(by Maria Stefania Cataleta) “My only friends were pigs, so I ended up moving like them, on all fours"(Jean-Pierre Gosse, La Bête que j'ai été, 2005). Between 1962 and 1984, 2.015 children, aged between two and twelve years, they were deported to France from the island of Réunion. Many of these children were orphans or belonged to very poor families. For these reasons they were taken over by the social services and their transfer was part of a specific migration policy implemented by the Office for Development of Migration in the Overseas Departments (BUNIDOM).
The aim pursued with this policy, organized, implemented and heavily sponsored by the prefect Michel Debré, a very influential Gaullist politician and former Prime Minister of the motherland, was to be to repopulate certain rural areas in French territory at the same time, counteract the irrepressible population explosion and poverty that plagued theReunion island.
The demographic and economic situation of the island was very serious. The island population in 1946 was 225.000, which in 1967 had reached 416.000. In the same period, the number of births had risen from 9.000 to more than 16.000. In 1962 the island had a number of unemployed equal to 50.000 out of a population of 370.000 inhabitants. Each year they were presented 2.000 job applications for only 800 places available and 54% of the population was made up of individuals under the age of 20. In this socio-economic context the migration policy from Réunion to the Hexagon, in order to decongest the island.
The cd "children of the Creuse”, Named after one of these French rural areas to be repopulated, they were transferred to 83 departments in France. In fact, however, these minors were victims of kidnapping, deportation and of all sorts of mistreatment, which reduction in slavery e sexual abuse. They were mostly employed in agriculture and pastoralism, but the harsh conditions of life and work led many of them to death or suicide. Only under the presidency of Francois Mitterand this migration policy was interrupted.
Thanks to the media, numerous reportages, memoirs and film and television works these stories were made public and reported. Famous were the books of Jean-Jacques Martial, Une enfance volee (2003) and La Déportation des Réunionnais de la Creuse. Témoignages (2004) by Élise Lemai, as well as the television series of Francis Girod, The Pays des enfants perdus (France 3, 2003) or the later film Akim Isker's L'Enfant de personne (2021), a similar story of troubled adoption that has reignited the debate.
These and other testimonies, which recalled The Adventures of Oliver Twist di Charles Dickens, they had the explosive power to reveal the French conception of childhood, which could be subjected to a process of adaptation involving also the severing of family ties and those with the society of origin. The underlying republican ideology was that every French citizen, in this case the citizens of the island of Réunion, they could be transferred anywhere in France without any difficulty. On the other hand, the recurring rhetoric in the imagination of the people of Réunion was that the Creole child could be deprived of everything, even of himself by the hegemonic forces, which applied the old practices of colonial oppression.
Thanks to the numerous literary reconstructions, the former children of Creuse have, in recent decades, acquired the courage to take action legal actions against the French state, asking that responsibility be declared, together with the acknowledgment of economic reparations. Thus, in the 2000s, the Creuse children's scandal re-exploded with vehemence both on the island of Réunion and in France, with a notable number of testimonies of former deported children, such as Jean Pierre Gosse, author de La Bête que j'ai été, and Valerie Andanson, as well as with the birth of a series of associations dedicated to these children, such as the FEDD (Fédération des enfants déracinés des DROMs), France Initiative Justice and switzerland Guido Fluri Foundation.
Unfortunately, many lawsuits were rejected by the French courts, so ex-deported minors, even with the help of lawyers such as Elisabeth Rabesandratana, who have espoused this cause, have turned to the political authorities. As a result, in 2014, theNational Assembly voted a "memory resolution”, Which stated that the France was morally responsible towards these deported children.