France's National Assembly has unanimously voted to repeal the Code Noir, a set of laws introduced in 1685 by King Louis XIV that legally governed and legitimised slavery across French colonies. The vote, which took place on Thursday, 28 May, marks a long-awaited symbolic act: although slavery itself was abolished in France in 1848, the Code Noir had never been formally struck from the books, remaining a dead letter in French law for nearly two centuries.

The Code Noir — whose name translates literally as "Black Code" — was among the most sweeping instruments of colonial dehumanisation in modern legal history. Its 60 articles declared enslaved people "movable property," prescribed mutilation for those who fled, mandated capital punishment for striking an enslaver, and stripped the testimony of enslaved persons of any legal weight. It regulated every aspect of enslaved life, from religion to the conditions under which people could be bought and sold. France transported an estimated 1.2 to 1.4 million Africans to colonies in the Americas, including present-day French Guiana and Caribbean territories, making it one of the largest slave-trading nations after Britain and Portugal.

The bill was sponsored by Max Mathiasin, a French lawmaker from Guadeloupe — a French overseas territory in the Caribbean — who is himself a descendant of enslaved people. Mathiasin told parliament the proposal "does not claim to erase history" but aims to make "a powerful act of remembrance, justice and recognition." Fellow lawmaker Steevy Gustave, a descendant of enslaved people from Martinique — a Caribbean island that became a French department in 1946 — delivered an emotional speech, drawing a pointed distinction: "We are not descendants of slaves. We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to slavery."

Reactions from French Caribbean communities reflect both relief and frustration. While activists welcomed the repeal as overdue, some expressed deeper scepticism. Rodrigue Petitot, head of RPPRAC, a movement for the protection of Afro-Caribbean peoples, argued the vote "reveals a sad reality" — that the failure to repeal the Code Noir sooner showed abolition had never been fully realised in practice. Senegalese philosopher Souleymane Bachir Diagne, a professor at Columbia University in New York, offered a more measured view, calling the repeal significant within a broader French reckoning with its colonial past: "France is looking in the mirror of its own history."

The vote comes 25 years after France passed the Taubira Law in 2001, which made it the first country in the world to formally recognise the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery as crimes against humanity. The timing is also notable because President Emmanuel Macron recently suggested it was "not absurd" to consider reparations — hinting that the repeal may not be a purely symbolic endpoint. Observers note that the convergence of these events, alongside a recent United Nations resolution on slavery, suggests France is moving — however cautiously — toward a broader reckoning with its colonial legacy.