France has taken a historic step toward formally erasing one of the darkest laws in its colonial history. On Thursday, May 28, the country’s National Assembly voted unanimously to adopt a bill repealing the Code Noir, the 1685 royal decree that governed slavery across France’s colonies and legally classified enslaved Black people as property.
According to The Associated Press, the vote passed 254-0, marking a rare moment of unity in France’s lower house of parliament. Although France abolished slavery in 1848, the Code Noir itself had never been formally removed from French law, and the repeal bill still needs Senate approval. The discovery that the more-than-340-year-old edict remained on the books stunned many lawmakers and renewed pressure on the country to confront the legacy of slavery, racism, and colonial rule.
Issued under King Louis XIV, the Code Noir, or Black Code, applied first to French colonies in the Caribbean, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Domingue, before being adapted elsewhere in the French empire.
Article 44 declared enslaved people “movable property,” allowing them to be bought, sold, mortgaged, and inherited.
Other provisions mandated baptism in the Catholic faith, ordered the expulsion of Jews from French colonies, and imposed brutal punishments on enslaved people who resisted or escaped, including branding, mutilation, and death.
Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved people in Martinique, broke down during the debate while explaining why the repeal mattered.
“We are not descendants of slaves,” he said. “We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst — reduced to slavery.”
President Emmanuel Macron said last week that the Code Noir “should never have survived the abolition of slavery.”
He added that France’s long silence around the law had moved beyond oversight, saying, “It has become a form of offense.”
Like previous French presidents, however, Macron stopped short of issuing a formal apology.
The vote comes amid a broader global reckoning over slavery and institutional responsibility. Earlier this week, Pope Leo XIV issued a historic apology for the Vatican’s role in legitimizing colonial-era slavery, acknowledging that past popes gave European rulers authority to subjugate and enslave non-Christians.
The Vatican’s own 15th-century papal bulls helped shape the Doctrine of Discovery, which justified European expansion into Africa and the Americas.
France’s role was also massive. The country operated the third-largest transatlantic slave trade, transporting an estimated 1.4 million Africans to colonial plantations. The wealth generated from sugar and slavery helped build French port cities, including Nantes and Bordeaux.
In Saint-Domingue, enslaved people eventually rose up and won independence, creating Haiti in 1804. France later forced Haiti to pay reparations to former slaveholders, a debt that was not fully cleared until 1947.
For Max Mathiasin, the Guadeloupe lawmaker who introduced the repeal proposal, the vote was about restoring dignity. “This was made by human beings — against human beings,” he said. He called the repeal “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity.”
Still, several activists and scholars argued that the symbolic move does not erase ongoing inequality in France’s overseas departments, including Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion, where many residents are descended from enslaved people. Those territories are legally part of France, yet remain among the country’s poorest regions.
Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, said the deeper issue is not just the old legal text, but the racism slavery left behind. “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.”
France previously recognized slavery and the slave trade as crimes against humanity under the 2001 Taubira law. Macron has also floated reparations as a subject France “must not refuse,” though he has not committed to financial compensation.
