The convicts were returned to France several years later, and in 1649, the island was named Île Bourbon after the French royal House of Bourbon. Although the first French claims date from 1638, when François Cauche and Salomon Goubert visited in June 1638, 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 island was then occupied by France and administered from Port Louis, Mauritius. īy the early 1600s, nominal Portuguese rule had left Santa Apolónia virtually untouched. Diogo Lopes de Sequeira is said to have landed on the islands of Réunion and Rodrigues in 1509. 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. 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. The first European discovery of the area was made around 1507 by Portuguese explorer Diogo Fernandes Pereira, but the specifics are unclear. The island might also have been visited by Swahili or Austronesian (Ancient Indonesian–Malaysian) sailors on their journey to the west from the Malay Archipelago to Madagascar.
The island is possibly featured on a map from 1153 AD by Al Sharif el-Edrisi. Arab traders were familiar with it by the name Dina Morgabin, "Western Island".
Not much is known of Réunion's history prior to the arrival of the Portuguese in the early 16th century. The island became an overseas department of France in 1946.Īn 1816 ten-centime coin from Réunion, from when it was still called Isle de Bourbon However, indentured workers continued to be brought to Réunion from South India, among other places. Slavery was abolished on 20 December 1848 (a date celebrated yearly on the island), when the Second Republic abolished slavery in the French colonies. The island has been inhabited since the 17th century, when people from France and Madagascar settled there. This last spelling corresponds to the recommendations of the Commission nationale de toponymy and appears in the current Constitution of the French Republic in articles 72-3 and 73. 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. It was permanently renamed Réunion after the fall of the July monarchy by a decree of the provisional government on 7 March 1848.
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. No document establishes this and the use of the word "meeting" could have been purely symbolic.) 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. ("Réunion", in French, usually means "meeting" or "assembly" rather than "reunion". To break with this name, which was too attached to the Ancien Régime, the National Convention decided on March 23, 1793, to rename the territory Réunion Island. When France took possession of the island in the seventeenth century, it was named Bourbon, after the dynasty that then ruled France.