Liberté, égalité, fraternité

Speaking of the July 1790 Fête de la Fédération festival, he described "the citizen-soldiers rushing into each other's arms, promising each other liberty, equality, fraternity."

Discours sur l'organisation des gardes nationalesArticle XVI.They will wear these words engraved on their uniforms: THE FRENCH PEOPLE, & below: LIBERTY, EQUALITY, FRATERNITY.

Elles porteront sur leur poitrine ces mots gravés : LE PEUPLE FRANÇAIS, & au-dessous : LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ.

[2][page needed] The historian Mona Ozouf underlines that, although Liberté and Égalité were associated as a motto during the 18th century, Fraternité wasn't always included in it, and other terms, such as Amitié (Friendship), Charité (Charity) or Union were often added in its place.

[2] As soon as 1789, other terms were used, such as "la Nation, la Loi, le Roi" (The Nation, The Law, The King), or "Union, Force, Vertu" (Union, Strength, Virtue), a slogan used beforehand by masonic lodges, or "Force, Égalité, Justice" (Strength, Equality, Justice), "Liberté, Sûreté, Propriété" (Liberty, Security, Property), etc.

[2] The only solid association was that of liberté and égalité, with fraternité being ignored by the Cahiers de doléances as well as by the 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.

[2] Thus, Marc Antoine Baudot considered that the French temperament was inclined towards equality than liberty, a theme which was re-used by Pierre Louis Roederer and Alexis de Tocqueville.

[2] The third term, fraternité, was the most problematic to insert in the triad, as it belonged to another sphere, that of moral obligations rather than rights, links rather than statutes, harmony rather than contract, and community rather than individuality.

The first one, according to Mona Ozouf, was one of "fraternité de rébellion" (Fraternity of Rebellion),[2] that is the union of the deputies in the Jeu de Paume Oath of June 1789, refusing the dissolution ordered by the King Louis XVI: "We swear never to separate ourselves from the National Assembly, and to reassemble wherever circumstances require, until the constitution of the realm is drawn up and fixed upon solid foundations."

"[2] Another hesitation concerning the compatibility of the three terms arose from the opposition between liberty and equality as individualistic values, and fraternity as the realization of a happy community, devoid of any conflicts and opposed to any form of egotism.

[2] The idea of individual sovereignty and of natural rights possessed by man before being united in the collectivity, contradicted the possibility of establishing a transparent and fraternal community.

[2] Despite this apparent disappearance of the triptych, the latter was still being thought in some underground circles, in Republican secret societies, masonic lodges such as the "Indivisible Trinity," far-left booklets or during the Canuts Revolt in Lyon.

[2] In 1834, the lawyer of the Society of the Rights of Man (Société des droits de l'homme), Dupont, a liberal sitting in the far-left during the July Monarchy, associated the three terms together in the Revue Républicaine, which he edited: Any man aspires to liberty, to equality, but he can not achieve it without the assistance of other men, without fraternity[2][b]In 1847, the triptych resurfaced during the Campagne des Banquets, upheld for example in Lille by Ledru-Rollin.

On the other hand, Pierre Leroux did not disguise the difficulties of associating the three terms, but superated it by considering liberty as the aim, equality as the principle and fraternity as the means.

[2] Fraternity was not devoid of its previous sense of opposition between brothers and foes, with images of blood haunting revolutionary Christian publications, taking in Lamennais' themes.

[2][14] On 6 January 1852, the future Napoleon III, first President of the Republic, ordered all prefects to erase the triptych from all official documents and buildings, conflating the words with insurrection and disorder.

[2] Auguste Comte applauded Napoleon, claiming equality to be the "symbol of metaphysical anarchism", and preferring to it his diptych "ordre et progrès", "order and progress", which became the motto of Brazil, Ordem e Progresso.

[16] Larousse's Dictionnaire universel deprived fraternity of its "evangelistic halo" (Mona Ozouf), conflating it with solidarity and the welfare role of the state.

[2] Some still opposed the Republican motto, such as the nationalist Charles Maurras in his Dictionnaire politique et critique, who claimed liberty to be an empty dream, equality an insanity, and only kept fraternity.

[2] On the other hand, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the most important French author of pseudo-scientific racism and supporter of eugenism, completely rejected the republican triptych, adopting another motto, "déterminisme, inégalité, sélection" (determinism, inequality, selection).

[2] During the German occupation of France in World War II, this motto was replaced by the reactionary phrase "travail, famille, patrie" (work, family, fatherland)[17] by Marshal Pétain, who became the leader of the new Vichy French government in 1940.

Pétain had taken this motto from the colonel de la Rocque's Parti social français (PSF), although the latter considered it more appropriate for a movement than for a regime.