{"id":1703,"date":"2026-06-01T06:03:47","date_gmt":"2026-06-01T06:03:47","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1703"},"modified":"2026-06-01T06:03:47","modified_gmt":"2026-06-01T06:03:47","slug":"frances-parliament-votes-to-repeal-slavery-era-black-code-with-tears-and-history-in-the-chamber","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1703","title":{"rendered":"France\u2019s parliament votes to repeal slavery-era Black Code, with tears and history in the chamber"},"content":{"rendered":"<div>\n<div>\n<div>\n<ul><\/ul>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>PARIS<\/strong> | 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.<\/p>\n<p>The National Assembly voted 254-0 \u2014 a rare show of unanimity \u2014 to adopt a bill repealing the Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France\u2019s colonies.<\/p>\n<p>The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.<\/p>\n<p>And the realization that France never formally did away with it left many aghast.<\/p>\n<div><\/div>\n<p><strong>Debate in the chamber turned raw.<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, told colleagues the repeal was necessary \u201cbut no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe are not descendants of slaves,\u201d he said, bursting into tears. \u201cWe are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst \u2014 reduced to slavery.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The code\u2019s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved \u201cmovable property\u201d \u2014 assets a master could acquire like real estate. Those who fled faced branding, the amputation of their ears, even death. The word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.<\/p>\n<p>The Code Noir\u2019s 60 articles \u201cshould never have survived the abolition of slavery\u201d in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron said last week.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThe silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight,\u201d Macron said. \u201cIt has become a form of offense.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>Others see the repeal as something more telling \u2014 a symptom, they argue, of a country that has yet to reckon fully with that past, one of many slow steps along the way.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Calls for France to face its past<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>In law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. The Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery.<\/p>\n<p>France didn\u2019t relinquish its slave colonies: the four oldest \u2014 Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and R\u00e9union \u2014 were made full French overseas departments in 1946. That means they\u2019re governed from Paris like any other.<\/p>\n<p>Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>Shocked to find the law wasn\u2019t annulled<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>Before he discovered the truth, the French lawmaker who put forward the proposal to repeal the law didn\u2019t know it still existed.<\/p>\n<p>Max Mathiasin, from Guadeloupe, had bought copies of the text over the years and left them on his shelf.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full,\u201d he said. \u201cThis was made by human beings \u2014 against human beings.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>For him, the vote is \u201ca way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity\u201d before a France whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity. \u201cIt means living up to the Republican promise.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>That promise, he says, is still unkept at home.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIn Guadeloupe,\u201d Mathiasin said, \u201cin the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>A colonial exception that never ended<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>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 \u2014 both white men.<\/p>\n<p>Bocquet calls the Code Noir the birthplace of France\u2019s \u201ccolonial exception\u201d \u2014 the principle that the French Republic\u2019s founding rights could be suspended for those under its rule.<\/p>\n<p>The principle outlived the empire, he said: \u201cEven today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>France is hardly the only country still holding fragments of empire \u2014 the United Kingdom, the United States and the Netherlands still have overseas territories.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p><strong>France is \u2018still in a form of apartheid\u2019<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal matters, because so little else has.<\/p>\n<p>His African ancestor had no name under the law, only a number and a registration code \u2014 the family that lived in Martinique was given the name Relouzat at emancipation, likely after Nelouzat, a village in the Auvergne region of central France.<\/p>\n<p>What galls him, he said, is what the symbolism leaves untouched: systemic racism in France.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cUnder the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained,\u201d Relouzat said. \u201cIf the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?\u201d<\/p>\n<p>In France, he said, \u201cwe are still today in a form of apartheid \u2026 a form of colonial continuity.\u201d<\/p>\n<p><strong>\u2018Racism is the legacy of slavery itself<\/strong>\u2018<\/p>\n<p>For some who have fought longest, Thursday isn\u2019t the milestone it appears.<\/p>\n<p>For Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the real turning point came 25 years ago. In 2001, the Taubira law made France the first country to call the slave trade, and slavery, crimes against humanity.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThat is what changed my life,\u201d Alexis said.<\/p>\n<p>For her, racism is the legacy of slavery itself, not of one edict.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWhen I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey,\u201d she said. \u201cPeople made animal cries when I walked past \u2014 as they still do in football stadiums today.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Paris-born \u00c9lodie L\u00e9on, 29, whose family is from French Guiana, welcomes the repeal, but resents the delay.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cSymbolic neglect is also neglect,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt shocks me,\u201d said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are from Martinique. \u201cA law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n<p><strong>The history of reparations<\/strong><\/p>\n<p>At the Taubira law\u2019s 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron floated the idea of reparations \u2014 something that France has long stayed away from addressing.<\/p>\n<p>He called it \u201ca question we must not refuse,\u201d but one on which \u201cwe must not make false promises.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>He committed no money, instead defining repair first as truth-telling, education and historical work.<\/p>\n<p>The wealthiest of France\u2019s plantations were in Saint-Domingue, in the Caribbean, where the enslaved rose up and won independence in 1804 as Haiti. France then forced the freed to pay reparations for the loss of their masters \u2014 a debt cleared only in 1947.<\/p>\n<p>France isn\u2019t alone. In the United States, federal reparations legislation has stalled for decades. California approved an apology, but no cash.<\/p>\n<p>But the timing of Macron\u2019s latest speech was awkward. Two months earlier, France abstained when the U.N. General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to call the trans-Atlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.<\/p>\n<p>And this month at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya, days after declaring himself a \u201cpan-Africanist,\u201d Macron seized a microphone and ordered the room to quiet down.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cAs soon as he sets foot on the African continent,\u201d French opposition lawmaker Dani\u00e8le Obono said, \u201che can\u2019t help but behave like a colonizer.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>The repeal of the nCode Noir, said Bocquet, \u201cwill have no direct effect.\u201d Whether it helps France fight racism and inequality in its overseas territories, he said, \u201cremains to be seen.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this,\u201d Alexis added. \u201cBecause it commits them to nothing.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1697\">Israeli army captures strategic castle in Lebanon in historically deep incursion<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1699\">Independent bookstores are multiplying, although many people still think they\u2019re dying out<\/a><\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<\/p>\n<p>Read more <a href=\"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1701\">Gamification and memes lure young people to sports wagering apps, prediction markets<\/a><\/p>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>PARIS | 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 National Assembly voted 254-0 \u2014 a rare show of unanimity \u2014 to adopt a bill repealing [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1702,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1101,1133,1134,1103,63,1104],"tags":[2640,2641,2642,2643,2644,2645],"class_list":["post-1703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-0-no-apple-publish","category-1gridnation","category-1gridnationandstate","category-uncategorized","category-world","category-z-other-galley","tag-code-noir","tag-florence-alexis","tag-jean-marc-ayrault","tag-max-mathiasin","tag-president-emmanuel-macron","tag-steevy-gustave"],"yoast_head":"<!-- This site is optimized with the Yoast SEO plugin v27.6 - https:\/\/yoast.com\/product\/yoast-seo-wordpress\/ -->\n<title>France\u2019s parliament votes to repeal slavery-era Black Code, with tears and history in the chamber - Denver Moving Chronicle<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/denvermovingchronicle.com\/?p=1703\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\"France\u2019s parliament votes to repeal slavery-era Black Code, with tears and history in the chamber - Denver Moving Chronicle\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"PARIS | For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property has remained quietly on its books. 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On Thursday, the lower house of Parliament voted to wipe it from French law. 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