Mayotte le 101e département français : les enjeux de la nouvelle départementalisation

Every French department has its own history and geography, not least those which form the French overseas territories and departments. While the metropolitan departments have just voted for new departmental councils, Mayotte confirmed by referendum her wish to become the 101st department. After her long colonial history, the islands of the Comoros did not choose the same destiny. These Indian Ocean islands became a republic, and Mayotte a new territory of the French Republic. It is Mayotte's institutional and political history, the various steps which led to its departmentalisation, the obstacles overcome as much as the consequences now needing to be managed, which have attracted the researcher's attention and analysis. The work has been driven by an ethic of conviction (the researcher has experienced this history as a Mahorais) and of responsibility (he has applied the same objectivity as every metropolitan researcher). He wants to contribute to the constitutional history of France by trying to explain in this research the legislative evolution of the French overseas departments and by exposing the different problems (health, education, migration, right to nationality based on birthplace) which need to be addressed. Up until now there hasn't been any research done which examines the reason for this new French department; the 101st, one of the only ones not founded by Napoleon, but which nevertheless joins the great tradition of 1789 and "the decentralised republic of 1982-2013".