PARIS (AP) — Nearly 200 years after France ended slavery, a colonial-era statute that defined human beings as property has remained quietly on the books. Thursday marks the day legislators will finally take action to remove it.
The legislation, anticipated to pass in the National Assembly, will eliminate the Code Noir, also known as the Black Code, which was established by a 1685 decree from King Louis XIV to regulate enslaved people throughout France’s colonial territories.
This statute transformed people into commodities, permitting their exploitation through forced labor, physical violence, sale, sexual assault and murder — and France never officially eliminated it.
This discovery has stunned many citizens.
“That shocks me,” said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are from Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean.
“A law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there,” she said.
The statute’s scope was comprehensive. Article 44 designated enslaved individuals as “movable property.” Additional provisions mandated bodily harm for escapees and established that testimony from enslaved people held no legal weight.
The 60 provisions of Code Noir “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron stated 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 offense.”
Similar to previous French presidents, Macron did not offer an apology.
France operated the world’s third-largest slave trade, transporting approximately 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar profits funded the development of French cities like Nantes and Bordeaux. Its colonial reach eventually extended across four continents.
Some view this repeal as more significant — evidence, they contend, of a nation that has not fully confronted its history, representing one of many gradual measures in that process.
Legally, formally removing it is straightforward, experts note. Code Noir became powerless in 1848, when France ended slavery.
France maintained control of its slave territories: the four oldest — Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion — became full French overseas departments in 1946. This designation means Paris governs them like any other region.
Their approximately 1.9 million residents, mostly descendants of enslaved people, hold French citizenship.
Despite full integration into France, these overseas departments remain among the nation’s most impoverished areas. Joblessness rates run about twice the mainland average, and over three-quarters of Mayotte households fall below the national poverty threshold.
Before learning the facts, the French legislator who introduced the repeal proposal was unaware the law still existed.
Max Mathiasin, representing Guadeloupe, had purchased copies of the document over time and stored them on his bookshelf.
“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 legislative action represents “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” before a France whose national motto proclaims liberty, equality, fraternity. “It means living up to the Republican promise.”
That commitment, he argues, remains unfulfilled domestically.
“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 led by a former prime minister, Jean-Marc Ayrault, and its deputy director is Pierre-Yves Bocquet — both white men.
Bocquet describes Code Noir as the origin of France’s “colonial exception” — the concept that the French Republic’s fundamental rights could be suspended for those under its authority.
This concept survived the empire’s end, he explained: “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.”
France is not the only nation maintaining remnants of empire — the United Kingdom and the United States also govern overseas territories.
However, what distinguishes France, analysts say, is its decision to make former slave colonies equal departments of the Republic, rather than distant dependencies.
The government maintains that overseas departments are France like everywhere else, while residents say they face inferior treatment.
For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal holds importance because so little else has changed.
His African ancestor possessed no name under the law, only a number and registration code — the family living in Martinique received the surname Relouzat upon emancipation, probably derived from Nelouzat, a village in central France’s Auvergne region.
What frustrates him, he explained, is what the symbolic gesture leaves unchanged: institutional racism in France.
“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?”
In France, he stated, “we are still today in a form of apartheid … a form of colonial continuity.”
For some longtime advocates, Thursday does not represent the milestone it seems.
For Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the genuine breakthrough occurred 25 years earlier. In 2001, the Taubira law made France the first nation to classify the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity.
“That is what changed my life,” Alexis said.
For her, racism stems from slavery itself, not from any single law.
“When I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey,” she said. “People made animal cries when I walked past — as they still do in football stadiums today.”
Paris-born Élodie Léon, 29, whose family originates from French Guiana, supports the repeal but regrets the postponement.
“Symbolic neglect is also neglect,” she said.
During the Taubira law’s 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron suggested the possibility of reparations — an issue France has long avoided confronting.
He described it as “a question we must not refuse,” but one where “we must not make false promises.”
He pledged no funds, instead defining repair primarily as truth-telling, education and historical research.
France’s most profitable plantations operated in Saint-Domingue, where enslaved people rebelled and achieved independence in 1804 as Haiti. France subsequently compelled the liberated nation to pay compensation for their masters’ losses — a debt settled only in 1947.
France is not unique in this regard. In the United States, federal reparations proposals have remained stagnant for decades. California approved an apology but provided no monetary compensation.
However, the timing of Macron’s recent remarks was problematic. Two months prior, France abstained when the U.N. General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to designate the trans-Atlantic slave trade as the most serious crime against humanity.
Additionally, this month at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya, days after calling himself a “pan-Africanist,” Macron grabbed a microphone and demanded the room become silent.
“As soon as he sets foot on the African continent,” French opposition lawmaker Danièle Obono said, “he can’t help but behave like a colonizer.”
The Code Noir repeal, Bocquet noted, “will have no direct effect.” Whether it assists France in combating racism and inequality in its overseas territories, he said, “remains to be seen.”
“It is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this,” Alexis added. “Because it commits them to nothing.”
