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Two hundred and fifty-four deputies repealed a decree that reduced human beings to the legal status of ‘moveable goods’ to be bought, sold, inherited, and mutilated.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.

Acknowledge – and forget?

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........

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