What to know about Code Noir, a shocking French law that oversaw the slavery of 1.4 million Africans

PARIS -- France’s powerful lower house voted finally to scrub a fundamental slavery-era edict from French law on Thursday.

After the National Assembly voted 254-0 to adopt the bill to repeal Code Noir, it now goes to the Senate, where supporters expect it to be approved as well. It's not clear when the Senate vote will happen.

Code Noir — or Black Code — was signed by King Louis XIV at Versailles Palace in 1685 to set the rules for slavery across France’s colonial empire.

It was described as “the most monstrous legal text of modern times” by French philosopher Louis Sala‑Molins.

Its 60 articles first governed the French Caribbean — Martinique, Guadeloupe and Saint-Domingue, today’s Haiti — and were later extended to French Guiana, Louisiana, and the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mauritius.

Deaths outpaced births

France shipped about 1.4 million Africans across the Atlantic in chains — the third-largest slave trade of any European power, after Portugal and Britain.

Most were put to cutting sugar cane and feeding the boiling houses, where the syrup was reduced over open fires, alongside coffee, cotton and indigo.

The work was so deadly that deaths surpassed births. Planters simply replaced the dead with fresh shiploads of Africans.

By 1789, Saint-Domingue — now Haiti — held around 500,000 enslaved people, more than any other Caribbean colony. It produced much of the world’s sugar and coffee, and was fabled to be the richest colony on earth.

Code Noir became toothless when France abolished slavery in 1848, but no one ever formally struck it from the books.

It made people into property

Article 44 called the enslaved “movable property.”

A master could buy them, sell them, mortgage them, or leave them to his children — like land or furniture.

Article 28 said that they could “own nothing that does not belong to their master.”

Anything they earned, and anything they were given, was his.

They had no name in law.

From 1839, each enslaved person in the colonies was given a number, and a registration code.

Only at abolition were the freed given last names.

It branded those who ran

Article 38 punished people who tried to escape.

The first time, their ears were cut off and one shoulder was branded with a fleur-de-lis — the symbol of the French crown.

The second time, a leg tendon was cut and they were branded again.

The third time, they were put to death.

It killed those who fought back

Article 33 ordered death for any enslaved person who struck a master, his wife or their children hard enough to leave a mark or draw blood — or who struck them in the face.

Such a slave, the article said, “shall be punished by death.”

Its shocking first line was about Jewish people

Before it said a word about the enslaved, the code’s first article expelled every Jew from France’s colonies within three months.

It called them “declared enemies of the Christian name.”

It forced a religion

Articles 2 and 3 ordered all enslaved people baptized and raised Catholic.

No other religion could be practiced in public.

It passed slavery down by birth

A child took the mother’s status.

The child of an enslaved woman was born enslaved — even if the father was free.

Children were enslaved from birth.

Code Noir set their food rations at half an adult’s.

Its ‘protections’ were most

ly ignored

A few articles read like rules to “protect” the enslaved.

Masters were meant to feed and clothe them, not to torture them, and not to sell a husband, wife and small children apart.

Historians say these were widely ignored.

Owners who killed the people they enslaved were almost never punished.