More than 175 years after slavery was abolished in France, the country’s lawmakers voted on Tuesday to strike out the government regulations overseeing the practice that had remained in the French legal code.
Called the Code Noir, or the Black Code, the rules were introduced in France between 1685 and 1724, and regulated the treatment of enslaved people in France’s colonies, including its Caribbean islands and present-day Louisiana.
They included provisions on how enslaved people could be punished and how much they should be fed. Those laws have been obsolete since 1848, when the French government banned slavery — for the second and final time, after it was briefly abolished between 1794 and 1802 — but they were never formally removed from the statute books.
On Tuesday, French senators voted to finally scrap the rules, approving a decision that lawmakers in the lower house of the French Parliament passed unanimously in May.
The vote was long planned and its timing was unrelated to the government’s efforts to prevent a repeat of widespread rioting that overwhelmed many French cities this past weekend.
The move’s proponents said it was an important act of reparative justice.
“Repeal is, first and foremost, a way of showing that such provisions should not exist — that such trash should not exist in French law,” said Max Mathiasin, a centrist lawmaker from the French Caribbean island of Guadeloupe who championed the move.
France was Europe’s third-largest trafficker of slaves, after Britain and Portugal, shipping up to 1.4 million people from Africa to its colonies in the Americas.
Mr. Mathiasin said he hoped the long-delayed act would help to make younger people from ethnic minorities — many of whom struggle for acceptance in French society and have joined student protests that snowballed into this week’s unrest — feel more valued.
“Many of our young people today are searching for an identity because they are well aware that they have difficulties in integrating in France as it is evolving today,” Mr. Mathiasin said.
“You know, us from the Antilles, we’re Antilleans, we aren’t totally French,” he added, referring to the archipelago that Guadeloupe is part of.
The law will separately require the government to investigate the consequences of slavery in its overseas territories. It also calls for the government to examine slavery’s effects on “the processes of discrimination and racism within French society,” and instructs a government commission to “evaluate the place given to the history of slavery, the slave trade and their abolition in school curricula.”
Critics considered the law mainly symbolic, even redundant.
“Of course, it’s going to be passed unanimously, because who would dare go against it?” said Myriam Cottias, director of the International Research Center on Slavery and Post-Slavery, a state-backed institution in Paris.
Ms. Cottias said the move was a failed opportunity to expand the public’s understanding of slavery’s prolonged imprint on France. She also noted that the law would leave intact a raft of other colonial-era rules that limited the rights of France’s colonial subjects.
“We need to go further” she said. “Why abolish just the Code Noir? There were plenty of other things that came after it.”
France abstained in March from supporting a United Nations resolution that described the trans-Atlantic slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and that urged countries to contribute to a reparations fund. France said it had not joined the call because it didn’t want “to create a hierarchy among crimes against humanity,” its foreign minister said.
The law repealing the Code Noir should have addressed the question of reparations, among other issues related to slavery’s legacy, said Lionel Zevounou, who leads research into the legal legacy of colonialism at the School for Advanced Studies in the Social Sciences in France.
Mr. Zevounou pointed to the history of the Central Bank of West African States, which issues the currency of many West African countries. The bank has its roots in a colonial-era institution that was initially funded with money paid to compensate slave owners after the abolition of slavery.
“We don’t talk enough about these things, and in my opinion, they are also connected,” Mr. Zevounou said.
As lawmakers debated in the National Assembly in May, several pointed to the irony of voting to repeal the law in a building that is still adorned with a statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, a former minister of King Louis XIV who was instrumental in the code’s creation.
President Emmanuel Macron of France backed the code’s repeal in May, saying that it was a “betrayal of what the Republic stands for” and was “contrary to our Constitution, contrary to the rights of man and of the citizen.”
“The silence, or even indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Code Noir is not an oversight,” he said, “but has become a form of offense.”
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