{"id":89841,"date":"2026-05-28T05:20:09","date_gmt":"2026-05-28T05:20:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/89841\/"},"modified":"2026-05-28T05:20:09","modified_gmt":"2026-05-28T05:20:09","slug":"france-moves-to-repeal-code-noir-the-slavery-law-it-never-abolished","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/89841\/","title":{"rendered":"France moves to repeal Code Noir, the slavery law it never abolished"},"content":{"rendered":"

PARIS \u2013 For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law<\/a> that classified humans as property remained quietly in place. On Thursday, lawmakers will finally move to eliminate it.<\/p>\n

The bill, expected to be adopted by the National Assembly, will repeal Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France\u2019s colonies<\/a>. <\/p>\n

The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and killed \u2014 and France never formally did away with it. <\/p>\n

That realization has left many aghast. <\/p>\n

\u201cThat shocks me,\u201d said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are from Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean. <\/p>\n

\u201cA law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The code\u2019s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved \u201cmovable property.\u201d Other sections ordered mutilation for those who fled, and dictated that the word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.<\/p>\n

Code Noir\u2019s 60 articles \u201cshould never have survived the abolition of slavery\u201d in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron<\/a> said last week.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight,\u201d Macron said. \u201cIt has become a form of offense.\u201d<\/p>\n

Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.<\/p>\n

France ran the third-largest slave trade, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth built the French cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. Its empire later spanned four continents. <\/p>\n

Others see the repeal as something more telling \u2014 a symptom, they argue, of a country that has yet to reckon fully with that past, one of many slow steps along the way. <\/p>\n

Calls for France to face its past<\/p>\n

In law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery. <\/p>\n

France didn’t relinquish its slave colonies: the four oldest \u2014 Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and R\u00e9union \u2014 were made full French overseas departments in 1946. That means they’re governed from Paris like any other. <\/p>\n

Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens. <\/p>\n

Despite being fully part of France, the overseas departments remain among its poorest territories. Unemployment runs roughly double the mainland rate, and more than three-quarters of households in Mayotte live below the national poverty line.<\/p>\n

Shocked to find the law wasn’t annulled<\/p>\n

Before he discovered the truth, the French lawmaker who put forward the proposal to repeal the law didn’t know it still existed.<\/p>\n

Max Mathiasin, from Guadeloupe, had bought copies of the text over the years and left them on his shelf. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was made by human beings \u2014 against human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n

For him, the vote is \u201ca way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity\u201d before a France whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity. \u201cIt means living up to the Republican promise.\u201d<\/p>\n

That promise, he says, is still unkept at home.<\/p>\n

\u201cIn Guadeloupe,\u201d Mathiasin said, \u201cin the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white.\u201d<\/p>\n

A colonial exception that never ended<\/p>\n

The Foundation for the Memory of Slavery is chaired by a former prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and its deputy director is Pierre-Yves Bocquet \u2014 both white men.<\/p>\n

Bocquet calls Code Noir the birthplace of France\u2019s \u201ccolonial exception\u201d \u2014 the principle that the French Republic\u2019s founding rights could be suspended for those under its rule. <\/p>\n

The principle outlived the empire, he said: \u201cEven today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.\u201d<\/p>\n

France is hardly the only country still holding fragments of empire \u2014 the United Kingdom and the United States still have overseas territories. <\/p>\n

But what sets France apart, observers say, is that it made its slave colonies equal departments of the Republic, not dependencies it governs from afar.<\/p>\n

The state insists that the overseas departments are France like anywhere else, even as the people who live there say they are treated as less.<\/p>\n

France is ‘still in a form of apartheid\u2019<\/p>\n

For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal matters, because so little else has. <\/p>\n

His African ancestor had no name under the law, only a number and a registration code \u2014 the family that lived in Martinique was given the name Relouzat at emancipation, likely after Nelouzat, a village in the Auvergne region of central France.<\/p>\n

What galls him, he said, is what the symbolism leaves untouched: systemic racism in France.<\/p>\n

\u201cUnder the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained,\u201d Relouzat said. \u201cIf the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?\u201d<\/p>\n

In France, he said, \u201cwe are still today in a form of apartheid \u2026 a form of colonial continuity.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u2018Racism is the legacy of slavery itself\u2019<\/p>\n

For some who have fought longest, Thursday isn’t the milestone it appears.<\/p>\n

For Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the real turning point came 25 years ago. In 2001, the Taubira law made France the first country to call the slave trade, and slavery, crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n

\u201cThat is what changed my life,\u201d Alexis said. <\/p>\n

For her, racism is the legacy of slavery itself, not of one edict. <\/p>\n

\u201cWhen I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople made animal cries when I walked past \u2014 as they still do in football stadiums today.\u201d<\/p>\n

Paris-born \u00c9lodie L\u00e9on, 29, whose family is from French Guiana, welcomes the repeal, but resents the delay.<\/p>\n

\u201cSymbolic neglect is also neglect,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

The history of reparations<\/p>\n

At the Taubira law\u2019s 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron floated the idea of reparations \u2014 something that France has long stay away from addressing.<\/p>\n

He called it \u201ca question we must not refuse,\u201d but one on which \u201cwe must not make false promises.\u201d<\/p>\n

He committed no money, instead defining repair first as truth-telling, education and historical work.<\/p>\n

The wealthiest of France’s plantations were in Saint-Domingue, where the enslaved rose up and won independence in 1804 as Haiti. France then forced the freed to pay reparations for the loss of their masters \u2014 a debt cleared only in 1947.<\/p>\n

France isn’t alone. In the United States, federal reparations legislation has stalled for decades. California approved an apology, but no cash.<\/p>\n

But the timing of Macron’s latest speech was awkward. Two months earlier, France abstained when the U.N. General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to call the trans-Atlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.<\/p>\n

And this month at the Africa Forward Summit<\/a> in Kenya, days after declaring himself a \u201cpan-Africanist,\u201d Macron seized a microphone and ordered the room to quiet down<\/a>. <\/p>\n

\u201cAs soon as he sets foot on the African continent,\u201d French opposition lawmaker Dani\u00e8le Obono said, \u201che can\u2019t help but behave like a colonizer.\u201d<\/p>\n

The repeal of Code Noir, said Bocquet, \u201cwill have no direct effect.\u201d Whether it helps France fight racism and inequality in its overseas territories, he said, \u201cremains to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201cIt is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this,\u201d Alexis added. \u201cBecause it commits them to nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n

Copyright 2026 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"PARIS \u2013 For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":89842,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":"","_share_on_mastodon":"0"},"categories":[125],"tags":[474,48826,242,2494,48828,48824,48821,48822,48825,48820,48827,48823,2497,52],"class_list":["post-89841","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-emmanuel-macron","tag-business","tag-daniele-obono","tag-emmanuel-macron","tag-ethnicity","tag-florence-alexis","tag-jacques-stephen-alexis","tag-jean-marc-ayrault","tag-louis-xiv-of-france","tag-max-mathiasin","tag-max-relouzat","tag-muriel-jean-baptiste","tag-pierre-yves-bocquet","tag-race","tag-world-news"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@people\/116650522927047651","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89841","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=89841"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/89841\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/89842"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=89841"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=89841"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/people\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=89841"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}