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Concept
Réunion
Summary
Réunion, officially Department of Réunion, is an island in the Indian Ocean that is an overseas department and region of France. 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 873,102. Its capital and largest city is Saint-Denis.
Réunion was uninhabited until French immigrants and colonial subjects settled the island in the 17th century. 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 is thus politically indistinguishable from its counterparts in Metropolitan France. Consequently, it is the outermost region of the European Union and part of the eurozone; along with the French overseas department of Mayotte it is the only eurozone area in the Southern Hemisphere. Owing to its strategic location, France maintains a large military presence.
When France took possession of the island in the seventeenth century, it was named Bourbon, after the dynasty that 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 Réunion Island. ("Réunion", in French, usually means "meeting" or "assembly" rather than "reunion". 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 use of 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 Île Bonaparte (after Napoleon), and in 1810 it became Île Bourbon again.
Official source
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