(The Guardian)- Emmanuel Macron has said reparations for France’s role in hundreds of years of enslavement of African people is an issue that should be addressed, but he stopped short of making clear proposals.
“How to repair … is a question that must not be refused,” the French president said in a speech on the legacies of slavery at the Élysée Palace. “It’s also a question on which we must not make false promises.”
Macron’s use of the term reparations broke a historic taboo at the head of the French state, where leaders have previously avoided the word. But he did not define the exact form of any potential reparations or reparatory justice, nationally or internationally, and did not discuss financial repair.
He said: “We must have the honesty to say that we can never fully repair this crime, because it is impossible. You will never one day be able to put a number on it, or find words that would bring this history to a close.”
Macron said France and Ghana would jointly launch an international scientific research project that would make “solid recommendations to political decision-makers” on the issue of addressing legacies of enslavement, saying “we must engage with honesty in dialogue and work to continue this path”.
Macron said French identity could not be “built on denial” and “we have to restore the truth to our history and give it its full place”.
Although Macron stressed that education, academic research, memorials and recognition of the history of enslavement were essential for repair, he stopped short of setting out a clear framework for national dialogue in France to address modern racism and structural inequalities which are seen as legacies of enslavement.
Macron said he backed a proposal by parliamentarians this month to symbolically repeal France’s 17th and 18th century “Code Noir”, which set out the violent rules of enslavement, and which was never formally scrapped, despite abolition.
Macron said it should be remembered that the Élysée Palace – home and workplace to modern French presidents – was built in the 18th century with money from a French family whose fortune came from enslavement.
Macron’s speech celebrated the 25th anniversary of France becoming the first country in the world to recognise the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity in a 2001 law brought by Christiane Taubira, a former MP from French Guiana.
As Macron enters his final months as president, demands have grown for him to launch a formal discussion process on how to address the legacies of enslavement in French society. France is facing a political row over racism in politics, the media and society, and the far right is polling high in the run-up to the 2027 presidential election.
The sense of urgency comes amid anger in France that its representatives – alongside those of the UK and other European nations – abstained in March’s UN vote to describe the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and call for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”
Victorin Lurel, a Guadeloupe senator, wrote in an open letter to Macron that France had committed a “moral, historic, diplomatic and political mistake” in abstaining and had “tarnished” its image internationally.
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, France was the third largest trafficker of enslaved people across the Atlantic and Indian oceans among the European nations, after Portugal and Britain. France was responsible for kidnapping and enslaving about 13% of the estimated 13 to 17 million men, women and children forced from Africa across the Atlantic.
Among those who have called for a process of dialogue in France is Dieudonné Boutrin, who heads the International Federation of Descendants of the History of Slavery and is a descendant of enslaved Africans who were trafficked from Benin to the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Boutrin works alongside Pierre Guillon de Princé, a descendant of 18th-century slave-ship owners in Nantes, who last month made a formal apology for his ancestors’ role in transporting about 4,500 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean, at least 200 of whom died at sea.
Boutrin and Guillon de Princé wrote to Macron this month asking him to initiate discussions on reparatory justice. They said this would “restore trust between our communities, acknowledge the reality of history, foster a spirit of brotherhood, and heal the psychological wounds suffered by communities of colour who have been made to feel inferior. Slavery is a wound whose scars are still visible through racism, the spread of which we have so far been unable to halt.”
Paris is regarded as crucial to the global discussion on reparations, because several “overseas departments and regions” remain part of France, such as the Caribbean islands of Martinique and Guadeloupe, French Guiana, and the Indian Ocean islands of Réunion and Mayotte. In these places, structural inequalities and disparities on employment, health, the cost of living, pollution and environmental safety are seen by local parliamentarians as a direct legacy of the mechanisms of enslavement and colonialism.
France is also facing demands for potentially billions of dollars in reparations to Haiti, after it imposed a harsh financial penalty on the country in 1825 to compensate owners of enslaved people after the Haitian revolution. That debt, which many Haitians blame for two centuries of turmoil, was only fully repaid to France in 1947. In 2025, Macron announced a joint commission with Haiti to examine the issue, with conclusions due by the end of this year.
France was the only country to bring back slavery, when Napoleon reinstated it in 1802 after a first attempt to ban it in 1794. Slavery was finally abolished in 1848, with compensation awarded to the owners of enslaved people.
