For almost 180 years after France abolished slavery, the “Code Noir” (Black Code) - which, as the name suggests, allowed enslaved humans to be treated as property and worked, beaten, sold, raped or killed - remained on the books, apparently just gathering dust in the legal equivalent of a forgotten attic.
On Thursday, France’s bitterly divided national assembly did something rare: it agreed on something. In a unanimous vote of 254-0, lawmakers repealed the 17th-century law, signed by King Louis XIV in 1685, which codified the treatment of enslaved people in France’s colonies. The move is an important step in acknowledging Paris’s role in slavery and opens the way to possible reparations - an idea President Emmanuel Macron floated last week, perhaps while trying to distract from other national crises.
Macron said the code “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in 1848. “The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries towards this Code Noir is no longer an oversight. It has become a form of offence,” he added. He also noted the issue of reparations was one “we must not refuse,” but cautioned that the country “must not make false promises” - which is a bit like saying you’ll pay back a loan but only if it doesn’t actually cost you anything.
Emotions ran high in the lower house during the debate. Steevy Gustave, an MP from the French island of Martinique whose ancestors were enslaved, was tearful as he told the national assembly: “No vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives. We are not descendants of slaves, we are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst - reduced to slavery.” The 60 articles within the code encompassed every aspect of a slave’s life. Article 44 declared a person “movable property,” while other clauses decreed those who fled be mutilated and that the word of a slave counted for nothing. Basically, it was a legal guide to treating people like objects, with a side of torture.
Max Mathiasin, a French MP from Guadeloupe who tabled the motion repealing the law, admitted he had bought copies of the original text but never got around to reading them. “As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full. This was made by human beings, against human beings,” he told MPs. He called the vote “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” and said it meant living up to the French republic’s promise of liberty, equality and fraternity - a motto that apparently had a few asterisks for the first couple of centuries.
France was the third largest slave trading nation, after Britain and Portugal, shipping an estimated 1.4 million Africans to sugar plantations in its colonies. The wealth it produced built the cities of Nantes and Bordeaux - so essentially, French elegance owes a debt to brutal exploitation. The wealthiest plantations were on Saint-Domingue (now Haiti), where enslaved people rose up in 1804 and secured independence. But Paris forced the freed slaves to pay reparations to cover their owners’ losses - a debt they were still paying until 1947. Because nothing says “liberty, equality, fraternity” like making the victims pay for their liberation.
After abolishing slavery, France maintained a number of its colonies. The four oldest - Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion - were made French overseas departments in 1946. Their 1.9 million people, mostly descended from slaves, are French citizens governed from Paris. Yet they remain some of France’s poorest territories, with unemployment almost double the rate in mainland France and many households living below the national poverty line. “In Guadeloupe, the most important positions in the structures of the state are held by whites,” Mathiasin noted.
Pierre-Yves Bocquet, deputy director of France’s Foundation for the Remembrance of Slavery, said the code was at the root of the country’s “colonial exception,” installing the idea that the founding motto of the French republic did not apply to certain people under its rule. “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France,” he said. So, France has finally repealed a law that treated people as property - but the echoes of that law are still very much alive in policy and practice.