Reunion has 885,700 inhabitants. Martinique, Guadeloupe, Mayotte, and French Guiana have hundreds of thousands more. Overseas residents are not the only ones concerned. The residential mobility rate in France is around 9% per year, according to INSEE data. Nearly 3% of the population changes departments each year, and 2% changes regions. Millions of French people live far from the place where they grew up. The question is not whether they still think about it. It's about understanding why this bond persists — and what it brings them.
Attachment to places knows no distance
Leila Scannell and Robert Gifford, environmental psychology researchers at the University of Victoria, proposed in 2010 a framework that has become the reference in the field: the PPP (Person, Process, Place) model. Attachment to a place involves three dimensions: the person, with their history and memories; the process — affective, cognitive, behavioral — through which the bond manifests itself; and the place itself, with its physical and social characteristics.
What recent research shows is that geographical distance does not necessarily weaken this bond. A study published in 2024 in the Journal of Urbanism, focusing on Indian expatriates in Dubai, demonstrated that migrants' subjective well-being is "intimately connected to the presence or absence of deep ties" — and that these ties include both people and the places left behind. Social psychology researchers (Brance et al., British Journal of Social Psychology, 2024) add that "the most important and significant social identity is that derived from friendship groups" — and that the distance from these groups, rooted in specific places, is "strongly felt."
The systematic review published in GeoJournal in 2025, covering ten years of research on place attachment (2015-2024), confirms that place attachment remains an expanding field. The concept has not dissolved in globalization. It has adapted.
Nostalgia is not a flaw — it's a survival mechanism
For centuries, nostalgia was treated as a pathology. Swiss medical student Johannes Hofer described it in 1688 as a disease of soldiers far from home, coining the word from the Greek nostos (return) and algos (pain). Two centuries later, it was still considered a sign of psychological fragility. Contemporary research has overturned this diagnosis.
Esha Naidu and colleagues published in 2024 in Social Psychological and Personality Science the results of six convergent studies: nostalgia increases psychological well-being through a mechanism they call "collective effervescence" — the sensation of shared connection with others around a common memory or experience. When a Reunionese person in Paris meets another Reunionese person and they talk about the Plaine des Palmistes, it's not melancholy. It's a functional psychological act that strengthens the sense of belonging, self-esteem, and optimism.
Research goes further. Nostalgia acts as a shield. It protects psychological well-being in the face of the perception of time passing — a particularly useful function for people far from their place of origin, who experience a double displacement: spatial and temporal.
Objects that replace the place
The psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott theorized in the 1950s "transitional objects" — the comfort blanket, the security blanket, the toy that allows a child to cope with the absence of the mother. Environmental psychology suggests that adults develop equivalents to cope with the absence of a place.
Visual representations of the place of origin — photographs, reproductions, wall art — function as emotional anchors. Research on olfactory and contextual memory shows that images of a place partially reactivate the same neural circuits as physical presence. This is not a substitute: it is a form of maintaining the bond, documented by scientific literature on place attachment.
Cooking plays a comparable role. Preparing a rougail saucisse in Créteil, a far breton in Lyon, or a colombo in Toulouse is not just a culinary act. It is a sensory reconstruction — olfactory, gustatory, tactile — of the place of origin. Studies on contextual memory show that these sensory stimulations reactivate connections between the hippocampus and the emotional regions of the brain: the same mechanism as Proust's madeleine, applied to everyday life.
Diasporic associations, online groups, and community celebrations play a similar role: they recreate a fragment of the absent place in the present space. The "third place" of sociologist Ray Oldenburg — that social space essential for well-being — takes a paradoxical form here: for the diaspora, the most important third place is a place that is not physically there.
Words that French does not have
An article in the Revue française des affaires sociales (2025) documents the specific vulnerability of Polynesian overseas students in mainland France. The distance is described as a "factor of vulnerability" in their trajectory — not only economic or academic, but also identity-related. An article in the journal Essaim (2018) explores migrant nostalgia from a clinical perspective: "nostalgia is a product of an economy from which the migrant manages both a sensitive pain in displacement and a greatness in the preserved attachment to the place of origin."
Portuguese has saudade — an untranslatable word that refers to the nostalgia for an absent place or person, mixed with sweetness and pain. The entire fado genre is built on this emotion. Korean culture values jeong, a deep emotional attachment that extends to places. French, despite its millions of uprooted people, has not coined a word for this experience. "Mal du pays" (homesickness) remains the closest formulation — but it sounds like a diagnosis, not a recognition.
What is at stake goes beyond linguistics. The absence of a word reflects an absence of a cultural framework for thinking about a distant relationship with a place. Integration policies consider integration in terms of housing, employment, and training. Rarely in terms of emotional continuity with the place of origin. LADOM data shows that 83,323 overseas residents were "supported in their mobility" in 2024. Supported administratively, logistically, professionally. The psychological dimension of this displacement — leaving a place that is part of oneself — remains a blind spot.
What research increasingly indicates is that actively maintaining a connection with one's place of origin is not a sign of poor integration. It is a factor of psychological protection. Objects, images, food, and rituals of return are not nostalgic crutches. They are resilience strategies that psychology documents and brain science explains. The bond to a place does not break with a plane ticket. It transforms, is nurtured differently, and continues to do its silent work: reminding us where we come from to better know where we are going.
Sources
1. LADOM — Key results 2024: 83,323 beneficiaries, historic record (ladom.fr)
2. INSEE — Population of Reunion on January 1, 2024: 885,700 inhabitants
3. Scannell, L. & Gifford, R. — Defining place attachment: A tripartite organizing framework, Journal of Environmental Psychology (2010)
4. Journal of Urbanism — Place attachment, spatial behaviour and subjective well-being: Indian expatriates in Dubai (2024)
5. Brance et al. — Social identity, mental health and the experience of migration, British Journal of Social Psychology (2024)
6. GeoJournal — Place attachment in transition: A systematic geographic review (2015-2024) (2025)
7. Naidu, E. et al. — Reliving the Good Old Days: Nostalgia Increases Psychological Wellbeing Through Collective Effervescence, SPPS (2024)
8. Hofer, J. — Dissertatio medica de nostalgia (1688)
9. Winnicott, D.W. — Transitional Objects and Transitional Phenomena, International Journal of Psycho-Analysis (1953)
10. Revue française des affaires sociales — Seul·es et à distance ? Éloignement et vulnérabilisation des étudiants ultramarins (2025)
11. Essaim — Clinique de l'exil : de la nostalgie du migrant (2018)
12. Observatoire des Territoires — Mobilités résidentielles en France (INSEE data)
