PARIS – For nearly 200 years after France formally abolished chattel slavery across its territories, a foundational colonial-era law that codified Black people as owned property remained embedded in the nation’s legal books. On Thursday, French National Assembly lawmakers are finally set to vote to strike the archaic, oppressive statute from official records.
The legislation expected to pass this week targets the *Code Noir* (or Black Code), a 1685 edict signed into law by King Louis XIV to regulate every aspect of enslaved life across France’s sprawling colonial empire. The decree explicitly reclassified human beings as chattel, legally permitting enslavers to overwork, assault, trade, sexually violate and murder enslaved people – and remarkably, no previous French government had ever formally rescinded the text. This long-overlooked fact has left many French citizens stunned and horrified.
Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-based nurse whose family hails from Martinique, a Caribbean French overseas department, called the persistence of the law shocking. “A law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there,” she noted.
The *Code Noir*’s 60 articles touched every corner of colonial life: Article 44 legally labeled enslaved people “movable property,” other clauses mandated disfigurement for captured freedom seekers, and the statute ruled that the testimony of an enslaved person held no legal weight against a white enslaver.
President Emmanuel Macron acknowledged last week that the text “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century, adding that “the silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight. It has become a form of offense.” Like all his predecessors, however, Macron has stopped short of issuing a formal national apology for France’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.
France oversaw the third-largest transatlantic slave trade in history, transporting an estimated 1.4 million enslaved Africans to work on colonial plantations whose sugar-driven profits built the wealthy mainland French port cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. At its peak, the French colonial empire spanned four continents.
While the upcoming repeal has been framed as a step toward reckoning with colonial history, many activists and analysts argue it exposes the deeper reality that France has yet to fully confront its legacy of enslavement and racial injustice, characterizing the vote as just one slow, incremental step in a long uncompleted journey.
Legal observers note that formally striking the *Code Noir* from the books is largely a symbolic act: the statute lost all practical legal authority when France abolished slavery for the final time in 1848. Unlike many former colonial powers that granted independence to their former slaveholding territories, France integrated its four oldest slave colonies – Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion – as full overseas departments of the French Republic in 1946, meaning they are officially governed from Paris identically to any mainland region.
Today, roughly 1.9 million people, most of whom are descendants of enslaved people, live in these departments as full French citizens. Despite their formal status as equal parts of the Republic, these territories remain among France’s poorest. Unemployment rates are roughly double the mainland average, and more than three-quarters of households in Mayotte, another French overseas department in the Indian Ocean, live below the national poverty line.
The push for repeal came from a lawmaker who had no idea the *Code Noir* still existed on France’s legal books until he researched the topic. Max Mathiasin, a deputy from Guadeloupe and the great-great-grandson of enslaved people, had collected copies of the original text over the years but could never bring himself to read it cover to cover. “This was made by human beings — against human beings,” he said. For Mathiasin, Thursday’s vote is “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” that aligns with France’s foundational republican motto of liberty, equality and fraternity. “It means living up to the Republican promise,” he added.
Even so, Mathiasin acknowledges that promise remains unfulfilled. “In Guadeloupe, in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white,” he pointed out.
Pierre-Yves Bocquet, deputy director of the Paris-based Foundation for the Memory of Slavery (chaired by former white prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault), argues that the *Code Noir* created the framework for France’s “colonial exception” – the doctrine that the founding equal rights of the French Republic could be suspended for populations under colonial rule. That principle, he says, outlasted the formal end of the French empire: “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.”
France is not unique in retaining remnants of its colonial past: both the United Kingdom and the United States still administer scattered overseas territories. But what distinguishes France, analysts note, is that it reclassified its former slave colonies as full departments of the Republic, not remote dependencies, yet still treats their populations as second-class citizens.
For 81-year-old Max Relouzat, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries based in Martinique, the repeal is meaningful only because so little else has changed for Black descendants of enslaved people in France. Relouzat’s own African ancestor had no legal name under slavery, only a registration number; his family was granted the surname Relouzat only after emancipation, likely taken from a small village in mainland France’s Auvergne region. What angers him most is that the symbolic repeal leaves systemic racism in France entirely unaddressed. “Under the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained,” Relouzat said. “If the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?” He argues that “we are still today in a form of apartheid … a form of colonial continuity.”
Some long-time activists for racial justice warn that the repeal is being framed as a more significant milestone than it actually is. Florence Alexis, a leading scholar of slavery and daughter of celebrated Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, notes that the real turning point came 25 years ago with the 2001 Taubira Law, which made France the first country in the world to formally classify the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery as crimes against humanity. “That is what changed my life,” Alexis said. For her, systemic racism is the direct legacy of the institution of slavery itself, not just one 17th-century edict. She points to ongoing anti-Black discrimination that persists in daily life: “When I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey. People made animal cries when I walked past — as they still do in football stadiums today.”
Élodie Léon, a 29-year-old Paris-born woman whose family is from French Guiana, welcomes the repeal but resents the nearly 200-year delay. “Symbolic neglect is also neglect,” she said.
The debate over the *Code Noir* comes as Macron has recently opened discussion of reparations for slavery, a topic France has avoided for decades. Speaking at the 25th anniversary of the Taubira Law on May 21, Macron called reparations “a question we must not refuse” but refused to commit to financial compensation, instead framing repair as first requiring truth-telling, public education and historical preservation work.
The wealthiest French slave colony was Saint-Domingue, where enslaved people rose up in revolution and won independence as the nation of Haiti in 1804. In retaliation, France forced the newly freed Haitian people to pay reparations to former French enslavers for lost property – a crippling debt that Haiti only fully paid off in 1947. France is not alone in grappling with this history: in the United States, federal reparations legislation has stalled for decades, and while California issued a formal apology for slavery, it has not approved financial compensation for descendants.
Critics have pointed out that Macron’s recent opening to the idea of reparations clashes with other recent actions. Two months before his May speech, France abstained from a United Nations General Assembly resolution that labeled the transatlantic slave trade a crime against humanity, which passed 123-3 with 52 abstentions. Earlier this month, at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya, just days after declaring himself a “pan-Africanist,” Macron sparked backlash when he seized a microphone and publicly ordered attendees to be quiet. “As soon as he sets foot on the African continent,” said French opposition lawmaker Danièle Obono, “he can’t help but behave like a colonizer.”
Bocquet notes that the repeal of the *Code Noir* “will have no direct effect” on daily life for Black people in France or its overseas territories. Whether this symbolic step paves the way for tangible action to address racism and inequality, he says, “remains to be seen.” For Alexis, the low-stakes symbolic vote is intentionally convenient for France’s leadership: “It is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this. Because it commits them to nothing.”
