France Finally Repeals Its 17th-Century Slavery Law

French lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament on Thursday adopted a bill to repeal a 17th-century law that governed enslaved people across France's colonies, in a symbolic and long-awaited move. The National Assembly voted 254-0 in a rare show of unanimity to approve the bill repealing the "Code Noir," or Black Code, a decree signed in 1685 by King Louis XIV. France abolished slavery in 1848, but the Code Noir had never been formally repealed. The vote is viewed as an important step in reckoning with France's colonial past, reports the AP. French President Emmanuel Macron last week floated the idea of reparations for slavery, though without providing details.

The Code Noir turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped, and killed. The realization that France never formally did away with it has left many aghast. In the National Assembly, the debate turned raw. Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved Martinicans, 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." 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. 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.

Before 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."