Mexican President Claudia Sheinbaum will ask her French counterpart Emmanuel Macron this Friday to send the Code of Azcatitlán to Mexico. The president will receive the European leader at the National Palace to talk about bilateral trade relations and the renewal of the trade agreement with the European Union. Issues related to science and culture will also be addressed, regarding the celebration of 200 years of diplomatic relations between the two countries, scheduled for 2030. Sheinbaum announced that an important part of the meeting will focus on the request to the French president for the codex that tells the pre-Hispanic history from the foundation of Tenochtitlan to the fall of the Aztec empire.
The Mexican president has not specified whether he will propose to Macron to lend or return the document to the country. For several years the Government has been asking various European countries for the return of pre-Hispanic pieces and documents stolen from the territory during the Colony. The Codex Azcatitlán has been in the National Library of France, in Paris, since 1898 and represents an important testimony to the origins of pre-Hispanic Mexico and the resistance of the Aztecs to the arrival of the Spanish. The document was in the custody of Carlos de Sigüenza y Góngora and Lorenzo Boturini. However, at some point in the 19th century it left Mexican territory. “We are very keen on sending this code,” Sheinbaum said in his conference this Thursday.
The Mexican government also paid attention to the Bourbon Code, a document that explains the details of the Aztec calendar, deities and rituals of the pre-Hispanic era. This codex is located in the Library of the National Assembly of France, in Paris. According to the Mexican presidency, the return of this other document will not be on the table of conversations between Sheinbaum and Macron, but there will be a request for the return of the piece to the French Parliament.
The two leaders will hold a private meeting in which they will discuss the renewal of the Free Trade Agreement between Mexico and the European Union, scheduled for February 2026. This agreement, in force since 2000, has been redesigned over the past eight years to include the modernization of trade in financial services, transportation, e-commerce and telecommunications. European countries updated the agreement against time before the start of Donald Trump’s administration, anticipating the global trade war that the American has been waging since his arrival in the White House. Mexico is France’s second-largest partner in Latin America, after Brazil, and boasts significant trade in sectors such as pharmaceuticals, wind energy and aerospace.
Macron arrives in Mexico after his participation in the COP30 summit in Belém, Brazil, in which he made a statement on the protection of the environment and the defense of the tropical forests of Congo. The French president has supported his fragile government since the summer, with a parliament that has failed to muster enough support to approve next year’s budget.
