FOR nearly two centuries since France abolished slavery, a colonial-era law classifying humans as property has remained on its books. The lower house of parliament voted to wipe it from French law on Thursday.

The National Assembly voted 254-0 — a rare show of unanimity — to adopt a Bill repealing the Code Noir (Black Code), a 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France’s colonies.

The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.

And the realisation that France never formally did away with it left many aghast.

Steevy Gustave, a lawmaker descended from enslaved people on the Caribbean island of Martinique, told colleagues the repeal was necessary “but no vote alone can repair centuries of shattered lives.”

“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 reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved “movable property” — assets a master could acquire like real estate. 

Those who fled faced branding, the amputation of their ears, even death. The word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.

President Emmanuel Macron said last week that the “silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight. 

“It has become a form of offense.”

France ran the third-largest slave trade, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth built the French cities of Nantes and Bordeaux. The French empire later spanned four continents.

France didn’t relinquish its slave colonies: the four oldest — Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana and Reunion — were made full French overseas departments, governed directly from Paris, in 1946.

Their roughly 1.9m population, most descended from the enslaved, are full French citizens.