Réunion
Réunion is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas department and region of France within the African region. Part of the Mascarene Islands, it is located approximately east of the island of Madagascar and southwest of the island of Mauritius., it had a population of 910,985. Its capital and largest city is Saint-Denis.
Before the arrival of French colonial subjects and immigrants in the 17th century, Réunion was an uninhabited island. Its tropical climate led to the development of a plantation economy focused primarily on sugar; slaves from East Africa were imported as fieldworkers, followed by Malays, Vietnamese, Chinese, and Indians as indentured laborers. Today, the greatest proportion of the population is of mixed descent, while the predominant language is Réunion Creole, though French remains the sole official language.
Since 1946, Réunion has been governed as a French region and thus has a similar status to its counterparts in Metropolitan France. Consequently, it is one of the outermost regions of the European Union and part of the eurozone; it is, along with the French overseas department of Mayotte, one of the two eurozone areas in the Southern Hemisphere and in Africa. Owing to its strategic location, France maintains a large military presence on the island.
Name
The French took possession of the island in the 17th century, naming it Isle Bourbon after the House of Bourbon which then ruled France. To break with this name, which was too attached to the Ancien Régime, the National Convention decided on 23 March 1793 to rename the territory La Réunion. This name was presumably chosen in homage to the meeting of the fédérés of Marseilles and the Paris National Guards that preceded the insurrection of 10 August 1792. No document establishes this, and the word "meeting" could have been purely symbolic.The island changed its name again in the 19th century: in 1806, under the First Empire, General Decaen named it Isle Bonaparte, though, in 1810, it became Isle Bourbon again. It was eventually renamed La Réunion after the fall of the July monarchy by a decree of the provisional government on 7 March 1848.
In accordance with the original spelling and the classical spelling and typographical rules, "la Réunion" was written with a lower case in the article, but during the end of the 20th century the spelling "La Réunion" with a capital letter was developed in many writings to emphasize the integration of the article in the name. This last spelling corresponds to the recommendations of the Commission nationale de toponymie and appears in the current Constitution of the French Republic in articles 72-3 and 73.
History
The island has been inhabited since the 17th century, when people from France and Madagascar settled there. Slavery was abolished on 20 December 1848, when the Second Republic that had been established months earlier by the February Revolution abolished slavery in the French colonies. However, indentured workers continued to be brought to Réunion from South India, among other places. The island became an overseas department of France in 1946.Early history
Not much is known of Réunion's history before the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. Arab traders were familiar with it by the name Dina Morgabin, "Western Island". The island is possibly featured on a map from 1153 AD by Al Sharif el-Edrisi. The island might also have been visited by Swahili or Austronesian sailors on their journey to the west from the Malay Archipelago to Madagascar.The first European discovery of the area was made around 1507 by Portuguese explorer Diogo Fernandes Pereira, but the specifics are unclear. The uninhabited island might have been first sighted by the expedition led by Dom Pedro Mascarenhas, who gave his name to the island group around Réunion, the Mascarenes. Réunion itself was dubbed Santa Apolónia after a favourite saint, which suggests that the date of the Portuguese discovery could have been 9 February, her feast day. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira is said to have landed on the islands of Réunion and Rodrigues in 1509.
Isle Bourbon (1642–1793)
By the early 1600s, nominal Portuguese rule had left Santa Apolónia virtually untouched. The island was then occupied by France and administered from Port Louis, Mauritius. Although the first French claims date from 1638, when and Salomon Goubert visited in June 1638, the island was officially claimed by of France in 1642, when he deported a dozen French mutineers to the island from Madagascar.The convicts were returned to France several years later, and in 1649, the island was named Île Bourbon after the House of Bourbon. Colonisation started in 1665, when the French East India Company sent the first settlers.
The French colonists developed a plantation economy founded on the cultivation of coffee and sugar by use of slave labor.
From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French colonisation, supplemented by importing Africans, Chinese, and Indians as workers, contributed to ethnic diversity in the population. From 1690, most of the non-Europeans on the island were enslaved.
Of the 80,000 slaves imported to Réunion and Mauritius between 1769 and 1793, 45% was provided by slave traders of the Sakalava people in North West Madagascar, who raided East Africa and the Comoros for slaves, and the rest was provided by Arab slave traders who bought slaves from Portuguese Mozambique and transported them to Réunion via Madagascar.
French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars (1793–1814)
On 19 March 1793, during the French Revolution, the island's name was changed to Réunion in homage to the meeting of the Federates of Marseille and the National Guards of Paris, during the march on the Tuileries Palace on 10 August 1792, and to erase the name of the Bourbon dynasty.The National Convention abolished slavery in French colonies on 4 February 1794, though this was rejected by authorities in Réunion and the Isle de France. A delegation accompanied by military forces, charged with imposing the abolition of slavery, arrived on Isle Bourbon on 18 June 1796, only to be immediately expelled by local authorities, who were pressured by the island's overwhelming pro-slavery colonial population. Napoleon, who came to power in France in 1799 as First Consul, legally supported the continuation of slavery in Réunion in the Law of 20 May 1802. On 26 September 1806, the island was renamed Isle Bonaparte.
Following a series of cyclones and floods between 1806 and 1807, coffee cultivation on the island declined rapidly and was replaced by sugarcane in response to increasing demand from France, which had lost the colony of Saint-Domingue in 1803. During the Mauritius campaign of 1809–1811, the island was invaded by British forces on 7 July 1810 and its governor, General Jean-Chrysostôme Bruneteau de Sainte-Suzanne, capitulated two days later. The island fell under British occupation until the end of the Napoleonic period, with the British restoring the old name of Isle Bourbon.
Colony of Bourbon, then Réunion (1814–1946)
Bourbon Island was returned to the French under the Treaty of Paris of 1814. The slave trade openly operated in the colony after French rule was restored, and despite international condemnation, Bourbon Island imported 2,000 slaves every month during the 1820s, mostly from the Swahili coast or Quelimane in Portuguese Mozambique. In 1841, Edmond Albius' discovery of hand-pollination of vanilla flowers enabled the island to soon become the world's leading vanilla producer. The cultivation of geranium, whose essence is widely used in perfumery, also took off. From 1838 to 1841, Rear-Admiral Anne Chrétien Louis de Hell was governor of the island. A profound change in society and mentality linked to the events of the last ten years led the governor to present three emancipation projects to the Colonial Council.On 9 June 1848, after the arrival of news of the French Revolution of 1848 from Europe, governor announced the proclamation of the French Republic in Saint-Denis, and on that same day the island was renamed "Réunion", the name it had already held between 1793 and 1806. The establishment of the Republic was met with coldness and distrust by the white plantocracy due to the professed abolitionism of the new Republican authorities in Paris. On 18 October 1848, the new Commissioner of the Republic Joseph Napoléon Sébastien Sarda Garriga, sent from Paris to replace Graëb, announced in Saint-Denis the abolition of slavery in Réunion, effective on 20 December 1848. Louis Henri Hubert Delisle became its first Creole governor on 8 August 1852, and remained in this position until 8 January 1858.
After abolition, many foreign workers came as indentured workers. Slavery was replaced by a system of contract labor known as engagés, which lasted from 1848 until 1864. In practice, an illegal slave trade was conducted in which slaves were acquired from Portuguese Mozambique and Zanzibar and then trafficked to Réunion via the Comoros slave trade. They were officially called engagés to avoid the anti-slavery British blockade of Africa.
The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the importance of the island as a stopover on the East Indies trade route and caused a shift in commercial traffic away from the island. Europe increasingly turned to sugar beet to meet its sugar needs. Despite the development policy of the local authorities and the recourse to compromise, the economic crisis became evident from the 1870s onwards. However, this economic depression did not prevent the modernization of the island, with the development of the road network, the creation of the railroad, and the construction of the artificial harbor of the Pointe des Galets. These major construction projects offered a welcome alternative for agricultural workers.
During World War II, Réunion was under the control of Vichy France until 30 November 1942, when Free French forces disembarked from the destroyer Léopard and liberated the colony.