PARIS (AP) — French lawmakers in the lower house of Parliament on Thursday adopted a bill to repeal a 17th-century law that governed enslaved people across France's colonies, in a symbolic and long-awaited move.
The National Assembly voted in a rare show of unanimity of 254-0 to approve the bill repealing the "Code Noir," or Black Code, a decree signed in 1685 by King Louis XIV.
France abolished slavery in 1848, but the Code Noir had never been formally repealed. The vote is viewed as an important step in reckoning with France's colonial past.
