SX Blog

By Anna Jayne Kimmel

France abolished slavery in 1848. 178 years later, and just this May 2026, the National Assembly voted to
repeal the Code Noir, an edict from Louis XIV that defined conditions of slavery throughout its colonial
empire since 1685. Heinous endorsement of human violence features large in its 60-articles. Many were
surprised to learn that the Code Noir continued on the books at all, including lawmakers themselves.

There seems to be a Mandela effect, a collective fabulation of formal justice as if abolition had already
occurred in full. France had previously abolished slavery in 1794, although this reform was short lived as
Napolean Bonaparte reinstated slavery in 1802. ‘There are no slaves in France!’ rallied advocates of the
Freedom Principle, a legal maxim of the seventeenth century. But chattel slavery and dehumanizing laws
continued across France’s overseas territories. The Code Noir carried on throughout these periods as the
regions addressed by the edict were not acknowledged under the first two efforts of abolition, only
continental Europe. Inequality persists today even as France claims equal treatment.

People remain skeptical that this symbolic act of removal now will materialize meaningful redress. Macron
himself equivocated reparations as “a question we cannot refuse” but a ceded “we must not make false
promises.” Earlier this spring, France and the United States were in the minority of countries to not favorably
vote in the United Nations General Assembly resolution to acknowledge trans-Atlantic slavery as the “gravest
crime against humanity.”

But the Code Noir and its performative afterlives persist in other sites. The law exists not only in the
documents of the courts, but repeats through performance stages, literary forms, aesthetic works and public
consciousness This includes theatrical works, such as the opera Code Noir, staged in Paris 1842 by Louis
Clapisson and Eugène Scribe, as well as narrative texts such as Mulatten by Hans Christian Anderson in 1840.
“When one is considering the crimes of slavery,” writes scholar Saidiya Hartman, “the popular theater is as
central as the courthouse.” While Hartman stresses that racial violence is no less cruel in theater than in law,
elsewhere I shift interpretation slightly to emphasize:

“performance as no less imperative to the securitization of the Code Noir than the courthouse. To
understand the codes fully, one must look toward its staged performance: not only for its
sentimentality or affective reception, but as a vital site for its mechanics of reproduction.”

The politics are uncertain; reproductions might arrive as reinvestment or refusal. Such is the challenge of
symbolic nature of law. It is not only justice done, but justice seen to be done.

As Ghanaian journalist Mustapha Bature Sallama reflects on these passing events, “Macron has been
performing a careful choreography around this moment” of abolition. New methods are required to
understand this legal dance, one that attends to lived experience and performative afterlives even as erasure
occurs on the page, least we cede again to a legal confabulation that abolition and justice had already arrived.

Anna Jayne Kimmel is the Deputy Director at the Corcoran School of the Arts and Design at George
Washington University, where she is also an Assistant Professor of Dance. A scholar of legal humanities,
performance studies, and francophone culture, her books include Legal Moves: Choreographies of Race, Law, and Empire (Stanford University Press) and Performing Law (Cambridge University Press). Kimmel holds a PhD
from Stanford University and AB from Princeton University.