For nearly two centuries afterFranceabolished slavery, the colonial-era law that classified humans as property remained quietly in place. On Thursday, lawmakers will finally move to eliminate it.

The bill, expected to be adopted by the National Assembly, will repeal Code Noir, or Black Code, the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across Frances colonies.

The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and killed and France never formally did away with it.

That realization has left many aghast.

That shocks me, said Muriel Jean-Baptiste, a Paris-born nurse whose parents are fromMartinique, a French overseas department in the Caribbean.

A law that treated Black people as property was left sitting there, she said.

The codes reach was total. Article 44 declared the enslaved movable property. Other sections ordered mutilation for those who fled, and dictated that the word of an enslaved person counted for nothing.

Code Noirs 60 articles should never have survived the abolition of slavery in the 19th century, PresidentEmmanuel Macronsaid last week.

The silence, even the indifference, that we have maintained for nearly two centuries toward this Black Code is no longer an oversight, Macron said. It has become a form of offense.

Like French presidents before him, Macron stopped short of an apology.

Read moreMacron backs symbolic repeal of France's slavery laws, warns against 'false promises' on reparations

France ran the third-largest slave trade, shipping about 1.4 million Africans to plantations whose sugar wealth built the French cities of Nantes andBordeaux. Its empire later spanned four continents.

Others see the repeal as something more telling a symptom, they argue, of a country that has yet to reckon fully with that past, one of many slow steps along the way.

In law, officially eliminating it is the easy part, observers say. Code Noir lost all authority in 1848, when France abolished slavery.

France didn't relinquish its slave colonies: the four oldestGuadeloupe, Martinique,French GuianaandRunionwere made full French overseas departments in 1946. That means they're governed from Paris like any other.

Their roughly 1.9 million people, most descended from the enslaved, are French citizens.

Despite being fully part of France, the overseas departments remain among its poorest territories. Unemployment runs roughly double the mainland rate, and more than three-quarters of households inMayottelive below the national poverty line.

Before he discovered the truth, the French lawmaker who put forward the proposal to repeal the law didn't know it still existed.

Max Mathiasin, from Guadeloupe, had bought copies of the text over the years and left them on his shelf.

As the great-great-grandson of people who were enslaved, I had never been able to read it in full, he said. This was made by human beings against human beings.

For him, the vote is a way of restoring our ancestors, restoring our humanity before a France whose motto is liberty, equality, fraternity. It means living up to the Republican promise.

That promise, he says, is still unkept at home.

In Guadeloupe, Mathiasin said, in the most important positions, in the structures of the state, they are White.

The Foundation for the Memory of Slavery is chaired by a former prime minister,Jean-Marc Ayrault, and its deputy director is Pierre-Yves Bocquet both White men.

Bocquet calls Code Noir the birthplace of Frances colonial exception the principle that the French Republics founding rights could be suspended for those under its rule.

The principle outlived the empire, he said: Even today, we accept that people in the overseas territories can have fewer rights than in mainland France.

France is hardly the only country still holding fragments of empire theUnited Kingdomand theUnited Statesstill have overseas territories.

But what sets France apart, observers say, is that it made its slave colonies equal departments of the Republic, not dependencies it governs from afar.

The state insists that the overseas departments are France like anywhere else, even as the people who live there say they are treated as less.

For Max Relouzat, 81, president of the Association for the Memory of Slaveries, the repeal matters, because so little else has.

His African ancestor had no name under the law, only a number and a registration code the family that lived in Martinique was given the name Relouzat at emancipation, likely after Nelouzat, a village in the Auvergne region of central France.

What galls him, he said, is what the symbolism leaves untouched:systemic racism in France.

Under the cover of departmentalization, a colonial system was maintained, Relouzat said. If the overseas departments are part of France, why is there a ministry for the overseas?

In France, he said, we are still today in a form ofapartheida form of colonial continuity.

For some who have fought longest, Thursday isn't the milestone it appears.

For Florence Alexis, a slavery expert and daughter of the Haitian writer Jacques Stephen Alexis, the real turning point came 25 years ago. In 2001, the Taubira law made France the first country to call the slave trade, and slavery,crimes against humanity.

That is what changed my life, Alexis said.

For her, racism is the legacy of slavery itself, not of one edict.

When I was a child at school, they called me the little monkey, she said. People made animal cries when I walked past as they still do in football stadiums today.

Paris-born lodie Lon, 29, whose family is from French Guiana, welcomes the repeal, but resents the delay.

Symbolic neglect is also neglect, she said.

At theTaubira laws 25th anniversary on May 21, Macron floated the idea of reparations something that France has long stayed away from addressing.

He called it a question we must not refuse, but one on which we must not make false promises.

He committed no money, instead defining repair first as truth-telling, education and historical work.

The wealthiest of France's plantations were in Saint-Domingue, where the enslaved rose up and won independence in 1804 asHaiti.France then forced the freed to pay reparationsfor the loss of their mastersa debt cleared only in 1947.

Read moreHaitis independence ransom: Macron offers truth, Haitians want reparations

France isn't alone. In the US,federal reparations legislationhas stalled for decades.Californiaapproved an apology, but no cash.

But the timing of Macron's latest speech was awkward. Two months earlier, France abstained when the UN General Assembly voted 123-3, with 52 abstentions, to call the trans-Atlantic slave trade thegravest crime against humanity.

And this month at theAfricaForward SummitinKenya, days after declaring himself a pan-Africanist, Macron seized a microphone and ordered the room to quiet down.

As soon as he sets foot on the African continent, French opposition lawmaker Danile Obono said, he cant help but behave like a colonizer.

The repeal of Code Noir, said Bocquet, will have no direct effect. Whether it helps France fight racism and inequality in its overseas territories, he said, remains to be seen.

It is easy for the French authorities, and for Macron, to do this, Alexis added. Because it commits them to nothing.

(FRANCE 24 with AP)

Originally published on France24