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Reunion - History

It was the Portuguese who, at the beginning of the sixteenth century, were the first Europeans to discover the island. The Arabs would have done it long before. The island is named Mascarenhas, named after the Portuguese navigator Pedro de Mascarenhas. This explains why the island is now, along with Mauritius and Rodrigues, part of what is called the Mascareignes archipelago.

After a short passage of the English, who baptized England's forest , it was in 1638 that the St. Alexis , a French building of the East India Company, landed on the island and his captain took possession of it on behalf of Louis XIII, King of France. The first occupiers, twelve mutineers exiled from Fort-Dauphin to Madagascar, arrived on the island in 1646 but it was in 1663 that the French settled there definitively and that the island becomes a colony in full share, called Bourbon.

Managed for more than a century by the Company, the island is turned towards the production of coffee and many slaves are disembarked from Africa and Madagascar. The latter make up the majority of the population of the island. For example, in the 1760s, out of the 22,000 inhabitants, 18,000 of them are slaves. They develop a new cultural, based on songs and dances, including sega and maloya. Several of them try to escape the plantations and escape into the heights. Then called "the chestnuts", they are fiercely suppressed, notably by the Governor General Mahé de la Bourdonnais.

It was during the Revolution that the island took on the name of Reunion, before becoming the island Bonaparte under the Empire. It did not keep this name very long, since the English occupy it from 1810, before returning it to France in 1814. On December 20, 1848, when France found the Republic, slavery was officially abolished in Reunion by Commissioner Sarda Garriga. To overcome the abolition of slavery, a new system is born, called "engagism". More than 100,000 workers are brought to the island, mainly from India, China and Madagascar.

Beginning in 1865, the collapse of the sugar price would put an end to this flourishing situation. Despite the construction of a railway line in 1882 and the digging of a port at Pointe des Galets in 1886, Reunion will experience a long period of slump and go through two tough tests. World War I, which will kill nearly 3,000 people, will be followed by an appalling Spanish flu epidemic, causing between 5,000 and 10,000 deaths before a significant turnaround in the 1920s began. The outbreak of the Second World War. Reunion suffered a severe blockade during this and its rallying to free France in November 1942 will only partially end this test.

The island became a French department in the aftermath of the Second World War in 1946. A period of considerable economic, demographic and social development for the island began, particularly under the impetus of deputy Michel Debré, former Prime Minister under General de Gaulle.

The recent history of the island can be seen in the light of the attempts of France to retain a political and economic foothold (stronghold?) in the Indian Ocean. Once Réunion was isolated from Mauritius it was to play an integral part in French attempts to colonise and retain Madagascar within its sphere of influence.

Until the early 1980s, the question of the status of the island provoked numerous debates between "departmentalists" and autonomists. In 1982, the decentralization law created the Regional Council alongside the General Council. In 1984, Reunion established an autonomous Academy. Then the Reunion became a European region in 1992 and in 1997, the Treaty of Amsterdam gave the island its place in all the ultra-peripheral regions of Europe. Since the beginning of the 21st century, the island has continued its development. Its growth is higher than in metropolitan France and many land-use planning projects have emerged. One of the most important is the Route des Tamarins, open to traffic in 2009, linking Saint-Pierre to Saint-Paul, clearing some of the island's roads and providing it with modern infrastructure.

La Réunion is today a modern region with a high level of infrastructure and a dynamic and varied economic fabric. Nevertheless, there are many deviations from metropolitan France, measured in particular in the social and educational fields.