Macron Faces Growing Demands for Reparatory Justice Over Slavery Legacy

Emmanuel Macron faces mounting pressure to initiate discussions on reparatory justice for France’s centuries-long role in the enslavement of African people, ahead of a key speech on the legacy of slavery.

On Thursday, the French president will commemorate the 25th anniversary of France becoming the first country to legally recognize the slave trade and slavery as crimes against humanity, under a 2001 law sponsored by Christiane Taubira, a prominent MP from French Guiana.

Macron’s office stated that “the memorial work around the question of slavery and the slave trade is a permanent project of recognition for the president.”

However, as Macron enters his final months in office, demands are intensifying for him to launch a formal dialogue on addressing the legacies of enslavement in French society, amid a political dispute over racism in politics, media, and society, and with far-right polling high ahead of the 2027 presidential election.

The urgency is fueled by anger over France’s abstention alongside the UK and other European nations in a March UN vote that described the transatlantic chattel slave trade as the “gravest crime against humanity” and called for reparations as “a concrete step towards remedying historical wrongs.”

Victorin Lurel, a senator from Guadeloupe, wrote in an open letter to Macron that France had committed a “moral, historic, diplomatic and political mistake” in abstaining and had “tarnished” its international image.

From the 16th to the 19th centuries, France was the third-largest European trafficker of enslaved people across the Atlantic and Indian oceans, after Portugal and Britain, responsible for abducting and enslaving about 13% of the estimated 13 to 17 million men, women, and children forcibly taken from Africa across the Atlantic.

Among those calling for a dialogue in France is Dieudonné Boutrin, head of the International Federation of Descendants of the History of Slavery and a descendant of enslaved Africans trafficked from Benin to Martinique. Boutrin works alongside Pierre Guillon de Princé, a descendant of 18th-century slave-ship owners in Nantes, who last month formally apologized 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 start discussions on reparatory justice, stating 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.”

Aïssata Seck, director of France’s Foundation for the Remembrance of Slavery—a government advisory body partly state-funded—and its president, former prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault, published an open letter to Macron last month urging France to lead efforts to open dialogue on addressing and repairing the racism and inequality stemming from enslavement.

Paris is considered crucial to global reparations discussions because several “overseas departments and regions” remain part of France, including Martinique, Guadeloupe, French Guiana, Réunion, and Mayotte. Local parliamentarians view structural inequalities in employment, health, cost of living, pollution, and environmental safety as direct legacies of enslavement and colonialism.

France also faces demands for potentially billions of dollars in reparations to Haiti, following the imposition of a harsh financial penalty in 1825 to compensate slave owners 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 year’s end.

France was the only country to reinstate slavery, when Napoleon revived it in 1802 after an initial ban in 1794; it was finally abolished in 1848, with compensation paid to slave owners.