On the eve of the 25th anniversary of the Taubira law recognizing trafficking and slavery as crimes against humanity, the deputies of the Law Committee voted unanimously on Wednesday May 20 to repeal the “Black Code”.
This is indeed a historical incongruity. While slavery was abolished in 1848 in France, the “black code”, a vast body of legislation governing the slave trade overseas, was never officially repealed. Even if these texts no longer have any legal value, their existence has always left a bitter taste for the Guadeloupe MP Max Mathiasin. Himself a descendant of slaves, he calls for their suppression. His transpartisan bill – defended by his Liot group and deputies La France insoumise and Les Républicains – must be studied in the National Assembly on Thursday May 28.
This approach “reinscribes memory in a logic of justice”, explains the Guadeloupean deputy, regretting “the delays of the State to fully recognize this painful past”. He assures that in addition to the symbol, this will contribute “to reconciliation between mainland France and its former colonies” and to “restore the dignity of these men, women and children who were torn from their land of Africa” and reduced to slavery.
Exemptions for slavery in the colonies
The “black code” is the name given to a set of royal edicts promulgated between the 17th and 18th centuries to govern relations between masters and slaves in the French colonies. At a time when serfdom was prohibited in France, these texts were written to grant exemptions to overseas territories. The very first, the King’s Edict, dates from 1685 and was largely written by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, then minister of the navy to Louis XIV.
Composed of sixty articles, this edict aims to establish the full sovereignty of the king in the French West Indies by establishing “regulations for the discipline and trade of “negroes” and slaves”, to prevail over local laws. The first articles first emphasize the Catholic identity of France and all its islands, enjoining them to expel “all Jews who have established their residence there” (article 1), to “baptize all slaves” as well as to “instruct them in the Catholic religion” (article 2).
There followed a series of articles on the condition of slaves, considered as “chattel beings” (article 44) who could only be freed by the decision of their master or, for women, by their marriage to a free man. It is also stated that slaves do not have the right to group together and hold property.
The edict also defines the duties of masters called to behave “as good fathers of families”: prohibition of killing slaves or committing sexual abuse; the obligation to provide them with food and clothing. Article 22 thus stipulates that masters who “failed to feed and clothe properly” their slaves could be prosecuted for “barbaric and inhuman treatment”.
The texts which affirm that “torture is prohibited” at the same time authorize certain abuses: a slave who has been on the run for a month will have his ears cut off; the masters are authorized to have them “chained” or “threshed”, when they consider it necessary (article 42). Another article indicates that a slave who hits his master or his family causing a bloody wound to the face will be liable to the death penalty.
After this first edict, a hundred other texts were added to govern the situations in the Mascarene Islands (Reunion and Mauritius, in December 1723) or even in Louisiana (March 1724). The whole thing, subsequently named “code noir”, ended up forming a set of more than 600 pages.
Beyond symbolic repeal
“With the establishment of the Code Noir, the logic of property and dehumanization prevails,” notes Max Mathiasin in the foreword to his bill, considering this corpus as “the striking symbol of a crime, the cornerstone of a system based on the debasement and trade of human beings.” “The recognition of trafficking and slavery as a crime against humanity (Taubira law, 2001) constituted a fundamental step, but the historical process remains incomplete,” he adds to defend his proposal.
But for the historian Jean-François Niort, a specialist on the subject, this does not hit the right place. Questioned by Le Monde last year, when François Bayrou, Prime Minister, had mentioned this repeal, he explained: “As far as the black code is concerned, we are therefore in the wrong debate with the repeal. The real problem is not there: we must above all recognize this text and all those which followed it until 1848 as crimes against humanity. »
Aware of this, Max Mathiasin and the Liot deputies do not intend to stick to simple repeal. In article 2 of their bill, they ask the government to submit a report to Parliament making it possible to list all the texts resulting from colonial law (between the first edition of the black code of 1685 and departmentalization in 1946), to study the consequences on the territories where they were applied.
