France’s Parliament has approved a bill to expressly repeal the Code Noir, a slavery-era edict that had lost its legal force, and require a review of colonial laws still in force overseas.
The Senate gave the measure final parliamentary approval on Oct. 20, voting 320-0 with 18 abstentions. The National Assembly passed it May 28.
Issued in 1685, the original Code Noir applied to French Caribbean islands. Later provisions adapted or extended its rules to other territories. The bill repeals the original edict and the measures used to apply, modify or expand it elsewhere.
The repeal addresses a gap in the legal record. A Senate committee report said France’s abolition of slavery in 1848 had already ended the edict’s legal effect, although it had never been explicitly repealed. The Code Noir treated enslaved people as property and prescribed corporal punishment.
The bill also says the texts used to organize enslavement are inseparable from the crime against humanity constituted by slavery and the slave trade under a 2001 French law. It does not designate each text as a separate crime against humanity.
Senators disputed whether the bill should identify later colonial edicts individually. Senator Evelyne Corbière Naminzo argued for explicit recognition of a 1723 text governing slavery in Indian Ocean territories. The Senate rejected amendments naming additional texts before approving the bill.
The measure sets a further task for the government. Within one year of promulgation, it must give Parliament an inventory of colonial laws that remain in force in overseas territories and examine their lasting effects. The report must also assess how schools teach the history of slavery, the slave trade and abolition, and propose ways to strengthen that teaching, places of remembrance and historical research.
