On the occasion of the 41st European Heritage Days and the new season of the “Favorite Monument of the French”, Stéphane Bern invites you to set off on a journey on the roads of France to discover the prodigious wealth of the cultural, architectural and historical heritage of our country.
The show will be broadcast live this Wednesday simultaneously on Réunion la 1ère (11:05 p.m.), France 3 and on france.tv from 9:05 p.m. (Mainland France time, editor’s note).
To reveal the 2024 ranking, Stéphane Bern invites us to the Château de Rambouillet, located in the Yvelines, around fifty kilometers from Paris. Rambouillet has experienced the Ancien Régime, the Empire and the Republic.
Throughout the show, we will discover this year’s ranking and the monument that will succeed the Sedan fortified castle, in the Ardennes (Grand Est)
What will be the French people’s favorite monument this year?
Among the contenders for the title of Favorite Monument of the French is the Lazaret de la Grande Chaloupe located in Possession and Saint-Denis on the island of Réunion.
On the island of La Réunion, the Grande Chaloupe lazaret, a quarantine site emblematic of the history of indentured labour, welcomed hundreds of thousands of travellers from 1860 to 1936. The colonial administration set up this system to prevent pestilential diseases – the plague, cholera and smallpox – from decimating the population.
Indentured labour, implemented in 1828, allowed the recruitment of workers bound by a specific contract to their employer, the indentured labourer. It developed especially after the abolition of slavery in 1848 to provide the workforce needed to grow sugar cane.
Indians, Chinese, Africans, Malagasy, Annamites, Comorians and Rodriguans disembark in Reunion to work and, like travellers who are sick or suspected of being sick, undergo quarantine at the Grande Chaloupe lazaret, a place of both isolation and treatment.
Made up of two sets of buildings, lazaret no. 1 on the coast and lazaret no. 2 upstream of the ravine, this heritage complex became the property of the departmental council in 1946 and has been listed as a Historic Monument since 1998.
Open to the public since 2008, the Grande Chaloupe lazaret perpetuates the memory of the indentured workers embodying this page in the history of the settlement of the island and the interbreeding of the Reunion population.
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