Twenty-five years after the adoption of the Taubira law which qualified trafficking and slavery as crimes against humanity, should we go further in the recognition by the French state of its slavery past? Yes, says Guadeloupe MP Max Mathiasin (Liot), rapporteur of a bill examined Thursday in the National Assembly, which concerns the repeal of the “black code”. In the name of continuing an “incomplete” historical process, it is a question of definitively abandoning the texts which governed slavery, rendered obsolete but never formally repealed after its abolition in 1848.
Legally useless for some, symbolically crucial for others: the proposal on this racist heritage reopens in any case the painful debate around reparations, long requested by the French overseas territories. Like the Taubira law, the text does not address this highly complex point – what is the price of blood, that of colonization? Yet the crux is there, outlined by Emmanuel Macron last Thursday during his speech at the Élysée for the 25th anniversary of the Taubira law. Some also saw it as a readjustment after France’s abstention on a UN resolution deemed anachronistic, which aimed to recognize the trafficking of Africans and slavery as “the most serious crimes against humanity”.
A cornerstone of our relations with Africa, the duty to remember slavery is also a national imperative. Racism weakens us, collectively and individually, here and now. Like Leo
