There is a persistent idea, inherited from the epistemic structures of colonial modernity, that France has already abolished slavery. This historiographical illusion, reproduced by the institutional mechanisms of legitimate knowledge, stands as a bulwark against any radical questioning of the colonial nation-state. However, it is imperative to face the evidence: if slavery was legally abolished, it was never truly abolished. It persists, not in the spectacular and visible form of the chain and the whip, but in insidious, systemic modalities, integrated into the very architecture of social, economic and cultural relations. The standardized white cis heteropatriarchy, as the organizing matrix of modern subjectivities, continues to reproduce forms of structural alienation that are similar, in their logic, to the slave systems of the past. Thus, France cannot be satisfied with a symbolic, dated abolition, frozen in the collective memory as an indisputable achievement. It is imperative to re-engage the abolitionist process in a perpetual dynamic of deconstruction, in order to dissolve the colonial residues that persist in contemporary social organization. We must lay the foundations for a constantly renewed abolition, which is part of a continuous praxis of rupture with the forms of domination inherited from the past. In this perspective, the sole legal proclamation of the abolition of slavery cannot suffice. It must be reiterated, performed and re-inscribed in the institutional fabric in a recurring manner, in order to ward off the permanent threat of a return to servitude. Each year, the head of state must, in a ritual gesture of self-dissolution of colonial power, sign a decree proclaiming a new abolition. This gesture, far from being a simple administrative act, will be a necessary staging of the deinstitutionalization of white privilege, a public catharsis where the Republic will have to recognize, not only its past, but the failure of its own claim to universality.

This dynamic of perpetual abolition cannot, however, stop at a simple declaration of intent. It must be accompanied by concrete measures guaranteeing the eradication of the relationships of exploitation and racial hierarchy still in force. Thus, any participation in the labor market must be conditioned by obtaining an “anti-slavery pass”, attesting that the individual has followed a 200-hour training course on the deconstruction of implicit biases and colonial history. This pass, far from being a constraint, will constitute a tool for emancipation, allowing everyone to become aware of the oppressive patterns in which they are registered and to engage in an active process of de-alienation.

Furthermore, France's historical debt to the populations it enslaved can no longer be denied. The descendants of formerly colonized peoples must benefit from a decolonial minimum wage, the amount of which will be indexed to the reparations owed by the colonial state. This differentiated remuneration is not a simple compensatory logic, but a reestablishment of economic relations on equitable bases, taking into account the structural injustices that persist.

In this same vein, a restorative tax system will have to be put in place in order to redistribute the wealth accumulated by the lineages that historically benefited from colonial exploitation. A compensation tax will be established for anyone who can establish a lineage with an individual who participated in colonization, directly or indirectly. This contribution, far from being a sanction, will be an act of historical responsibility, a way for the descendants of colonists to recognize their place in the perpetuation of an oppressive system and to actively work towards its dismantling.

However, these measures will not be enough as long as colonial epistemic violence continues to structure our language and our perception of the world. It is therefore urgent to carry out a radical lexical overhaul, starting with the removal of the word “work”, a historically loaded term, derived from the tripalium, an instrument of torture used to constrain bodies. Language is a battlefield where invisible power relations are played out. It is therefore imperative to deconstruct it and rearticulate it around new semantics freed from the schemes of domination. The term “work” will thus be replaced by “voluntarily consented activity under ethical control”, guaranteeing that any participation in social production is part of a framework respectful of minority subjectivities.

Furthermore, temporality itself, as a construct imposed by the capitalist West, must be deconstructed. It is now established that temporal linearity, as we understand it, is a colonial imposition intended to regulate bodies according to productivist imperatives. The collective reappropriation of time must allow each individual to freely choose their own time zone and work schedule, according to their cultural and historical references. This process of decolonization of time will be a crucial step towards the total emancipation of oppressed subjectivities.

Finally, the state will have to establish a Ministry of Perpetual Decolonization, tasked with continuously monitoring the risks of a resurgence of structural colonialism. This ministry will be tasked with abolishing slavery once a quarter, ensuring that the country does not, in a moment of inattention, fall back into slavery. It will also oversee the regular removal of statues of problematic historical figures, followed by their reconstruction so that they can be destroyed again in a public ceremony of collective atonement.

Abolition must be a permanent process, a dynamic of rupture that can never be completed. Because if France abolished slavery once, it has not yet abolished it for real. Only a repeated, incessant abolition, pushed to its paroxysm, will finally be able to free bodies and minds from the colonial straitjacket. We must abolish again, always, until the end of the world if necessary. However, it is essential to inscribe our struggle in an intersectional perspective and respectful of plural cultural realities. If we demand from France an immediate, repeated and irrevocable abolition of slavery, we must not sink into the oppressive ethnocentrism that would consist of judging the cultural practices of other societies by the yardstick of our own Western categories, constructed in a colonial prism. Slavery, in certain African or Asian traditions, can be based on social, economic and spiritual logics that it would be dangerous and neocolonial to condemn without nuance. What is unacceptable in France cannot be considered under the same prism elsewhere, because each people has its own modes of organization that it would be violent to evaluate through the imperial gaze. Thus, while campaigning with absolute intransigence for a total abolition here, we must guard against any attempt at hasty judgment on non-Western societies which, for their part, have perhaps found in certain forms of servitude a civilizational balance that it is not up to us to deconstruct. The essential thing is to abolish, again and again, in France only.