The Unacknowledged Brutal History of France’s Code Noir

In 2025, François Bayrou, then serving as the Prime Minister of France, faced an unexpected question from a member of Parliament. The query focused on why France had not officially revoked the Code Noir, a set of laws historically used to enforce slavery in French colonies. This question caught Bayrou off guard, as few realized these laws remained on the books. In response, he announced plans to introduce a bill to Parliament aimed at abolishing the Code, expressing hope for a unanimous passage. Despite his government’s fall, the Code remained intact.

A year later, a legislative effort emerged, spearheaded by Max Mathiasin, a lawmaker from Guadeloupe. His cross-party bill seeks to annul the slave laws 341 years after King Louis XIV established them. While symbolic, this action demands greater scrutiny of the Code Noir’s implications on France’s colonial slavery system.

The Code Noir provided the legal framework to transform African captives into “movable goods” or heritable human property. While profit was a clear motive, the laws also reflected Louis XIV’s conservative Catholicism. Significantly, the Code’s first article did not mention enslaved Black people; it expelled Jews from Caribbean colonies.

The Code embodied a chilling exchange: captives lost freedom but gained salvation through Christ. This concept was central to Louis XIV’s slave economy. Unlike English colonies like early Virginia, where captives were seldom baptized due to Protestant beliefs against Christian bondage, Louis XIV pursued a religious integration.

Catholic religious orders, such as the Jesuits, played roles in both educating and enslaving populations. They managed slave plantations to fund their missions. Jean-Baptiste Labat, a Dominican priest in Martinique during the 1690s, exemplifies this duality. As the manager of a sugar plantation, Labat baptized the enslaved, grieving over their deaths while ordering tortures if he discovered African religious practices. Labat’s contradictory behavior was not merely personal failure; it illustrated the Code Noir functioning as intended.