BY THE OPTIMIST DAILY EDITORIAL TEAM
There is something disquieting about the idea that a law governing slavery could still exist on the books in 2026. Not as an enforced law. Not as a policy. Just sitting there, formally unrepealed, in the archive of French legal history.
That was the status of the Code Noir until May 28, 2026, when France’s National Assembly voted to annul it. The margin was 254 to zero.
The Code Noir was signed by King Louis XIV in 1685. It governed enslaved people in France’s colonies: classifying them as moveable goods that could be inherited, requiring Catholic conversion, and prescribing ear mutilation for escape attempts. France abolished slavery in 1848 and declared it a crime against humanity in 2001. In all that time, nobody touched the law.
What the vote means, and what it does not
The unanimous National Assembly vote was one step. The Senate still needs to approve the repeal before it becomes law. President Macron said he supported it the week before the vote.
Max Mathiasin, the Guadeloupe lawmaker who championed the bill, cried when his colleagues raised their hands. Steevy Gustave, a Greens lawmaker whose father was born in Martinique, put it plainly from the floor: “We are not descendants of slaves. We are descendants of human beings who were born free, then reduced to slavery.”
The language matters. The vote was called symbolic from the start, and opponents of that framing were not quiet about it.
The louder argument underneath
Repealing an obsolete law is relatively easy. Reparations are not.
Activist Dieudonne Boutrin said it plainly: the repeal “changes nothing. Black people are still looked at the same way.” He and others called for a formal reparations programme addressing educational inequity and systemic racism.
Martinique official Serge Letchimy went further, citing “lasting historical, cultural, social, economic and psychological harm” and pointing to a 10-point plan from Caribbean nations that includes debt cancellation and healthcare investment.
Haiti is the clearest case. After winning independence in 1804, the country was forced to pay France hundreds of millions of francs, reparations to its former colonizers for the loss of enslaved labor. Haiti took high-interest loans to cover the payments and only cleared the debt in 1952.
A country still sorting out what happened
France was Europe’s third-largest slave trader, after Britain and Portugal. Between the 17th and 19th centuries, more than one million Africans were transported into slavery on French ships, most of them bound for Caribbean plantations.
The unanimous vote last week was not nothing. It closed a legal gap that should have been closed in 1848. But the lawmakers who wept in the chamber and the activists outside appear to be arguing about two different things: one a matter of record, the other still unresolved.
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