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French commune in Réunion
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Saint-Denis (; French: [sɛ̃ d(ə)ni] ⓘ; Reunionese Creole: Sin-Dni), unofficially Saint-Denis de La Réunion (pronounced [sɛ̃ d(ə)ni də la ʁeynjɔ̃]) for disambiguation, is the prefecture (administrative capital) of the French overseas department and region of Réunion, in the Indian Ocean. It is located at the island's northernmost point, close to the mouth of the Rivière Saint-Denis.
Saint-Denis is the most populous commune in the French overseas departments and the twentieth most populous in all of France. At the 2023 census, there were 326,743 inhabitants in the metropolitan area of Saint-Denis (as defined by INSEE), 155,634 of whom lived in the city (commune) of Saint-Denis proper and the remainder in the neighbouring communes of La Possession, Sainte-Marie, Sainte-Suzanne, Saint-André, and Bras-Panon.
Saint-Denis was founded in 1669 by Étienne Regnault, the first governor of Bourbon Island (as La Réunion was then called), on the northern side of the island, where a larger and more fertile plain was deemed more propitious for the development of settlements than the drier and more barren area of Saint-Paul on the western side of the island. Saint-Paul had been the site of Bourbon Island's first French settlement in 1663 due to the better anchorage and wind conditions of the western coast.
The new settlement was named Saint-Denis after the name of a ship owned by one of governor Regnault's friends, which had landed in Réunion in 1668. Saint-Denis and Saint-Paul shared the role of colonial capital of Bourbon for some years, with the governor and colonial council staying alternatively in the two settlements, until Saint-Denis was chosen as the permanent location of Bourbon's colonial government in 1738.
Soon after 1738, work was started to establish a seaport in the little bay of Le Barachois, on the eastern side of the Saint-Denis River, to replace the port of Saint-Paul, but its site did not offer a safe haven, due to unpredictable winds and tides, as well as frequent high surf which forced ships to unload their cargo in the open roadstead away from the shore, from where it was carried to the shore with the use of a mobile pier. Improvements in the 19th century resulted in the construction of a small artificial harbor where surf boats in charge of unloading cargo from larger ships could be protected from winds and swells, but it was regularly damaged by cyclones. Eventually it was replaced by a new and much larger artificial harbor built on the northwest coast of La Réunion in the 1880s, in today's commune of Le Port, 15 kilometres (9.3 mi) from Saint-Denis.
A royal decree in 1766 divided Bourbon Island in 5 quartiers, one of which was Saint-Denis. The checkerboard plan of the city, established by land surveyor Jean-Baptiste Bancks (sometimes spelled Banck, of Irish Jacobite descent), was officially adopted in 1777. In 1790, Saint-Denis became a commune. Its first mayor was Jean-Baptiste Delestrac.
During the Napoleonic Wars, Saint-Denis was captured by British troops on 8 July 1810. The British occupied Saint-Denis and the entire island during nearly 5 years. On 6 April 1815, after the Treaty of Paris, the British officially restored Bourbon Island to France during a ceremony held on the main square of Saint-Denis. Later in October 1815, as news of Napoleon's return to France had arrived in the Indian Ocean, a British fleet from Mauritius presented itself in front of St Denis, asking the French governor of Bourbon Island to surrender the colony to His Britannic Majesty. The French governor refused and the British started a blockade of the island. Eventually on 28 October the news arrived of Napoleon's 2nd abdication and Louis XVIII's return to power, and the British fleet ended its blockade.
In the 18th century, cultivation of coffee had ensured the development of Saint-Denis. Warehouses in Saint-Denis stored the coffee beans before their export to Europe from the port of Saint-Denis. In the 19th century, following France's loss of its largest sugar colonies of Saint-Domingue (Haiti) and the Isle of France (Mauritius) as a result of the French Revolution and Napoleonic Wars, sugarcane replaced coffee as the main crop in Bourbon, and sugar became the main export, again ensuring the development of Saint-Denis, from where sugar was exported to Europe.
The prosperous period experienced by Saint-Denis after the Napoleonic Wars was marked by urban development and public investments. In 1818, due to the British annexation of the Isle of France (Mauritius) which was home to the only lycée in the Mascarene Islands, where Bourbon Island's elites used to send their children for secondary education, Bourbon Island's governor Milius launched the construction of a royal college in Saint-Denis (Collège de Bourbon), which opened in 1819, the first royal college on Bourbon Island (later renamed Lycée de La Réunion in 1848, then transformed into a collège, i.e. middle school, in 1968). In 1825 a law school (École de Jurisprudence) granting the Bachelor of Laws was established in Saint-Denis.
Construction of the Saint-Denis Cathedral was begun in 1829 and completed in 1832. The theatre of Saint-Denis was built in 1835 with loggias and balconies (it was later destroyed by fire in 1919). That same year, construction of the Palais législatif ("Legislative Palace") was begun and completed in 1837: the palace housed the Colonial Council (Conseil colonial), the legislative assembly of Bourbon Island; the palace was later turned over in 1855 to the newly created Natural History Museum of La Réunion, the first natural history museum in the Indian Ocean. In 1843, following the example of Mauritius where horse races had become popular among French colonial planters, a racecourse was inaugurated at La Redoute, now transformed into a stadium. Construction of the Hôtel de Ville was started in 1846 and the building was inaugurated in 1860. The central market of Saint-Denis, a wrought iron structure, was built between 1864 and 1866.
The first cholera pandemic struck Saint-Denis in the beginning of 1820: cholera had arrived from Calcutta in Mauritius the year before, and despite strict orders from governor Milius forbidding any contact with Mauritius, one ship arriving from Mauritius evaded the orders and brought cholera to Saint-Denis. The authorities reacted quickly as soon as the disease was discovered in town by isolating sick people, establishing a military cordon sanitaire, and evacuating the rest of the population from the city. As a result, cholera was contained within the city limits and killed only 178 people (whereas it spread all over Mauritius and killed thousands of people there).
In 1841, the famous poet Charles Baudelaire, then 20 year-old, who had been sent on a voyage to Calcutta, India by his family in the hope of ending his dissolute habits, landed in Saint-Denis and stayed on Bourbon Island for 45 days, before deciding to return to metropolitan France without reaching India.
In 1847, the return to Bourbon Island of the Catholic Apostolic Vice-Prefect of the island, Alexandre Monnet, an abolitionist who had worked for the evangelization of Bourbon's Black slaves and was returning from a trip to Europe where he had been celebrated in Paris and Rome for his work in favor of Black slaves, triggered two days of protests in Saint-Denis among the White colonists, who insulted the Apostolic Vice-Prefect without governor Joseph Graëb intervening to stop the turmoil. Due to strong opposition, and without any local support, Father Monnet, nicknamed the Father of Black People (le Père des Noirs), was forced to leave Bourbon Island only fifteen days later at the urging of the governor.
On 9 June 1848, after the arrival of news of the February 1848 French Revolution from Europe, governor Graëb announced the proclamation of the French Republic in Saint-Denis, and the island's name was changed to La Réunion, the name it had already held between 1793 and 1806. The establishment of the Republic was met with coldness and distrust by the wealthy White planters due to the professed abolitionism of the new Republican authorities in Paris. On 18 October 1848 the new Commissioner of the Republic, Sarda Garriga, sent from Paris to replace governor Graëb, announced in Saint-Denis the abolition of slavery in Réunion Island, effective on 20 December 1848. In December the students at the lycée of Saint-Denis, sons of rich planters, demonstrated against the director of the lycée, a declared republican. Unable to calm the protestors, commissioner Sarda Garriga was forced to call in the troops and close the lycée for more than a month.
In 1853, the Banque de La Réunion was founded in Saint-Denis with part of the compensation paid to Réunion's slave owners by the French government after the 1848 abolition of slavery. It was the first commercial bank in Réunion, and also served as a central bank, with the legal right to issue banknotes. The next year a savings bank was also established in Saint-Denis.
Saint-Denis was struck by the third cholera pandemic in 1859, the first time cholera was returning to Réunion since 1820. During the outbreaks of cholera in Mauritius in 1854 and 1856, strict sanitary measures forbidding the landing of ships in Réunion had prevented the disease from reaching the island. In 1859, however, a ship transporting indentured laborers from East Africa hid the cases of cholera on board from the Saint-Denis authorities and the ship was allowed to land. Cholera spread quickly and killed 863 people in the city (and 2,200 people in the entire island) in the space of two months and a half, one of the deadliest epidemics in the history of Réunion.
In the 1860s, cane cultivation was affected by the Chilo sacchariphagus pest, and the recruiting of labourers in India also became more difficult (caps introduced by British authorities), which led to a crisis of Réunion's sugar cane industry. During the same period, the island was hit by several cyclones. Malaria also arrived in Réunion in 1868, three years after its arrival in Mauritius (both islands were malaria-free before the 1860s), and the disease became endemic in the island. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 as well as the French growing interest in colonizing Madagascar also marginalized Réunion. As a result of all these events, Saint-Denis entered a period of stagnation that lasted until World War II. The city even officially experienced population decline from the 1870s until the beginning of the 1920s, before recovering slightly after 1921 (see Demographics section).
In 1868, bitter press campaigns opposing local liberal (anti-clerical) and clerical (pro-Jesuit) newspapers degenerated when the editor-in-chief of the clerical newspaper La Malle was rumored to have sexually assaulted the son of a merchant from Saint-Denis. The rumor led to five days of anti-clerical riots in the city in November–December 1868, with crowds of up to 2,000 gathering in front of the bishop's palace, shouting "Down with La Malle! Down with the Jesuits!", and ransacking the college (high school) of the Jesuits. On 3 December governor Marie Jules Dupré ordered the dispersal of the unarmed anti-clerical crowd assembled on the square in front of the Saint-Denis Hôtel de Ville, and the troops opened fire, killing 9 people and injuring another 30 people. The next day, a state of siege was declared. The tragedy had nationwide repercussions in France in the dying days of the Second French Empire which opposed liberals and conservatives.
On 3 November 1870, after ships had brought the news of Napoleon III's fall and proclamation of the French Republic in Paris, governor Louis Hippolyte de Lormel announced the proclamation of the French Republic in Saint-Denis. That same year, the first telegraph line in Réunion was established between Saint-Denis and the southern Réunionese subprefecture of Saint-Pierre, 110 kilometres (68 mi) in length.
In December 1874, the Oudemans scientific mission sent by king William III of the Netherlands to Réunion to observe the transit of Venus established its observation camp at the seafront of Barachois, in Saint-Denis.
A 10.5 kilometres (6.5 mi) railway tunnel dug in the big lava flow separating Saint-Denis from La Possession was started in 1878 and completed in 1881, allowing trains to connect Saint-Denis with the new seaport of La Réunion under construction at Le Port in replacement of the old harbor of Barachois in Saint-Denis. It was the third-longest tunnel in the world at the time.
Text from the Wikipedia article “Saint-Denis, Réunion”, available under CC BY-SA 4.0.