00:00France's Assemblée Nationale has voted unanimously to symbolically repeal the Black Code,
00:05colonial-era decrees governing slavery, after President Emmanuel Macron endorsed the bill last week.
00:11The silence, or the indifference that we have now for two centuries on this Black Code is not a forgetting,
00:20but a form of offense.
00:22But what exactly was the Black Code?
00:24It's a set of articles that asserted and defined the French monarchy's control over its colonies from the 17th century
00:31onwards.
00:32Slaves were then considered as furniture and could be bought, sold, and inherited.
00:38Originally, these texts were called an ordonnance and then an edict.
00:42According to historians, the term Code Noir, or Black Code, only appeared in the 18th century.
00:49To understand its importance in slavery, let's take a look at this period of history.
00:55Since the 16th century, France, like other world powers, participated in human trafficking.
01:01This was called the triangular trade.
01:04Slaves deported from the African continent were used as labor in America to grow sugarcane, cotton, and tobacco.
01:11It was during this period that France became a major colonial empire, with slave owners that ruled over their plantations.
01:19To assert his power over these remote territories, Louis XIV commissioned his minister, Jean-Baptiste Cobert, to write an ordinance
01:28to regulate the trade.
01:30His son, Jean-Baptiste Antoine Cobert, later completed the task.
01:34The ordinance was enacted in 1685, and it created an exemption for these territories from French law, because slavery was
01:43supposed to be banned in France at the time.
01:46The text first concerned Martinique, Guadeloupe, and Saint-Christophe, and was extended to the French part of Saint-Domingue in
01:531687, and then to French Guiana in 1704.
01:58Two further versions of the text were enacted by Louis XV for the Masqueran Islands and Louisiana.
02:05These texts regulated the economy, daily life, and religion, especially for slaves.
02:10First, slaves had to be baptized and live according to Catholicism.
02:15For repeat fugitives, the code allowed for extremely violent corporal punishments, such as branding, ear removal, and the death penalty.
02:24This was in order to prevent rebellion and escape.
02:27Apart from these cases, masters were forbidden to torture slaves, but this wasn't always respected.
02:34The code also included measures to discipline the behavior of masters, who were obliged to feed and clothe their slaves
02:41or face prosecution.
02:43It also allowed for slaves to be freed by their owners.
02:46The black code has not been in effect in France since 1848, when the decree abolishing slavery implicitly repealed it.
02:54So there was no law specifically abolishing the code.
Commentaires