Photo credit: Globe Boston
For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property has remained quietly on its books. On Thursday, the lower house of Parliament voted to wipe it from French law.
The Associated Press reports that the National Assembly voted 254-0 – a rare show of unanimity – to adopt a bill repealing the Code Noir, or Black Code, tthe 1685 decree \king Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France’s colonies.
The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.
The realization that France never formally repealed it left many angry.
The debate in the chamber turned raw.
Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, told colleagues the 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, or 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 becomee a form of offence.”
Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.
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. The French Empire later spanned four continents.
Others see the repeal as something more.telling – a symptom, they argue, of a country that has yet to reckon fully with that past, one of many slow steps along the way.
In law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. The Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery.
France didn’t relinquish its slave colonies; the four oldest – Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion – were made full French overseas departments in 1946. That means they’re governed from Paris like any other.
Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens.
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 the Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte live below the national poverty line.
