ABSTRACT
French Revolution, originally with the menacingly activist
addition of ‘ou la mort’ (Freedom, Equality, Fraternity or death),
has echoed through subsequent history. The French were still
arguing about what the words had entailed, or should entail,
in 1989, during the Revolution’s bicentenary. Then, advancing
neo-conservatives proclaimed that the Revolution was at last
over, since, they maintained, liberty and equality had become
‘common currency’ (fraternity was ignored). With the approach
of the new millennium, all could accept that ‘1789 was good,
1793 [the period of Jacobin “terrorism”] was bad’. Moreover,
French exceptionalism had also come to rest: ‘Politics was now
less about ideology than about management’, they affirmed, and
France, just another western liberal democratic nation, was
The arrogance and blindness
of the neo-conservative recko-
ing with modernity may be
left to its own devices. But,
certainly, the process of history
since the Enlightenment can be
read as a contest between the
desire to be free, the desire to
be equal and the desire to base
the state on popular sover-
eignty and thereafter to live
in love and charity with the
nation’s neighbours. From liberté liberalism; from egalité social-
ism; from fraternité nationalism. Yet, despite the bliss of the revo-
lutionary prospect that men and women were about to be made
anew, in the longer term, for humankind the modern trinity
entailed an inescapable dilemma. During the next two centuries,
some advantages and endless difficulties were to result from the
thoughts and actions of those who sought to be liberals and
nationalists but not socialists, nationalists and socialists but not
liberals, liberals and socialists but not nationalists, and from the
other juddering encounters of each of these groups.
