France Votes Unanimously to Repeal 338-Year Slavery Law

After nearly two centuries of quiet existence, France's National Assembly finally erased a law that should have died with slavery itself.

Lawmakers voted unanimously Thursday to repeal the Code Noir, a decree signed in 1685 by King Louis XIV that classified enslaved people as "movable property." The vote was 254-0, a rare show of complete agreement in French politics.

The law allowed enslaved people to be worked, beaten, sold, and killed. It ordered mutilation for those who fled and declared their testimony worthless in court. Yet it survived 176 years after France abolished slavery in 1848.

The lawmaker who proposed the repeal, Max Mathiasin from Guadeloupe, admits he couldn't even read it fully at first. "As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full," he said.

President Emmanuel Macron called the law's survival "no longer an oversight" but "a form of offense." The code's 60 articles should never have outlasted abolition, he said, though he stopped short of issuing a formal apology.

France ran the third-largest slave trade in history, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to Caribbean plantations. The wealth from sugar built French cities like Nantes and Bordeaux.

The four oldest slave colonies became full French departments in 1946. Their 1.9 million residents are French citizens, yet they remain among the country's poorest regions with double the unemployment rate of mainland France.

The Ripple Effect

The vote opens conversations France has avoided for generations. The law had no legal force since 1848, but its symbolic weight mattered deeply to the descendants of enslaved people who are still French citizens today.

For 81-year-old Max Relouzat, whose ancestor had only a number under the law, the repeal addresses a wound that's been ignored too long. His family received the name Relouzat only at emancipation, likely borrowed from a village in central France.

Mathiasin sees the vote as "a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity." For a nation whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity, he says it means "living up to the Republican promise."

That promise feels incomplete to many in the overseas territories, where the most important positions remain largely held by white appointees from mainland France. The Foundation for the Memory of Slavery itself is led by white French officials.

The unanimous vote proves that when France confronts its past directly, change becomes possible.

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