The Code Noir has been dead for 178 years. It just took France this long to say it out loud.

On Thursday, the National Assembly voted 254-0 to formally repeal the 1685 decree that King Louis XIV signed to govern enslaved people across France’s colonies. The vote was unanimous, rare, and very late. France abolished slavery in 1848. The legal text that classified human beings as “movable property” — that allowed them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped, and killed — was never explicitly struck from the books.

Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker from Martinique descended from enslaved people, made clear what a vote cannot fix. “We are not descendants of slaves,” he said, bursting into tears. “We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst — reduced to slavery.”

The code’s 60 articles governed every corner of an enslaved person’s existence. Article 44 declared them chattel. Those who fled faced branding, ear amputation, death. The word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.

President Emmanuel Macron said the silence France maintained toward the Code Noir for nearly two centuries had become “a form of offense,” though he stopped short of an apology — a pattern. France ran the third-largest slave trade in Europe, shipping roughly 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth built Nantes and Bordeaux.

The repeal carries weight precisely because it costs so little. The law held no force since 1848. No budget lines shift, no policies change. As slavery expert Florence Alexis put it: “It is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this. Because it commits them to nothing.”

Still. A law that treated Black people as property sat on France’s books for three centuries. Better to strike it than leave it. The descendants of the people it dehumanized deserved at least that much — even if they deserved far more.

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