French lower house approves repeal of 17th-century slavery law

French lawmakers in the lower house of parliament on Thursday adopted a bill to repeal a 17th-century law that governed enslaved people across France’s colonies, in a symbolic and long-awaited move.

The National Assembly unanimously voted to approve the bill repealing the “Code Noir,” or Black Code.

In 1685, King Louis XIV passed the so called “Black Code”, legislation meant to regulate the conditions of slavery in French colonies, including life, death, purchase, religion, and treatment of slaves by their ‘masters’.

It legalized the brutal treatment of slaves and foresaw capital punishment for offences including striking a “master.”

The code’s reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved “movable property.” Other sections ordered mutilation for those who fled and dictated that the word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.

Max Mathiasin, a French lawmaker from Guadeloupe and the sponsor of the bill, told Parliament that the legislative proposal “does not claim to erase history” but “aims to take a new step, to make a powerful act of remembrance, justice and recognition”.

“Because to be born from the matrix of crime is something dizzying,” he added.

Slavery was abolished in France in 1848, which had a significant slave trade, shipping more than 1 million Africans to colonies in the Americas, but the set of legal texts governing still existed in French law although they ceased to be applied long ago.

In a very emotional speech, Steevy Gustave, a French lawmaker and a descendant of Martinique slaves, told his colleagues that “repealing the Code Noir is necessary, but no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives.”

“Allow me to make an important distinction: We are not descendants of slaves. We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst, reduced to slavery,” he concluded, bursting into tears.

Among Black French citizens in from the Caribbean island of Martinique, a former French colony which became a French department in 1946, the reactions mix recognition and disillusionment.

“It was about time! This Black Code is one of the most regressive and criminal pieces of legislation in modern times” Philippe Pierre-Charles, an anti-colonialist and anti-capitalist activist told The Associated Press.

“The fact that they (French authorities) forgot to repeal it, to cancel it, says a lot about the limits of the evolution of mentalities and official policie,” he added.

For Rodrigue Petitot, the head of RPPRAC, a movement for the Protection of Afro-Caribbean Peoples and Resources, this vote “reveals a sad reality.”

“This shows that the abolition of slavery never truly happened for us. It was all just talk. It demonstrates that those who have always complained about it are still feeling enslaved are right, because even the laws don’t follow the promises,” he explained.

On May 21, 2001, France adopted of a law recognizing the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity, known as the “Taubira Law,” named after the Member of Parliament behind it, Christiane Taubira.

It made France the first country in the world to officially recognize the transatlantic slave trade and colonial slavery as crimes against humanity.