05/31/2026
It’s 2026…. And,
Almost 180 years after France abolished slavery, the Code Noir (Black Code) allowing enslaved humans to be treated as property and worked, beaten, sold, r***d or killed, remained in place.
Just this past Thursday, the country’s bitterly divided national assembly voted unanimously to repeal it.
The vote, passed by 254-0, puts an end to a 17th century law, signed by King Louis XIV in 1685, which codified the treatment of enslaved people in France’s colonies.
It is an important step in acknowledging Paris’s role in slavery and will open the way to possible reparations.
The 60 articles within the code encompassed every aspect of a slave’s life. Article 44 declared a person “movable property”, while other clauses decreed those who fled be mutilated and that the word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.
Max Mathiasin, a French MP from Guadeloupe in the southern Caribbean, who tabled the motion repealing the law said he had bought copies of the original text but had never got around to reading them.
“As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full. This was made by human beings, against human beings,” he told Associated Press.
He said the vote was “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity”. It meant living up to the French Republic’s promise of liberty, equality and fraternity, he added.
France was the third-largest slave trading nation, after Britain and Portugal. It shipped an estimated 1.4 million Africans to sugar plantations in its colonies. The wealth it produced built the cities of Nantes and Bordeaux.
The wealthiest of those plantations were on Saint-Domingue, a French colony on the western third of the Caribbean island of Hispaniola, established in 1687. In 1804, those enslaved in the colony rose up, securing independence in the territory that became Haiti. However, Paris forced the freed slaves to pay reparations to cover their owners’ losses, a debt they were still paying until 1947.
After abolishing slavery, France maintained a number of its colonies. The four oldest – Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana on the north-eastern coast of South America and the island of Réunion in the Indian Ocean – were made French overseas departments in 1946. Their 1.9 million population, most descended from enslaved people, are French citizens and governed from Paris.
These laws stayed on the books until Just this past week! May 29th, 2026!
