On Thursday, France’s influential lower legislative chamber, the National Assembly, took a landmark step toward reckoning with the nation’s slave-trading colonial history, voting 254-0 to formally repeal the 17th-century slavery edict known as Code Noir, or the Black Code. The bill will next advance to the French Senate for consideration, where backers of the repeal anticipate it will pass, though no official timeline for the upper chamber vote has been announced.
First signed into law by King Louis XIV at the Palace of Versailles in 1685, Code Noir laid out the official legal framework regulating chattel slavery across France’s expanding colonial empire. What began as a set of 60 rules governing enslavement in France’s early Caribbean holdings — Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue, the territory that would become the independent nation of Haiti after a successful enslaved uprising — was later extended to other French holdings including French Guiana, Louisiana, and the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius. French philosopher Louis Sala-Molins once described the document as “the most monstrous legal text of modern times,” a label that aligns with historical records of its brutal provisions.
Over the course of France’s colonial slave trade, an estimated 1.4 million kidnapped African people were forcibly transported across the Atlantic Ocean in chains, making France the third-largest European slave-trading power behind only Portugal and Britain. The vast majority of enslaved people were forced to work in deadly, backbreaking conditions harvesting cash crops including sugar cane, coffee, cotton, and indigo for French colonial landowners. The labor was so lethal that the death rate among enslaved populations consistently outpaced birth rates, with planters simply replenishing their workforce by purchasing more kidnapped Africans from transatlantic slave traders.
By 1789, Saint-Domingue alone held roughly 500,000 enslaved people — more than any other Caribbean colony of the era. The territory’s massive enslaved labor force produced the majority of the world’s sugar and coffee exports, earning it a reputation as the wealthiest colony on the planet at the time.
While Code Noir was effectively rendered obsolete when France formally abolished slavery across its remaining colonies in 1848, it had never been formally removed from the country’s official legal statutes until the National Assembly’s historic vote this week.
Every provision of the 337-year-old edict enshrined the dehumanization of enslaved people into law. Article 44 explicitly classified enslaved people as “movable property,” granting enslavers full legal right to buy, sell, mortgage, or bequeath enslaved people to their heirs, just like land or household furniture. Article 28 cemented this status by stating that enslaved people “could own nothing that does not belong to their master,” meaning any income or personal belongings an enslaved person acquired legally belonged to their enslaver. For more than a century after the edict took effect, enslaved people were not even granted legal personhood or formal names; starting in 1839, each enslaved person in French colonies was assigned only a serial number and registration code, with formal surnames only granted to people after abolition in 1848.
The code codified extreme, often deadly punishments for people who resisted enslavement. Article 38 mandated punishment for people who attempted to escape bondage: for a first offense, the escapee would have their ears cut off and be branded with a fleur-de-lis, the official symbol of the French monarchy, on one shoulder. A second attempted escape resulted in the severing of a leg tendon and a second branding, while a third attempt carried a death sentence. Article 33 went even further, ordering capital punishment for any enslaved person who struck their enslaver, the enslaver’s wife, or their children hard enough to leave a bruise or draw blood, including any strike to the face.
Many of the edict’s harmful provisions targeted marginalized groups beyond enslaved people as well. The very first article of Code Noir, before it addressed the regulation of slavery at all, ordered all Jewish people expelled from French colonies within a three-month window, labeling them “declared enemies of the Christian name.” Articles 2 and 3 forced all enslaved people to be baptized and raised in the Catholic faith, banning all public practice of any other religion. The edict also enshrined hereditary slavery, ruling that a child’s enslaved status followed the mother: any child born to an enslaved woman was born into slavery, even if the child’s father was a free person. Enslaved children were allocated just half the food rations granted to adult enslaved people.
A small number of provisions were framed as nominal protections for enslaved people, requiring enslavers to provide basic food and clothing, banning excessive torture, and barring the separation of husbands, wives, and young children through sale. But historical research confirms these rules were almost universally ignored by colonial landowners, and enslavers who killed the people they held in bondage were almost never held legally accountable under the existing system.
