Liberte, Fraternite, Egalite

In his endlessly fascinating classic Fire in the Minds of Men: Origins of the Revolutionary Faith , Librarian of Congress James Billington notes that, though ancient, the triangle of values in the slogan of the French Revolution took on “a new mystical aura” during the 18th and 19th century.

He sums them up this way: Liberty was the political “ideal of security freedom through a constitutional republic.” Liberty was “defined in terms of constitutional rights and popular legislatures.” This ideal “may be identified with the Enlightenment reformism of the eighteenth century.”

Fraternite was an “emotional ideal of experiencing brotherhood in a new kind of nation,” a “discovery amidst a struggle against others that one’s immediate neighbors are one’s brothers – linguistically, culturally, geographically – fellow sons of a common fatherland.”

This ideal dominated the nineteenth century and produced most of the revolutionary movements of that period. Billington writes, -“The French national example and republican ideal dominated the revolutionary imagination throughout the first half of the nineteenth century. Exiled Francophile intellectuals from Poland and Italy largely fashioned the dominant concept of revolutionary nationalism – inventing most modern ideas on guerrilla violence and wars of national liberation, expressing their essentially emotional ideal best in mythic histories, vernacular poetry, and operatic melodrama.”

Egalite was an intellectual ideal “of creating a nonhierarchical socio-economic community,” where goods would be shared “within a community free of all social and economic distinctions.” Billington links this final Revolutionary value with the “authoritarian communism of the twentieth” century.”