Cesaire, who died on Thursday at the age of 94 was commemorated at a state funeral in his native Martinique attended by President Nicolas Sarkozy, government ministers and senior figures from the opposition Socialist Party.

Thousands of ordinary Martinicans had already paid their own homage as Cesaire's body lay in state in the football stadium of the Caribbean island's main town Fort-de-France.

"All French people today feel Martinican in their hearts," Sarkozy said in a short speech before the ceremony. "Martinicans should know and understand that the 7,000 kilometres that separate them from the mainland have never counted so little."

In mainland France, the ceremony was followed by a crowd in front of the Paris city hall where it was broadcast onto a giant screen and television stations also carried the proceedings.

In deference to Cesaire's lack of religious belief, the ceremony in the packed stadium took the form of a "cultural homage" with readings from his works.

The interest with which the funeral was followed in France underlined the respect accorded to Cesaire, who was a fixture in Martinique and who regularly received a stream of visiting politicians and writers from the mainland.

The firmness with which he defended his ideas was underlined in 2005 when he refused to meet Sarkozy, then interior minister, over the ruling party's support for a law which proposed to recognise the positive legacy of France's colonial rule.

After study at the prestigious Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, Cesaire won prominence in 1939 with his "Notebook of a Return to the Native Land", in which he celebrated "negritude" ("blackness") and his relationship with his own land.

A member of the French Communist Party until the Soviet forces bloc crushed Hungary's Communist reformers in 1956, his anti-colonial writing, continued through the 1950s and 1960s, did not prevent him having a long political career.

As well as his literary activities, Cesaire also served as mayor of Fort-de-France for more than half a century and was a member of the French National Assembly.

After early suggestions that Cesaire's remains would be transferred to the Pantheon in Paris, the traditional resting place for France's most honoured heroes, it was finally decided to inter them in Martinique.