Historian and professor Olivette Otele of SOAS London joins a news program to discuss the French Parliament’s unanimous repeal of the Code Noir, 341 years after it was signed by Louis XIV and 178 years after France abolished slavery. The reparations debate is now officially open.
In 1685, King Louis XIV signed the Code Noir. The Black Code.
It was a document designed to do one thing with legal precision: regulate the bodies of enslaved African people in France’s colonies as property. Not as human beings. As tools. As currency. As reproductive assets. As labor.
The Code gave slave holders the legal framework to work enslaved people, beat them, sell them, rape them, and kill them, all within the bounds of French law.
France abolished slavery in 1848.
The Code Noir was repealed last week.
178 years. The law that codified slavery was never taken off the books when slavery ended. It simply sat there on the French statute books, through every republic, every president, and every generation of French schoolchildren taught to celebrate 1848 as the moment France did the right thing.
5 Key Takeaways
1. France repealed the Code Noir in 2026, 341 years after it was signed and 178 years after slavery was abolished.
The law that legally codified the enslavement, sale, beating, and killing of African people in French colonies was never removed from the statute books when slavery ended in 1848. Its repeal last week was unanimous in Parliament, and long overdue.
2. The Code Noir wasn’t incidental. It was France’s competitive colonial strategy.
France ran the world’s third largest slave trade and needed legal infrastructure to protect its investment. The Code regulated enslaved people as tools, currency, and reproductive assets, and was designed to ensure slave holders faced no legal consequences for what they did to Black bodies.
3. Successive French governments deliberately avoided repealing it because doing so would force a reckoning.
Examining the Code Noir meant examining slavery’s violence. Examining that violence meant confronting its legacy, including racism, inequality, and generational poverty. That path leads directly to reparations, a word France refused to say in any official capacity until last week.
4. Macron said “reparations” out loud for the first time but stopped short of an apology or financial commitment.
The French President acknowledged that reparations have no end date and that the harm is ongoing. He neither apologized nor committed to financial reparations, leaving advocates exactly where they have long been: heard, but not compensated.
5. France’s former slave colonies, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana, and Réunion, are still governed from Paris and remain among France’s poorest territories.
Made French overseas departments in 1946, these 1.9 million citizens have legal equality but face persistent racial inequality in employment, social mobility, and opportunity. They are governed by the country that enslaved their ancestors, from the same capital city, under a legal framework that was only just repealed.
“Successive governments knew that as soon as you start talking about these things, you have to look at the violence embedded within slavery, and therefore the legacies of the past: racism, racial inequality. France didn’t want to talk about that.”
— Professor Olivette Otele, SOAS London