Linette Cassirame, now 69, was sent from La Réunion to the Creuse at the age of nine. This weekend she travels back to the island of her birth for the first time since, one of forty-five former transplantés, minors once removed from their families under a French state policy that reshaped the island’s population for nearly two decades.
The journey is part of a broader reckoning. More than 2,000 children were taken from their Réunionnaise families between 1963 and 1982, a political choice designed to contain the island’s demographic growth while repopulating rural areas of mainland France. The children became known as the “enfants de la Creuse”, and their treatment has since been the subject of official recognition. In June, the Senate adopted unanimously a text providing financial and memorial reparations for the roughly 2,000 victims, a step described as historic for those who were uprooted.
Practical support goes back further. Since 2017, the ministry responsible for the overseas territories has offered to cover a round-trip plane ticket to La Réunion for former transplantés. The trip this weekend is the third organized under that measure, arranged by the Fédération des enfants déracinés des DROM.
For Cassirame, the return is deeply personal. Placed with her twin sister in a home in Guéret, she was forced to work in a violent environment during her childhood. She now lives in the Indre, and she speaks of the trip with a mixture of anticipation and unease. “Moi, ça me fait plaisir d’aller à La Réunion, il paraît que c’est joli. Ça va me faire un peu drôle. Moi, ce que je veux voir, c’est la maison où je vivais avec mes parents”, she explains. Her words capture what the reparations debate has been about in human terms: the desire to recover a place, a family and a memory that state policy interrupted.
She still has much of her family on the island, and she looks forward to spending the end-of-year holidays with them. She plans to stay for two months, a stay that will allow her to rebuild, in her own time, the souvenirs that years of pain had scattered.
The story carries weight well beyond one woman’s itinerary. It concerns how a state accounts for decisions taken decades ago in the name of demographic and territorial planning, and how the people affected, now adults in their sixties and beyond, are finally able to return to the places they were taken from. The Senate vote in June acknowledged that suffering officially, opening the way for the first time to both financial and memorial reparations. Meanwhile, the organized trips, funded by the ministry since 2017, form a practical expression of that recognition, giving former transplantés the means to set foot on the island again.
For the citizens of La Réunion and the families concerned, the stakes are those of memory and dignity: knowing what happened to children who disappeared from their communities, and seeing those who survived welcomed back. For the communities of the Creuse and the Indre, where many of these children grew up, the history is equally part of local memory, as books and testimonies published in recent years have shown.
This weekend, forty-five people will make that return. For Cassirame, the first stop of the heart is simple and specific: the house where she lived with her parents. After a childhood of displacement and hardship, and after decades far from the island where she was born, she is finally going home to see it.