Overview
- President Emmanuel Macron publicly urged the government on May 21 to adopt a parliamentary bill that seeks to formally abrogate the Code noir, saying its continued presence in law is an affront to the Republic.
- The proposal was adopted unanimously by the National Assembly’s commission des Lois on May 20 and is scheduled for debate in the full Assembly on May 28, where lawmakers will consider a final vote.
- The Code noir refers to 17th‑ and 18th‑century royal edicts that treated enslaved people as property, allowed corporal punishments and regulated forced baptism; it has had no legal force since abolition but was never formally repealed.
- Macron announced a joint international scientific project with Ghana to produce concrete recommendations for policymakers and said that reparations are an unfinished, complex question that cannot fully redress the crime.
- The initiative comes on the 25th anniversary of France’s 2001 Taubira law and follows Paris’s abstention on a March UN resolution on the transatlantic slave trade, raising questions about school curricula, official memory work and political divides over reparations.