France’s Black Code and Blank Check Legacy
France's National Assembly voted to formally repeal the long-defunct Code Noir slavery regulations, a move critics say is a symbolic gesture that validates unfounded grievance claims.
According to Causeur, the legislative move took place on May 28th with an overwhelming majority, possibly even unanimous support. Socialist deputy Béatrice Bellay from Martinique had recently claimed that her eighteen-month struggle to find an apartment in Paris was proof that the Code Noir still affects contemporary life.
The problem with this theatrical display, as Causeur points out, is that the Code Noir has been dead letter law for over a century. Slavery was abolished in France in 1794 and again in 1848. With the elevation of the Declaration of the Rights of Man to constitutional status, any provisions of the Code Noir became not merely obsolete but illegal.
Attacking Ruins While Creating New Divisions
The repeal is not simply unnecessary, it is actively harmful. By formally repealing a text that had no concrete or symbolic existence in modern French law, the National Assembly has effectively validated the claim that the Code Noir continues to haunt social relations. Socialist deputies asserted in a recent opinion piece that the legacies of slavery continue to structure contemporary injustices and discrimination.
This approach divides French citizens along ethnic lines. Those designated as “racialized” can now invoke ancestral suffering to justify any difficulty in their current existence, while those labeled as non-racialized, or white, bear ontological guilt for crimes committed by distant ancestors, whether those crimes are real or imagined.
Opening Pandora’s Box
The legislative precedent creates unlimited opportunities for activists and idle parliamentarians. As Causeur observes, forgotten vestiges of Roman law offensive to descendants of the Gauls might be next, or perhaps anti-Jewish edicts from the reign of Saint Louis could be blamed for contemporary antisemitism. Patriarchal provisions buried in legal archives could provide material for years of political theater.
The move also intensifies competitive victimhood. In March, France wisely refused to support a United Nations General Assembly resolution declaring that slavery and the transatlantic slave trade were the gravest crimes against humanity in history. Such hierarchies negate the very concept of crimes against humanity. There can be no ranking of horror or suffering.
Rewriting History, Erasing Inconvenient Facts
Both the UN resolution and France’s Taubira Law, which recently marked its twenty-fifth anniversary, completely ignore Arab and inter-African slave trades. Former Justice Minister Christiane Taubira explicitly stated she did not want young Arabs to carry the weight of Arab historical misdeeds on their backs. This solicitude, Causeur notes, has never been extended to young French citizens now labeled as Gauls.
The Real Agenda: Permanent Reparations
The repeal of the Code Noir is not the culmination of memorial demands but rather the prelude to the next phase: reparations. This is not about tribute paid by the defeated to victors, nor compensation paid to direct victims and their immediate descendants, as Germany paid after the Holocaust. In their current postmodern conception, reparations never extinguish the debt.
Descendants of slaves are conceived as having a permanent claim against peoples whose ancestors practiced slavery, because trauma supposedly transmits across generations indefinitely. It matters not that among today’s claimants there are inevitably descendants of slaveholders themselves. The West must pay.
President Emmanuel Macron appears to have sensed the trap. While acknowledging that reparation is an immense question that should not be evaded, he immediately clarified that it could never be total. He has commissioned a scientific and international report to suggest ways for political decision-makers to navigate this issue, but his reflection remains deliberately unfinished.
The abrogation of a long-dead legal code has become a tool not for healing historical wounds but for institutionalizing permanent ethnic grievance and guilt in contemporary France.
With information from Causeur
