A slave textual content lastly abolished … in 2025 | EUROtoday

On May 23, 2025

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IIt have to be acknowledged because the political ability of the gesture: promising to “abolish” the black code, this vile textual content which, in 1685, codified slavery within the French colonies. Arrested on May 13 by the Liot parliamentary group, the Prime Minister introduced {that a} textual content would quickly be submitted to Parliament to pronounce this symbolic abolition. Unanimity hoped for, convened republican fervor, assured emotion.

But what hides this operation? The Black Code has had no authorized existence for the reason that abolition of slavery in 1848. It produced no authorized impact, is just not talked about in any present normative textual content, and its reminiscence belongs to the sphere of historical past, not of legislation. Abolish it at this time due to this fact quantities to proclaiming the dying of a useless man. In this, the maneuver can solely be understood as an empty memorial gesture, a coverage of the image with out structural dedication.

Memory guardian

The Liot group, which incorporates Guadeloupe deputies involved with reminiscence justice, most likely considered doing effectively by stressing that this textual content had by no means been explicitly repealed. But their method questions. Why not mobilize their mandate to request concrete measures in favor of the ultramarine territories? Why favor symbolic posture to the battle in opposition to postcolonial inequalities, racial discrimination, college abandonment, endemic poverty or cultural marginalization?

The Prime Minister, however, seized this chance to set himself as a guardian of reminiscence, within the conductor of supposed historic reconciliation. But this reconciliation can’t be based mostly on a simulacrum. It requires demanding work of reality, justice, recognition, removed from these beauty operations. It presupposes formidable academic insurance policies, a reform of the nationwide narrative, symbolic and materials repairs, a systemic battle in opposition to the logics of inferiorization all the time at work.

To uncover

The kangaroo of the day

Answer

We don’t heal the accidents of historical past with bulletins. By dint of substituting spectacular gestures for concrete insurance policies, we preserve a memorial theater, the place everybody performs their position: the indignant deputies, the compassionate authorities, the moved media. Meanwhile, anger rises, inequalities persist, reminiscence runs out of steam. The reminiscence of slavery doesn’t ask to be glorified by means of pointless votes. She requested to be heard in public insurance policies, taught with rigor, honored in acts. She has nothing to do with an abolition textual content voted three centuries too late.

*Élisabeth Landi is a member of the affiliation which popularizes college manufacturing on the geography historical past of the Caribbean. Oliwonlakarayib. She works on the problems of reminiscence within the historical past of the Antilles, and notably on the heritage and decolonial coverage of Aimé Césaire in Fort-de-France. And on the position of resentment because the engine of Martinican historical past.

https://www.lepoint.fr/politique/code-noir-un-texte-esclavagiste-enfin-aboli-en-2025–23-05-2025-2590383_20.php