Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité
The Jacobins unbalanced these concepts and brought about the Reign of Terror
The United States once had no greater friend than France.
As a factual matter, without France there would be no United States. Help from the French was one of the most important factors in the defeat of the greatest army and navy of the times by a ragtag bunch of colonials. France funded, supplied, and trained our rebellion against the Crown.
At one point, our nascent nation and France, long established, while not being carbon copies, largely embodied the same emerging attitudes about individual freedoms. While the French motto of “Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité” did not formally emerge until the early 1790’s, the ideals of liberty, equality, and brotherhood (unity) were shared by the United States at a conceptual level, so much so they turn up in our Declaration of Independence and our Constitution in one form or the other.
Casually observing this tripartite expression of liberty, equality, and unity, it would seem they are on equal footing and well suited to live in harmony, to coexist and cooperate, but as a point of fact, there is an almost irreconcilable tension between these concepts. How this tension was accommodated is evident in how these ideas evolved in practice in France and in the United States over the years.
There is much to be learned from the mistakes of the French during the French Revolution as their tripartite motto began to lose the presumed equality of the three terms and prioritized one over the other. Our contemporary times bear a strong correlation with the French Revolution that ran from 1789 to 1799.
During this decade, the French government and people struggled mightily with the balance of the concepts of liberty and equality. During the Jacobin period, much as the US is doing during its own Jacobin period, the French redefined equality to mean the equality of outcomes, not only judicial equality of rights – in other words, the changed “equality” to “equity”. Many French intellectuals of the period came to believe that the French societal temperament was more inclined toward equity of outcome rather than liberty. At that point, equity became more important that liberty.
Furthermore, since liberty implied individualism and individualism implied uneven and unequal outcomes, the idea that an equal society could only be found through coercion began to take hold.
Then the question arose of how to maintain unity in a coercive state, the answer to that question was the dawn of the Reign of Terror. “Unity” was maintained by the invention of the Maximillian Robespierre led Comité de Salut Public (the Committee for Public Safety). Charged with protecting the new French Republic against its foreign and domestic enemies, the committee was given broad supervisory and administrative powers over the armed forces, judiciary, and legislature, as well as the executive bodies and ministers of the Convention. Rising to the heights of dictatorial power over the French people (including the royalty), mass arrests and imprisonment, regicide, and summary executions became the order of the day.
One can easily see how prioritization of any of the three concepts condemns them all to destruction.
The United States took a different route.
The ideas of liberty, equality and unity were given co-equal standing in our founding documents and in the systems derived from them. Equality was defined as protecting an environment where citizens have equality of opportunity, not guaranteeing equal outcomes. In doing so, individual liberty was protected as unequal outcomes were expected and accepted as the price of a life of liberty. Unity was wrapped around the idea that we all have the same liberties and opportunities, and we are a nation united by the need and desire to protect both liberty and equality for all.
The best analogy I can think of to illustrate these is a centrifuge.
Assume you have three test tubes in a centrifuge, equally weighted and equally spaced at 120 degrees apart. Because the centrifuge is in balance, when it spins, it spins smoothly. Now assume that we take the tube marked “equality” and begin to fill it with lead instead of water (or that we empty the other two test tubes) and the system becomes unbalanced – the centrifuge begins to wobble as it spins and eventually self-destructs.
As France did during the French Revolution, intellectual and political forces in America have been trying to unbalance the centrifuge by eliminating and reweighting our founding principles. The most dangerous is the redefinition of equality, the morphing from equality of opportunity into equality of outcomes (equity).
In every important way, the Trump administration was a break from the Obama/Biden administration’s resurrection of the French Revolution in America. Now that Biden has been reinstalled in the White House, his administration has begun creating their own Committees for Public Safety, a process interrupted but the election of Donald Trump in 2016, each headed by their own versions of Robespierre (it is hard to look at Biden’s nominees to run different entities within the government - the DOJ in particular - and not see Robespierres among them).
The progressive left (the Democrats) has decided, as the French intellectuals did about France, that the American temperament now favors equity over liberty, equality, and unity.
We have seen this movie before, and we know how it ends.
The French version ended with gallows and guillotines in public squares.
Returning the American centrifuge to balance will change that ending.
Stopping the push for “equity” is a critical aspect of that balancing act.