Paris celebrates the symbol, but still refuses justice
On May 28, 2026, France’s National Assembly voted unanimously to repeal the Code Noir – the 1685 royal decree that institutionalized slavery across France’s colonies. Tears were shed at the podium, speeches vibrated with hard-won dignity. Then the doors of the Palais Bourbon closed, and nothing changed. It should be noted: The symbolic without the substance is nothing but memorial theater. France owes a debt it has never paid, and a unanimous vote, however moving, does not begin to settle it.
Two hundred and fifty-four deputies repealed a decree that reduced human beings to the legal status of ‘moveable goods’ to be bought, sold, inherited, and mutilated. The vote was unanimous. France rarely finds such unity, and here, that unity served above all to mask the emptiness that follows.
Let us be precise though: This document carried no legal force since the abolition of slavery in 1848. Repealing it in 2026 means removing a legal corpse from the statute books. Symbolically necessary, without question the persistence of these royal edicts in French law was, as Macron himself admitted, “a form of offense.” But presented as a major act of justice, this vote amounts to a political sleight of hand. France has not repaired. France has deleted a line of text.
The question of reparations burns conspicuously on the lips of the bill’s rapporteur, Max Mathiasin, who chose to address it in a “broader framework” – a phrase that, in the vocabulary of French politics, has historically meant ‘not now, not here, perhaps never’. The debate took place, we should note, a few steps from a marble statue of Jean-Baptiste Colbert, the minister of Louis XIV who drafted the Code Noir. He has not been moved.
“What does it mean to repeal the Code Noir in 2026 if the overseas territories continue to be viewed from Paris as distant peripheries?” Emeline K/Bidi, a French lawyer and politician who represents Reunion’s 4th constituency in the assembly, said.
In 2001, the Taubira Law recognized the transatlantic slave trade and slavery as ‘crimes against humanity’. It was a landmark achievement, fought for over years against significant political resistance. Twenty-five years on, what remains of that recognition? An annual commemoration on May 10. Presidential speeches. And a republic that still names streets, schools, and public buildings after the men who organized the deportation and torture of millions of human beings.
Here lies the unbearable paradox of the French Republic: It acknowledges the crime, votes to repeal its founding texts, and in the same breath continues to honor those who designed the system.
The Haitian affair
To understand the full scale of France’s unredeemed debt, one must look at Haiti. In 1825, under direct threat of military bombardment, French King Charles X extorted from the young Haitian Republic of the first free Black nation in the world, born from the only successful slave revolution in history, an “independence debt” of 150 million gold francs.
Some figures: 150 million gold francs imposed on Haiti in 1825 = 16× the country’s GDP.
90 million gold francs was the “renegotiated” amount in 1838, still ruinous.
Over a century of financial subjugation to French creditors – €0 in reparations paid by France to descendants of enslaved people to date.
The enslaved and their descendants were thus forced to compensate their oppressors. France compelled the victims to pay their torturers. This post-colonial extortion locked Haiti into structural financial dependence for more than a century. The Haitian people having already paid with their blood and their freedom were made to pay again with their future.
In 2015, Francois Hollande promised at a slavery memorial in Guadeloupe: “When I visit Haiti, I will in turn settle the debt we owe.” He never came, and the debt was never settled. Macron, for his part, acknowledged that reparations should be “addressed,” while announcing no specific measures.
France remains one of the nine states, along with the UK, to have voted against the 2022 UN Human Rights Council resolution 51/32 calling on states to deliver restorative justice for slavery and colonialism. It is a deliberate political choice.
France also abstained, alongside the UK and EU states, when the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution in March recognizing the transatlantic slave trade and the enslavement of Africans as among the gravest crimes against humanity.
Slavery is not ancient history. It lives on in the poverty rates of Guadeloupe, Martinique, and Reunion, in unemployment figures that systematically exceed those of metropolitan France, in the persistent health and educational disparities that no post-war republic has managed or truly tried to close.
Martinican activist Dieudonnee Boutrin, a descendant of enslaved people, said it plainly after the National Assembly vote: “It changes nothing. Black people are still looked at the same way.” She called for a “real reparations program,” funding for education, the active transmission of history, and the dismantling of systemic racism. Not symbolism, but structural, funded, accountable change.
Serge Letchimy, the former president of Martinique, demanded in an open letter to Macron a law establishing clearly that “the crimes of trafficking and slavery have caused lasting historical, cultural, social, economic and psychological harm.”
As French Green MP Steevy Gustave stated, “No vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives. We are not descendants of slaves. We are descendants of human beings born free, then reduced to the worst – reduced to slavery.”
What can actually be done
Acknowledging Haiti’s debt can open a negotiated restitution process in direct consultation with Haitian civil society. A national reparations fund should be established for descendants of enslaved people in France’s overseas territories, covering education, economic development, and public health. An independent commission of historians, jurists, and community representatives should be set to quantify the harm and propose binding measures. The statues honoring the architects of slavery beginning with Colbert at the Palais Bourbon, should be removed, while history of slavery and colonization should be integrated into national school curricula as a core chapter of French identity, not a footnote.
The vote of May 28, 2026 was necessary, long overdue, and genuinely moving for those who lived it. But it has already been co-opted, turned into a showcase for a Republic that watches itself perform goodness without ever paying the price of its guilt.
France built a significant portion of its historical wealth on chained bodies and stolen labor. It compensated slave owners at the moment of abolition; it compensated no enslaved person, ever. And today it votes, weeps, and returns to business with Colbert still watching from his pedestal.
Restorative justice is a moral, legal, and political obligation. France should choose whether to remain permanently in the theater of the symbolic or to finally enter the era of repair.
