Slave law repealed - France scraps code that governed colonies

For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property has remained quietly on the statute books. Yesterday, the lower house of parliament voted to strike it from French law.

The National Assembly voted 254 to zero, a rare show of unanimity, to adopt a bill repealing the Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree signed by King Louis XIV to govern enslaved people across France’s colonies.

The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.

The realisation that France had never formally abolished it left many aghast. Debate in the chamber turned raw.

Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, now a French overseas department, told colleagues that repeal was necessary, “but no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives”.

“We are not descendants of slaves,” he said, bursting into tears. “We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst, reduced to slavery.”

The code’s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved “movable property”, assets a master could acquire like real estate. Those who fled faced branding, the amputation of their ears, and even death. The word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.

The Code Noir’s 60 articles “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron said last week.

“The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight,” Macron said. “It has become a form of offence.”

Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.

France ran the third-largest trade in Africans, transporting about 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth helped build cities such as Nantes and Bordeaux. The empire later spanned four continents.

For some, the repeal is more telling, a sign, they argue, of a country yet to reckon fully with its past, one of many tentative steps along the way.

FRANCE TO FACE PAST

Legally, eliminating the code is the easy part, observers say. The Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery.

France did not relinquish its slavery colonies: the four oldest, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion, became full overseas departments in 1946, governed from Paris like any other.

Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens.

Yet, despite being fully part of France, the overseas departments remain among its poorest territories. Unemployment is roughly double the mainland rate, and more than three-quarters of households in Mayotte, in the Indian Ocean, live below the national poverty line.

Max Mathiasin, the lawmaker who introduced the repeal, said he had not realised the law still existed until recently.

From Guadeloupe, he had long kept copies of the text on his shelf.

“As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full,” he said. “This was made by human beings, against human beings.”

For him, the vote is “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” before a France whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity. “It means living up to the Republican promise.”

That promise, he said, remains unfulfilled.

“In Guadeloupe,” Mathiasin said, “in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white.”

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, both white men.

Bocquet describes the Code Noir as the origin of France’s “colonial exception”, the principle that republican rights could be suspended for those under its rule.

That principle outlived the empire; he argued, “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.”

France is not alone in retaining fragments of empire; Britain, the United States and the Netherlands all have overseas territories.

What sets France apart, observers say, is that it made its former slavery colonies full departments of the Republic, not distant dependencies.

The state insists that the overseas departments are France in every sense, even as residents argue they are treated as lesser.

Most colonial powers had laws governing slavery in their territories. In each case, those laws fell away when slavery was abolished, leaving no single text to repeal.

France’s Code Noir was different: a named royal decree that lingered on the books long after its legal force had vanished.

At the Taubira law’s 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron raised the question of reparations, long avoided in France.

He called it “a question we must not refuse”, but one on which “we must not make false promises”.

He committed no funding, instead framing repair as truth-telling, education and historical work.

Some of France’s wealthiest plantations were in Saint-Domingue, where enslaved people rose up and secured Independence in 1804 as Haiti. France then forced the formerly enslaved to pay reparations to their former masters, a debt only cleared in 1947.

France is not alone. In the United States, federal reparations proposals have stalled for decades. California has issued an apology, but no payments.

-AP