

The poverty rate in Mayotte is nearly 80 percent, five times higher than on the mainland, according to official statistics. The unemployment rate is nearly 40 percent, compared with about 7 percent for the rest of France. About 30 percent of residents do not have access to running water at home, a problem made worse by a drought last year.

Some aid workers and analysts have said the government has failed to keep up with a rapidly growing population and provide necessary services. Others suggest that the government has largely overlooked the island, which sits some 5,000 miles away from mainland France and a 12-hour flight from Paris.

In the aftermath of the cyclone, Mr. Macron has vowed to support the devastated population.

At the airport and then at the hospital on Thursday, Mr. Macron was greeted by scores of worried residents and exhausted doctors who told him about destroyed homes, power blackouts, low food and medicine stocks, empty gas stations — and worries of a terrible toll.

Mr. Macron, who wore a white shirt and a traditional local scarf, was also taken on a helicopter flyover of the devastation. He repeatedly promised that relief was arriving and said that a field hospital would be operational on Friday.

For some people living in Mayotte, all the attention and talk of camaraderie coming from mainland France — and Mr. Macron’s visit — ring hollow after what they see as decades of discrimination and being cast aside like neglected stepchildren.

“It’s not going to do anything for us,” said Sarah Moilimo, 35, a teacher who is now accommodating about 25 people who lost their homes in her house in Mamoudzou, referring to Mr. Macron’s visit. “What we need is for him to act and to do something,” she added. “Over the last few months he’s sent many ministers to visit Mayotte and nothing ever changes.”

Mr. Macron rejected suggestions that the French state had abandoned Mayotte and made sweeping promises of recovery during his visit. “We were able to rebuild our cathedral in five years,” Mr. Macron said, referring to the recent reopening of Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris. “It would be a tragedy if we were unable to rebuild Mayotte.”

Even though Mayotte is a part of France, its inhabitants do not enjoy all the same benefits as mainland residents, and they are subject to some different laws.

In Mayotte, families are not entitled to certain grants for child birth and education that are accessible almost everywhere else in France.

Mayotte is one of only two French departments, the basic administrative units within regions, where state representatives can remove residents and destroy illegal housing without a court order. Although the law requires the government to provide suitable alternative accommodation, that often does not happen, according to aid groups.

The shantytowns that have been the focus of the local government’s demolition efforts have taken the hardest hit from the storm, with many wiped away. Many residents of the shantytowns are believed to be undocumented migrants.

In Passamanty, a shantytown that covered a hill, not a single tree remained intact. The only remnants of the homes that once stood there are a few wooden poles poking up from the ground; the tin sheets that formed the roofs and walls of shacks are lying on meter-high piles of rubble.

Because of a lack of classroom space in Mayotte, some children go to school either for a morning or an afternoon session, not the entire day, according to UNICEF.

There is a growing sense in Mayotte and other French territories “that they are not treated as the rest of the French population,” said Lucile Grosjean, the director of advocacy for the United Nations Children’s Fund in France. “That’s definitely something that the authorities have to deal with to build trust and to ensure that all French citizens have the same level of services.”

The disparities that Mayotte faces are in some ways a legacy of the French colonial era.

Colonized in 1843, Mayotte only became a French department — which establishes a local authority to administer social services and infrastructure — in 2011. It’s the youngest department in the country, and some civil society activists say government officials are still struggling to catch the island up on services and infrastructure amid rapid population growth.

Mayotte belongs to an archipelago that held a referendum on becoming independent from France in the mid-1970s. Thanks in part to pro-French female activists who used what is known as tickle torture as a way to scare off pro-independence politicians, Mayotte was the only territory in the island chain that voted to remain a part of France. That led to its separation from what is today the independent nation of Comoros.

Today, many Mayotte residents continue to hold a strong allegiance to France, even when they feel the government has failed them, said Ms. Moilimo, the teacher in Mamoudzou.

“It’s like the people of Mayotte have the syndrome of the colonized,” she said. “They’re so happy to be considered French that they’ll settle for anything you give them.”

For all of Mayotte’s problems, French support has helped it to fare better economically than Comoros. Tens of thousands of migrants from Comoros have sought refuge and economic opportunities in Mayotte, where about a third of the population is undocumented, officials say. This has fueled major tensions and even violence in Mayotte, and made the island a focal point for France’s broader debates around immigration.

Part of the reason that Mayotte may have lost so many lives is that cyclones are so rare there that residents often are not aware of the proper precautions to take, said Eric Sam-Vah, the deputy head of the Piroi Center, a disaster management agency of the French Red Cross.

Mr. Sam-Vah said that his organization had received reports as late as Saturday morning of people attending mosque, after the highest-level warning for the fast-moving storm already had been issued, and just hours before it made landfall.

Bruno Retailleau, France’s departing interior minister, said on Monday that some undocumented residents had not gone to officially designated shelters in time. That has raised questions about whether fears of arrest or deportation hampered the territory’s preparedness efforts.

The center plans to deploy as many as 50 people to Mayotte to help with a response that Mr. Sam-Vah expects to last at least 12 months. The center has already sent 10,000 tarpaulins to help make temporary accommodations. It is also dispatching essentials like solar lamps, buckets and soap to aid the roughly 100,000 people enduring difficult conditions in emergency shelters, he said.

In the Piroi Center’s 25 years in operation, Mr. Sam-Vah said, “This one is probably one of the most complex situations we have faced.”

Aurelien Breeden reported from Paris and Julie Bourdin contributed reporting from Mamoudzou.

After joining the Chinese leader Xi Jinping for dinner last year, Mayor London Breed of San Francisco accompanied him to the airport to bid him farewell. There, on the tarmac, she made her request: pandas.

Her city’s zoo was faltering. Tourism was suffering and she faced a tough re-election campaign. A pair of pandas from China would be a political and public relations win.

What ensued were months of informal negotiations, with Ms. Breed — a politician with no foreign affairs or security experience — becoming a diplomat of sorts. She went to China, where she met the vice president and a deputy foreign minister, her calendars and emails show. She traveled with the editor of Sing Tao U.S., a pro-Beijing newspaper that registers as a foreign agent in the United States, according to other records and photographs from the trip.

All of this was organized by the Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries, a group that American intelligence officials have concluded seeks to “malignly influence” local leaders. Unlike traveling Washington politicians, Ms. Breed received no C.I.A. briefing about what counterintelligence threats she might face in China and how officials there might try to manipulate her.

If Ms. Breed wanted pandas, China had an interest in the meeting, too — as a way to cultivate a relationship with the mayor of one of America’s most technologically important cities. There is no evidence of any quid pro quo or wrongdoing, but intelligence officials say that China is increasingly looking to wield influence in local governments as its sway in Washington diminishes.

One lever it has, documents and interviews show, is pandas. Chinese officials have sought to use pandas to cultivate relationships, shape policy on Taiwan and soften China’s image abroad, a major goal of Mr. Xi. Panda exchanges provide Chinese leaders with rare, high-profile opportunities to rebrand their country.

This has long been the case. During panda negotiations with Omaha and with Oakland in the mid-2000s, Chinese diplomats tried to scuttle a Nebraskan trade deal with Taiwan and to persuade a California congresswoman to stop criticizing Beijing, negotiators for the American side said. When those efforts failed, China denied pandas to both cities, they said.

But intelligence officials say that China’s outreach is on the rise locally, where officials often do not have the training or intelligence briefings needed to deflect it.

In September, federal prosecutors charged a former aide to Gov. Kathy Hochul of New York with taking payoffs for securing Chinese influence in Albany. Also this year, a former aide to the New York City mayor, Eric Adams, came under scrutiny after collaborating with groups linked to China’s government.

Local officials in the United States and Europe are also struggling to make sense of a network of unofficial Chinese police outposts that have popped up unexpectedly.

As relations between Beijing and Washington have cooled and high-level delegations have slowed, diplomacy at the local level has taken on increased significance.

“Every mayor wants to have the publicity of getting pandas,” said David Towne, former panda negotiator for American zoos. “Pandas become the bait,” he added.

Pandas are the face of wildlife conservation. Zoos pay about $1 million a year to rent them from China and breed them in captivity, in hopes that pandas will someday be released into the wild. China is supposed to use the money to protect the wild species.

But a New York Times investigation this year revealed that after three decades, China has actually captured more pandas than it has released. And aggressive artificial breeding has injured and even killed pandas. China has steered millions of dollars toward building infrastructure such as apartments and roads as American zoo administrators and regulators looked the other way.

Zoos have an incentive to keep the program running. Pandas bring crowds and merchandise sales. China, too, has a stake in the exchanges.

“Pandas are an interesting piece of the propaganda and influence-seeking puzzle because they’re seemingly innocuous and fuzzy and huggable,” said Orville Schell, who directs the Center on U.S.-China Relations at the Asia Society in New York.

As Lee Simmons, former director of the Henry Doorly Zoo and Aquarium in Omaha, put it: “Almost every Chinese ambassador was a panda salesman.”

The Chinese Embassy in Washington did not comment on whether Beijing had used pandas to push its political interests. It said that pandas had “promoted people-to-people exchanges between China and the U.S. and enhanced the friendship between the two peoples.” It criticized anyone who “maliciously associated and unreasonably slandered China-U.S. cooperation on giant panda conservation without factual evidence.”

Ms. Breed’s office declined to say whether the mayor had concerns about her trip’s organizers or about the newspaper that is registered as a foreign agent.

“This was a trip designed to boost tourism, which ultimately would benefit San Francisco’s economy,” her office said in a statement.

Ms. Breed announced this spring that two pandas will arrive in San Francisco next year.

Panda Influence

The Chinese People’s Association for Friendship with Foreign Countries portrays itself as nongovernmental. But it is an arm of the Communist Party, charged with overseeing outreach to foreign local governments.

In 2022, the American director of national intelligence warned statehouses and city halls that China had “stepped up its efforts to cultivate U.S. state and local leaders in a strategy some have described as ‘using the local to surround the central.’” Intelligence officials cited the friendship group as part of that effort.

Mr. Xi has overseen an effort to rebrand his country through overseas propaganda, or what he calls “telling China’s story well.” Under his watch, China has produced a spate of pro-Beijing documentaries and media channels centered on pandas.

In Edinburgh, which until recently was home to pandas, the Chinese government-backed Confucius Institute worked with school officials in the Scottish capital to teach a unit called “Beyond the Panda.” The program included maps showing Taiwan as part of China.

The Chinese friendship group has also organized panda-related events with American politicians and Chinese propaganda officials. The group did not respond to a request to comment.

Pandas are “one of the few tools that China has left for winning public excitement in the U.S. and building soft power,” said Kyle Jaros, an expert on U.S.-China ties at the University of Notre Dame.

‘Chinafornia’

California is home to two Chinese consulates and many people of Chinese descent. The state’s longstanding ties with Beijing, a relationship sometimes called Chinafornia, have yielded positive changes, like cooperation on climate change.

But it has also exposed state and local governments to security risks, experts say.

Before congressional delegations to China, officials typically receive C.I.A. briefings that discuss how Beijing might try to exploit visits, said Dennis Wilder, a senior fellow at Georgetown University and former C.I.A. official focused on East Asia. Travelers are also warned about cybersecurity risks.

But, Mr. Wilder noted, “At the local level, there’s no mechanism for this.”

In its statement, Ms. Breed’s office said that she had received a briefing from the State Department. Mr. Wilder said that those are less thorough than C.I.A. intelligence briefings.

Across the San Francisco Bay, in Oakland, politicians spent nearly a decade trying to get pandas for the city’s zoo. Henry Chang, a former deputy mayor, said that he had met with a vice premier and several other senior Chinese officials, adding that they had made what he saw as increasingly unreasonable demands.

In a 2008 meeting with the Chinese ambassador in Washington, Mr. Chang said, he brought along Representative Barbara Lee. The meeting was ostensibly about pandas, but an aide pressured Ms. Lee to stop criticizing China’s activities in Africa, Mr. Chang said. Ms. Lee had sponsored a resolution the year before calling on China to use its influence in Sudan to end the genocide there.

“They were more interested to talk to Barbara Lee about the Africa problem than to talk about pandas, to tell you the truth,” he noted.

Ms. Lee’s office did not respond to a request for comment.

The Oakland Zoo built a $1 million panda enclosure and donated $375,000 to a panda breeding center in Chengdu, southwestern China, Mr. Chang said. The pandas never came.

Officials in Omaha had a similar experience that same year, said Dr. Simmons, the former zoo director there. Plans for pandas went awry after the state cut a $400 million agricultural trade deal with Taiwan. Dr. Simmons said the Chinese ambassador had asked him to scuttle the deal.

When he did not, China declined to send the bears. “The Chinese were very unhappy with Omaha,” Mr. Towne, the former American panda negotiator, said.

In San Diego, a Chinese diplomat wrote to Mayor Todd Gloria in late 2023, requesting a meeting about pandas and “mutually-beneficial cooperation.” The mayor agreed to meet at the zoo, which an executive there suggested as a discreet location, emails and calendar records show.

When San Diego finally got pandas, in June, Mr. Gloria flew to China for their departure. While there, he said in an interview, he met with a deputy foreign minister in Beijing.

Mr. Gloria said that he understood it was a “fraught time” for U.S.-China relations but that he was cleareyed about the relationship.

“I could control what I am a part of,” Mr. Gloria said. “Through engagement, you gain understanding. You’re able to collaborate.”

But Beijing’s talking points crept into the panda welcome ceremony in San Diego — and not just into the Chinese ambassador’s speech. Paul Baribault, a zoo official, talked about the institution’s commitment to a “shared future,” a signature foreign policy concept of Mr. Xi that sees China and other countries competing with the United States for influence.

Gov. Gavin Newsom of California talked about “common humanity,” another buzzword of Mr. Xi’s government.

San Francisco is still waiting to hear when its pandas will arrive. Ms. Breed lost her re-election bid in November, but her successor, Daniel Lurie, said that he hopes to bring pandas back to the city.

A city report recently described the San Francisco Zoo as “unsafe for the animals and visitors.” The city is auditing the zoo’s finances, which administrators say could jeopardize hopes for pandas. But there are no indications that China has changed plans.

In a brief interview with The Times after the San Diego ceremony, Xie Feng, China’s ambassador to the United States, said: “The American people, they are so fond of pandas.”

Joy Dong contributed reporting. Kirsten Noyes contributed research.

When President Volodymyr Zelensky of Ukraine met European leaders for dinner in Brussels on Wednesday, the shadow of President-elect Donald J. Trump hung over the gathering. But it is not just Mr. Trump’s return to the White House that has scrambled Europe’s response to the war in Ukraine.

It is also the political disarray across the continent — a wave of instability that is depriving Europe of robust leadership at the very moment that Mr. Trump is challenging its deeply felt support for Ukraine and its hard-fought resistance of Russian aggression.

From Germany, where the government of Chancellor Olaf Scholz just collapsed, to France, where President Emmanuel Macron has been gravely weakened by months of domestic political turmoil, Europe’s big powers are on the back foot as they confront a resurgent Mr. Trump.

“We’re not well equipped, that’s for sure,” said Wolfgang Ischinger, who served as Germany’s ambassador to the United States during the Iraq War. “It is a horribly bad moment for my own country to be in the midst of an election campaign, with a rather polarizing political debate.”

Mr. Ischinger, who chaired the Munich Security Conference until 2022, said he was optimistic that Germany would emerge with a new government, likely led by the conservative candidate, Friedrich Merz, that could engage constructively with the Trump administration.

Mr. Macron, for all his domestic travails, appears determined still to play an energetic role in shaping Europe’s response to the war. He recently floated the idea of sending a European peacekeeping force to Ukraine, though it found little immediate support from other European officials.

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Dominique Pelicot, the ex-husband of Gisèle Pelicot, was convicted on Thursday of aggravated rape and other charges after admitting to drugging and raping Ms. Pelicot for almost a decade, and arranging for dozens of strangers he met online to abuse her unconscious body.

He received the maximum sentence of 20 years in prison. The 50 other men, most charged with aggravated rape, who were tried alongside him, were also convicted.

Despite Mr. Pelicot’s guilty plea, under the French legal system a trial was held for society to understand the truth of what happened, experts said.

Here is a timeline of events in the case, based on court records and testimony.

1973

The Pelicots marry, two years after meeting. “We were so in love, we didn’t want to be apart,” Ms. Pelicot told the court at the trial.

1974

The first of their three children is born. They settle on the outskirts of Paris, where Ms. Pelicot, now 72, is the family’s main breadwinner as a manager in a big public company, and Mr. Pelicot, also now 72, works at different jobs, including as a real estate agent.

2010

Mr. Pelicot is caught filming women under their skirts in a shopping mall near Paris, using a miniature camera concealed in a pen. He is arrested and fined 100 euros for “capturing indecent images.” Ms. Pelicot learned of the arrest only in 2020 from an investigative judge, in the lead-up to the current trial. “If I had been informed, maybe I would have left him, or not,” she told the court. “But I would have been more attentive.”

July 2011

Mr. Pelicot starts drugging his wife, he said in court. Ms. Pelicot told the court that she recalled she had a blackout on a Saturday in 2011 when she slept in until 6 p.m. Later, as the drugging became more regular, she said, she suffered frequent unexplained blackouts that she feared were the symptoms of Alzheimer’s or a brain tumor.

2013

The couple retire and move to a bungalow with a garden and a pool in Mazan, a small town near Avignon, in the south of France. Their children and grandchildren visit regularly.

2014

Adrien Longeron, then 24, is the first stranger that evidence shows Mr. Pelicot filmed penetrating Ms. Pelicot while she was asleep in her bed. The footage taken this year is among thousands of videos and photos the police later found on Mr. Pelicot’s electronics. Mr. Longeron is among the dozens who were charged with aggravated rape. He pleaded not guilty.

Sept. 12, 2020

Mr. Pelicot is arrested after a security guard catches him filming up the skirts of women with his smartphone in a supermarket in Carpentras, a town near Mazan. The police seize the two phones, a camera and a video recorder he is carrying, as well as a laptop, a USB key and an SD card from his home. He is released while awaiting charges and tells Ms. Pelicot about the event.

Nov. 2, 2020

Ms. Pelicot meets with the police in Carpentras, believing she will hear about the supermarket event. Instead, the police tell her about the videos they have found on her husband’s electronics and say that they believe her husband has been drugging her for years and inviting dozens of men into their home to rape her alongside him.

Nov. 3, 2020

The Pelicots’ children help her move out of the house, which is now a crime scene. The police show Caroline Darian, the middle child and only daughter (who goes by a pen name) two photos recovered from her father’s electronics that show her sleeping in a strange position, with the duvet pulled back and the lights on. She testifies that she is convinced her father drugged and sexually assaulted her. He denies the accusations and says he did not take the photos.

Feb. 9, 2021

The police make the first arrests of other men charged in the case, using photos, as well as records from Skype conversations, phone calls and text messages, to track most of them down. Mr. Pelicot had directed the police to a hard drive in his garage where they had discovered thousands of images and videos he had taken and edited. Many were stored in a folder named “Abuse.”

Sept. 2, 2024

The trial begins. Ms. Pelicot takes the stand and explains her decision to allow a trial to be public and refuse the anonymity offered by law to victims of sexual assault. She says she wants society to change the way it deals with rape. “So when other women, if they wake up with no memory, they might remember the testimony of Ms. Pelicot,” she tells the court calmly. “No woman should suffer from being drugged and victimized.”

Sept. 14

Thousands of women participate in protests across France to support Ms. Pelicot.

Dec. 19

Mr. Pelicot and other defendants are convicted. Nine of the accused, including Mr. Pelicot, received sentences above 10 years. The longest sentence apart from Mr. Pelicot was for a defendant who was given 15 years.