Eloquent and erudite, she embodies much of the French political ideal; she cites poetry from memory. But the writers she prefers are those who wrote of their otherness in France, the statesmen-poets of the anticolonial movement known as Négritude, including Léon-Gontran Damas of French Guiana, Léopold Sédar Senghor of Senegal and Aimé Césaire of Martinique.

Her willingness to discuss race frankly is a distinction of some note, too, in a nation where such matters remain delicate and often unspoken. The French state does not officially recognize skin color or ethnicity.

She was born the sixth of eight children in Cayenne, the capital of a racially divided French Guiana, an overseas department and former colony of France. Her mother, a nursing assistant, raised the family alone and died young.

Ms. Taubira came of age in the 1960s, idolizing from afar the heroes and agitators of the American civil rights movement, like Angela Davis, Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali, but also Simón Bolívar, Che Guevara and other revolutionaries of her native South America.

She left to study economics and sociology in Paris, where she took up the cause of Guianese independence from France. A proud sense of obligation drew her back to French Guiana, she said, where she held various posts in the local administration. In the early 1990s, her politics having grown more moderate, she won seats in the French and European Parliaments.

In 2002, she ran for the French presidency, one of several candidates in a divided left. She won just 2.3 percent of the votes, but siphoned enough from the main leftist candidate to keep him out of the final runoff. To the horror of many French, a candidate of the xenophobic far right reached the second round, and though he did not win the presidency, Ms. Taubira was viewed by many as an insolent spoiler.

Party politics have never much agreed with her, she said, and she is known within the political establishment as having streaks of authoritarianism and pridefulness.