France, May 28 -- The National Assembly voted 254-0 - a rare show of unanimity - to adopt a bill repealing the "Code Noir" or "Black Code", the 1685 decree King Louis XIV signed to govern slaves across France's colonies.

The law turned human beings into chattel, allowing them to be worked, beaten, sold, raped and murdered.

The French were the third largest slave traders in Europe, after the British and the Portuguese.

Ships departing from French ports between the 17th and 19th centuries forcibly transported more than one million men, women and children from Africa into slavery, many in plantations in its overseas colonies in the Caribbean, according to expert estimates.

France abolished enslaving humans more than 170 years ago, and in...