Plus Ça Change – May 28, 2026
It’s a tiny step, but it’s a step.
The news distracts me from my writing. Not the horrors happening in the United States, that distraction is constant. This is a “smaller” thing, from history.
In Laveaux: Dancer there is a scene where a rich white woman is advising her daughter how to avoid a particular topic so she can entice a man.
“On a few things he and your Papa are at loggerheads. It’s mostly to do with the Spanish Codido Negro, and our Code Noir. So avoid anything to do with slaves or the free coloreds.”
Anyone who digs into the sordid past of slavery encounters Le Code Noir – The Black Code. Promulgated in 1685 by Louis XIV to decide, definitively, how to manage slaves. I’ve read it. It is horrific in its total pragmatism, like when you could legally amputate a slave’s ear for running away, and when it was legal to cut his hamstring. But first, we expel all the Jews. Seriously, that’s Article One. Then we can get on with how to deal with slaves.
The French Code Noir and the Spanish Codido Negro fed off each other. At various times both were the law of Louisiana and governed Marie Laveaux. What’s even more awful is that after the Americans took over Louisiana, it got worse. A lot worse.
My snippet is based on an obscure footnote to history: In Louisiana in the 1820s a well-respected American lawyer named Edward Livingston got the job of “Americanizing” the hodgepodge of laws derived from Spanish and French legacy, including the Code Noir. The State of Louisiana rejected his work as far too liberal toward slaves and prisoners. It actually treated them like human beings.
Time passes. France outlawed all forms of slavery in 1848. But Le Code Noir remained officially on the books, never repealed.
Until yesterday. Yesterday, May 27, 2026. Three hundred and forty one years after promulgation. There was no apology, no true reckoning, no fund for reparations. But the vote was unanimous in France’s National Assembly, 254-0.
The repeal has zero direct effect. It is purely symbolic. But progress builds on symbols. This was a tiny step, but a good one, centuries late.
