Reunion Island Historic Overview

Though Arab and Malay mariners had been to the island long before, the 16th century Portuguese navigator Tristao da Cunha was the first European to make landfall on Réunion, thus ‘discovering’ the island he named Santa Apolonia in 1507. A few years down the line and the three islands in the region, including Mauritius and Rodriguez came to be referred to as the Islas Mascarenhas (Mascarene Islands) by the Portuguese.

The island remained lost in the vastness of the ocean as the Portuguese sailors bypassed it enroute to the far more lucrative Indies. The first French sailors arrived here on the French ship ‘Le Saint-Louis’ more than a hundred years later. The French had already established themselves on the nearby island of Madagascar, from where twelve mutineers were dispatched to Santa Apolonia under sentence of exile in 1646.  Two years later, the twelve men were found to be in surprisingly good health and the authorities did a re-think on the potential of the island. In 1649, the island was officially claimed by the French in the name of the King of France and named Île Bourbon. Under its first French governor, Etienne Régnault, the island became part of the Compagnie des Indes and St Paul, its first capital. The French East India Company brought in slaves and indented labour to work on the newly established coffee plantations. Despite an official ban on slavery, the French brought in many slaves and treated them in a manner designed to make them revolt. A series of uprisings and minor rebellions later, the island’s governance passed directly to France in 1764.

The island came by its present name in 1792 when it was renamed Île de la Réunion in memory of the union of the Marseilles with the National Guard for the assault on the Tuilleries during the French revolution. As the French Republics went back and forth, so too did the island, and with the return of the monarchy in France, it again became the Île Bonaparte in 1806. Anglo-French rivalry culminated in the Napoleonic Wars and after Waterloo, the ownership of the Mascarenes passed into British hands in 1810. During their time, the British forcibly introduced the cultivation of sugarcane to the islands, making even the marginal farmers change to the new crop. As farmers abandoned their lands and fled, a labour crisis occurred forcing the British to bring in labour from India to work on these plantations.

Mauritius and Rodriguez remained with the British but Réunion returned to the French five years later under the Treaty of Paris. The islands were an important port of call for ships traversing the Indian Ocean between Asia and Europe till the opening of the Suez Canal in 1870. Competition from Cuba and Europe caused economic stagnation in the sugar industry, falling prices pushed out most players resulting in a concentration of land and capital in the hands of the French elite. As a consequence of this marginalisation, the left wing Comite’d’Action Democratique et Sociale was founded in 1936 with the primary intention of integration with France. Ten years later, in 1946, the Réunion Island became an Overseas Department of France, under direct rule and administered by France as an overseas territory. In the last few decades the left has been trying for greater autonomy and improvements in the working conditions and wages of the islanders.