France's National Assembly voted on Thursday to repeal the Code Noir, the decree that regulated slavery across the French colonies and that, in a quirk of legal history, was never formally struck down even after slavery itself was abolished in 1848. The vote was 254 to nil, a rare moment of unanimity in a fractured parliament, and it was carried, by several accounts, amid tears in the chamber as deputies confronted a document that had outlived the system it was written to serve.
The Code Noir was a creation of the absolutist state at its height: sixty articles signed in 1685 by King Louis XIV to govern the lives of enslaved people across France's colonial empire, dictating their treatment, their punishment and their status as property. That its text remained technically unrepealed for nearly two centuries after emancipation had become, for the bill's supporters, an unbearable symbol of a reckoning deferred.
President Emmanuel Macron framed the repeal in those terms. The decree's articles "should never have survived the abolition of slavery", he said in the days before the vote, adding that "the silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight." As French presidents before him have done, however, Macron stopped short of a formal apology for the slave trade itself, keeping the gesture symbolic rather than reparative.
The history the vote invoked is vast and largely unspoken in French public life. France ran the third-largest slave trade of the colonial powers, shipping roughly 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth helped build the Atlantic ports of Nantes and Bordeaux. The prosperity those cities accumulated remains visible in their architecture, even as the source of it has rarely been confronted in the national story France tells about itself.
Critics noted the limits of the measure. Repealing a decree that had no force in practice changes nothing in law, and the bill carries no provision for reparations, education reform or any of the substantive steps that campaigners have long sought. Supporters countered that symbols matter precisely because they endure, and that formally erasing the Code Noir from the statute book closes a wound that official indifference had been content to leave open.
The unanimous tally gave the moment a weight beyond its practical effect. In a legislature that has struggled to agree on budgets or governments, deputies from across the political spectrum found common ground on a question of national memory — a reminder that the past, handled carefully, can still command a consensus that the present rarely does.