France moves to repeal Code Noir, the slavery law it never abolished

A statue named "Chains," by French artist Driss Sans-Arcidet, honoring the memory of the abolition of slavery, is photographed in a park in Paris, Wednesday, May 27, 2026, as France's National Assembly examines a bill to formally repeal the Code Noir, or Black Code, the 17th-century royal edict that governed slavery in French colonies and treated enslaved people as property. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)2026-05-28T05:10:45Z PARIS (AP) — For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property remained quietly in place. On Thursday, lawmakers will finally move to eliminate it.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’s colonies. The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and killed — and France never formally did away with it. That realization has left many aghast. “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 code’s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved “movable property.” Other sections ordered mutilation for those who fled, and dictated that the word of an enslaved person counted for nothing. 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 offense.”Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology. Read More 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. 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. Calls for France to face its pastIn law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. 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 Mayotte live below the national poverty line.Shocked to find the law wasn’t annulledBefore he discovered the truth, the French lawmaker who put forward the proposal to repeal the law didn’t know it still existed.Max Mathiasin, from Guadeloupe, had bought copies of the text over the years and left them 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 says, is still unkept at home.“In Guadeloupe,” Mathiasin said, “in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white.”A colonial exception that never endedThe 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 calls Code Noir the birthplace of France’s “colonial exception” — the principle that the French Republic’s founding rights could be suspended for those under its rule. The principle outlived the empire, he said: “Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.”France is hardly the only country still holding fragments of empire — the United Kingdom and the United States still have overseas territories. 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.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. France is ‘still in a form of apartheid’For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal matters, because so little else has. His African ancestor had no name under the law, only a number and a registration code — the family that lived in Martinique was given the

A statue named "Chains," by French artist Driss Sans-Arcidet, honoring the memory of the abolition of slavery, is photographed in a park in Paris, Wednesday, May 27, 2026, as France's National Assembly examines a bill to formally repeal the Code Noir, or Black Code, the 17th-century royal edict that governed slavery in French colonies and…

A statue named "Chains," by French artist Driss Sans-Arcidet, honoring the memory of the abolition of slavery, is photographed in a park in Paris, Wednesday, May 27, 2026, as France's National Assembly examines a bill to formally repeal the Code Noir, or Black Code, the 17th-century royal edict that governed slavery in French colonies and treated enslaved people as property. (AP Photo/Thomas Padilla)2026-05-28T05:10:45Z PARIS (AP) — For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property remained quietly in…