Reunion Island, Indian Ocean - Creole House near Salazie - postcard c.1980s

• • Postcard

     

  • Picture / Image:  L'Ile de la Reunion (Indian Ocean French overseas territory) - Case Creole environ de Salazie
  • Publisher:  Christian Fontaine, c.1980s
  • Postally used:  no - written message
  • Stamp:  n/a
  • Postmark(s): n/a
  • Sent to:  n/a
  • Notes / condition: 

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Text from the free encyclopedia WIKIPEDIA may appear below to give a little background information (internal links may not  work) :

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Réunion (French: La Réunion, IPA: [la '?eynj?~] ( listen); previously Île Bourbon) is a French island with a population of about 800,000 located in the Indian Ocean, east of Madagascar, about 200 kilometres (120 mi) south west of Mauritius, the nearest island.

Administratively, Réunion is one of the overseas departments of France. Like the other overseas departments, Réunion is also one of the 27 regions of France (being an overseas region) and an integral part of the Republic with the same status as those situated on the European mainland.

Réunion is an outermost region of the European Union and, as an overseas department of France, is part of the Eurozone.

Before the arrival of the Portuguese in the early sixteenth century, there is little to Réunion's recorded history.[4] Arab traders were familiar with it by the name Dina Morgabin.[5] The island possibly features on a map from 1153 AD by Al Sharif el-Edrisi.[6] The island may also have been visited by Swahili or Malay sailors.[4]

The first European discovery of the area was made around 1507 by Portuguese explorers, but the specifics are unclear. The uninhabited island may have been first sighted by the expedition led by Don Pedro Mascarenhas, who gave his name to the island group around Réunion, the Mascarenes.[7] Réunion itself was dubbed Santa Apolonia after a favorite saint,[5] which suggests that the date of the Portuguese discovery may have been February 9, her saint day. Diego Lopes de Sequeira is said to have landed on the island in 1509.[6]

Over a century later, nominal Portuguese rule had left Santa Apolonia virtually untouched.[7] The island was then occupied by France and administered from Port Louis, Mauritius. Although the first French claims date from 1638, when François Cauche and Salomon Goubert visited in June 1638,[8] the island was officially claimed by Jacques Pronis 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 royal house. Colonization started in 1665, when the French East India Company sent the first 20 settlers.

“Réunion” was the name given to the island in 1793 by a decree of the Convention with the fall of the House of Bourbon in France, and the name commemorates the union of revolutionaries from Marseille with the National Guard in Paris, which took place on 10 August 1792. In 1801, the island was renamed ""Île Bonaparte"", after Napoleon Bonaparte. The island was invaded by a Royal Navy squadron led by Commodore Josias Rowley in 1810, who used the old name of “Bourbon”. When it was restored to France by the Congress of Vienna in 1815, the island retained the name of ""Bourbon"" until the fall of the restored Bourbons during the French Revolution of 1848, when the island was once again given the name “Réunion”.

From the 17th to the 19th centuries, French immigration supplemented by influxes of Africans, Chinese, Malays, and Indians gave the island its ethnic mix. Starting from 1690, most of the immigrants from outside Europe were enslaved until 20 December 1848 when slavery was abolished. Afterwards, many of them were indentured workers. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 reduced the importance of the island as a stopover on the East Indies trade route.

During the Second World War, Réunion was under the authority of the Vichy Regime until 30 November 1942, when Free French forces took over the island with the destroyer Léopard.

Réunion became a département d'outre-mer (overseas départment) of France on 19 March 1946. Its département code is 974.

For a period of around two decades in the twentieth century (1968-1982), 1,630 children from Réunion were relocated to France, particularly to Creuse. These children, known as les enfants de la Creuse, were brought to light in 2002 when Réunion exile Jean-Jacques Martial brought a legal action against politician Michel Debré (who had been the MP for Réunion at the time) for ""kidnapping of a minor, roundup and deportation"".[9] In 2005, a similar case was brought against the French Government by the Association of Réunion of Creuse.[10]

In 2005 and 2006, Réunion was hit by a crippling epidemic of chikungunya, a disease spread by mosquitoes. According to the BBC News, 255,000 people on Réunion had contracted the disease as of 26 April 2006.[11] Madagascar had also been hit by this disease during the same year.[12] A few cases also appeared in mainland France through airline travel. Then French Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin sent an emergency aid package worth 36 million Euro ($57.6M U.S. dollars) and deployed approximately five hundred French troops in an effort to eradicate mosquitoes.