The Lower House of the French Parliament Thursday voted, in a rare show of unanimity, to adopt a Bill that would repeal Code Noir (Black Code), used to govern slaves across the nation’s colonies under King Louis XIV in 1685, the Associated Press reported.
For about two centuries after France had abolished slavery in 1848, the law which treated human beings as properties, and enabled them to be beaten, sold, raped, and murdered, persisted, the report noted.
However, the debate at the National Assembly on Thurday turned raw, as members voted 254-0 to wipe it off from the French law.
French President Emmanuel Macron last week asserted that Code Noir’s 60 articles “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century.
Even though he stopped short of an apology, he stated, “The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight.”
“It has become a form of offense,” he added.
Lawmakers shocked the law wasn’t annulled yet
A French lawmaker who proposed to repeal the colonial-era law said he didn’t know it was still under existence.
Although Max Mathiasin bought copies of the text over the past years, he left them on his shelf.
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“As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full,” he said during the Assembly session, AP quoted.
“This was made by human beings — against human beings.”
For him, the vote was “a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity” in France, adhering to the principles of liberty, equality, fraternity. “It means living up to the Republican promise,” he added.
That promise, he said, remained unfulfilled. “In Guadeloupe,” Mathiasin said, “in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are white,” Max claimed.
For Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker and a descendant of those enslaved on the Caribbean island of Martinique, the repeal was necessary, “but no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives.”
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“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 news agency highlighted.
Slave trade in France
Article 44 of Code Noir declared the enslaved people as “movable property” — assets a master could acquire. According to the law, those who fled had to face branding, amputation of their ears, or even death.
France ran the third-largest slave trade, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to sugar plantations, the profits from which helped built the French cities of Nantes and Bordeaux, AP highlighted.
Even though Code Noir had lost all authority in 1848, France did not completely give up its slave colonies. Its four oldest — Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Réunion — were deemed as French overseas departments, governed from Paris as others, in 1946. And their 1.9 million people, most descended from those enslaved, are not French citizens.
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However, these overseas departments still remain France’s poorest territories, with high unemployment rates, and over three-quarters of households in the Indian Ocean territory of Mayotte living below the national poverty line.
Even today, the deputy director of the Foundation for the Memory of Slavery, Pierre-Yves Bocquet, says people living in overseas territories are treated as less than those residing in mainland France.
Many also share that the vote to repeal the Black Code does not address the revalence of systemic racism in France.
“Under the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained,” Relouzat said. “If the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?,” Max Relouzat, the president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries told AP.
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In France, he claimed, “we are still today in a form of apartheid … a form of colonial continuity.”
The repeal of the Code, Bocquet claimed, “will have no direct effect.” Whether the move helps the nation fight against racism and inequality in its overseas territories, “remains to be seen,” he added.
Still a colonizer?
On May 21 this year, the French president circulated the idea of reparations, calling it “a question we must not refuse,” but one on which “we must not make false promises,” the Associated Press quoted.
While he committed no money, he pushed for repair as truth-telling, education and historical work, according to the report.
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However, only two months earlier, France had abstained when the United Nations General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to call the trans-Atlantic slave trade the gravest crime against humanity.
AP also pointed out that Macron was quick to grab the microphone and order the room to quiet down at the Africa Forward Summit in Kenya.
He was also criticised for his actions by the French Opposition. “As soon as he sets foot on the African continent,” French opposition lawmaker Danièle Obono said, “he can’t help but behave like a colonizer.”
