Macron under pressure over reparatory justice for France’s role in slave trade | Slavery
As Emmanuel Macron delivers a major speech about the legacy of slavery, he is under pressure to open up restorative justice discussions about France’s role in centuries of enslavement of African people.
On Thursday, the French president will mark the 25th anniversary of France becoming the first country in the world to recognize the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity, under a law introduced in 2001 by French Guiana’s leading lawmaker, Christiane Taubira.
Macron’s office said that “the commemorative work around the issue of slavery and the slave trade is a permanent recognition project of the president.”
But as he enters his final months as president, demands are growing for Macron to initiate a formal process of discussion on how to address the legacy of enslavement in French society. France is facing a political debate over racism in politics, media and society, with the far right voting strong ahead of the 2027 presidential elections.
The sense of urgency comes amid outrage in France, where representatives of Britain and other European countries, as well as abstaining from a March UN vote that described the transatlantic chattel slave trade as “the greatest crime against humanity” and called for reparations, were seen as “a concrete step towards righting historical wrongs.”
Guadeloupe senator Victorin Lurel wrote in an open letter to Macron that France made a “moral, historical, diplomatic and political mistake” by abstaining and “damaged” its international image.
From the 16th to the 19th centuries, France was the third largest trafficker of enslaved people across the Atlantic and Indian oceans among European countries, after Portugal and England. France was responsible for the kidnapping and enslavement of approximately 13% of the estimated 13 to 17 million men, women, and children forcibly removed from Africa across the Atlantic.
Among those calling for a dialogue process in France Dieudonne BoutrinHe heads the International Federation of Descendants of Slavery and is a descendant of enslaved Africans who were smuggled from Benin to the French Caribbean island of Martinique. Boutrin works with Pierre Guillon de Princé, a descendant of 18th-century slave ship owners in Nantes. He made a formal apology last month for his role in transporting nearly 4,500 enslaved Africans to the Caribbean, at least 200 of whose ancestors died at sea.
Boutrin and Guillon de Princé wrote a letter to Macron this month, asking him to open a debate on restorative justice. This, they said, would “restore trust among our communities, acknowledge the reality of history, strengthen the spirit of brotherhood, and heal the psychological wounds suffered by communities of color who were made to feel inferior. Slavery is a wound whose scars are still visible due to the racism we have so far failed to stop from spreading.”
France Director Aïssata Seck Slavery Memorial Foundation, An advisory body to the government that is partly funded by the state and its chairman, former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, published a report. open letter Last month, we asked Macron to take France’s lead in starting a dialogue on how to address and repair the racism and inequality that are the legacy of slavery.
Paris is vital to the global debate over reparations because many “overseas departments and territories” 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 inequities and inequalities in employment, health, cost of living, pollution and environmental safety are seen by local parliamentarians as a direct legacy of the mechanisms of enslavement and colonialism.
France also faces claims for potentially billions of dollars in reparations against Haiti after imposing a harsh financial penalty on the country in 1825 to compensate the owners of enslaved people after the Haitian revolution. This debt, which many Haitians blamed for two centuries of turmoil, was only fully repaid to France in 1947. In 2025, Macron announced the establishment of a joint commission with Haiti to study the issue, which is expected to be concluded by the end of this year.
France was the only country to bring back slavery; Napoleon reintroduced slavery in 1802, after an initial attempt to ban it in 1794. Slavery was finally abolished in 1848, with compensation given to the owners of enslaved people.
