Slavery in France, and by extension, the French Empire, covers a wide range of disparate topics.

During the Middle Ages, chattel slavery was legal in France itself. In the early Merovingian Middle Ages, there was a trade in slaves from the British Isles to France. In the Frankish Middle Ages, France served as a middle station in the saqaliba slave trade of Pagan slaves from Northeastern Europe to al-Andalus in the Southwest, which were transported from Prague to the Caliphate of Cordoba via France.

Chattel slavery in France gradually transitioned to serfdom and was finally abolished in the 1310s, specifically with a decree in 1315. While chattel slavery was never again made legal in France itself, it was later allowed in the French colonies from the 17th century. During the French colonial empire, slavery was legal in the colonies while remaining banned in France itself. This was a common parallel system used in many European countries at the time. In 1793, slavery was abolished in the French colonies. Slavery was reintroduced in the colonies in 1802 and finally abolished in 1848.

In 486, Clovis I, the son of Childeric, defeated Syagrius, a Roman military leader who competed with the Merovingians for power in northern France. Like the Roman empire before them, the Merovingians used slavery.

Slavery in Merovingian France included several Frankish queens in the Merovingian dynasty who had formerly been slaves. Only five slave queens have been identified in Merovingian France, though there may have been more: Ingund, Fredegund, Bilichild, Nanthild, and Balthild. Slavery continued during the Carolingian Empire.

Slavery was gradually phased out and replaced by serfdom in Francia in parallell with the establishment of feudalism in Western Europe (later France and Germany), a system which did not include slavery. This was a system that was completed by Charlemagne (r. 768–814), but the process of phasing out slavery had been set long before the reign of Charlemagne.

In Roman Gaul, the land estates of the Roman country villas in Gaul had been worked by slave laborers called ancillae (sing. ancilla) or servi (sing. servus), who worked the land of the landowner, the dominus. When Roman rule in Gaul was replaced by the migrating Germanic tribes in settling in Gaul in the 5th century, the Roman villa estates started to transition to become feudal estates, and the transition of slavery to serfdom was a part of this. The slavery system was dependent upon a strong central power and legal enforcement, which was no longer possible in the Post Roman world, where an estate was now forced to be self-sufficient, and rely on cooperation. In order to keep their labor force and ensure their cooperation, the landowners started to manumit their slaves and give their former slaves, called coloni or servi casati, their own land, known as mansi, in exchange for working also on the landowner's own land, demesne.

When the former slaves were given their own land, they could no longer be sold or bought as property, but was liberated and referred to as franci or coloni. As free peasants with their own land the former slave laborers were motivated to work better for the landowner; and when they were free to marry and leave their land as inheritance to their children, the labor force of the landowner started to reproduce itself instead of the landowner being responsible for supplying new laborers (via slave purchases). The method of freeing the slaves and giving them land in exchange for working duty on the landowners land, was seen as more efficient by the landowners, since the free laborers were motivated to work and did not have to be supervised; and while slavery was not abolished, the new labor method became so popular among the landowners that by the 7th century, the rural slave laborers had been almost completely replaced by free serf peasant laborers, and slavery reduced to urban house slaves. The former rural slaves mixed via intermarriage with the originally free rural population, and the peasantry merged to become a single class.