PARIS (AP) — For nearly two centuries after France abolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property remained quietly in place. On Thursday, lawmakers will finally move to eliminate it.The bill, expected to be adopted by the National Assembly, will repeal Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France’s colonies. The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and killed — and France never formally did away with it. That realization has left many aghast. “That shocks me,” said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are from Martinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean. “A law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there,” she said.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.
Code Noir’s 60 articles “should never have survived the abolition of slavery” in the 19th century, President Emmanuel Macron said last week.
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