These words, without the quotation marks, appear on every public building here in France, which makes them hard to avoid. These are the founding words of modernity, and not just in France.
Hardly a day goes by that I don’t drive past our village council, where I see that slogan proudly emblazoned on the façade. And each time, I rejoice – one should always celebrate, if only inwardly, any reminder of the truth.
That’s what the slogan of the French Republic does: it reminds me of the truth. But it does so not by affirmation but by negation. By telling me not what the truth is but what it isn’t.
I hope that one day that triad will be submitted as Exhibit A at the trial of modernity. The charge will be grand larceny.
The slogan first gained currency during the French Revolution, an impassioned attempt to destroy the edifice that Christendom had built over 18 centuries. Yet when the mob got going in earnest, the revolutionaries found the building too sturdy to be razed to the ground.
So they settled for the next best thing. They kept the house standing, but evicted its rightful owners, those who had built it in the first place, added numerous extensions, decorated the house inside and out, lovingly maintained it for centuries.
New owners moved in, took stock of the verbal furniture and decided to keep some of it, to dupe the masses into thinking that a change of ownership didn’t just mean unrestrained vandalism. The vocabulary they found especially useful highlighted freedom, equality and brotherhood, three pillars of Christianity.
That added perfidy to vandalism and vulgarity to beauty. The new owners didn’t break the old furniture into sticks; they reupholstered it in ugly, lurid floral patterns. They didn’t yank the icons off the walls and toss them onto a bonfire; they disfigured them by using crayons and charcoal to add obscene details.
Freedom was one such icon, God’s gift to man. “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free,” recorded St John. Perhaps “even freer” would have been more accurate, if less sonorous. For the first gift of freedom had been given to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden.
It was the gift of free will, the ability to make uncoerced choices between right and wrong, beautiful and ugly, just and unjust, good and bad. Such is the ultimate freedom, the only kind that emphasises the chasm separating man from beasts.
Ostensibly, wild beasts are free to do anything they want: run in any direction, sleep whenever or wherever they want, pounce on whatever they choose. But in fact, they aren’t free; they are enslaved. They are slaves to their biological makeups, and their behaviour is predetermined for ever.
Man, on the other hand, can use his free will to raise himself high above his physical nature, so high that it would be barely visible. That would be the right choice, but man is equally free to make a wrong one. Adam and Eve chose wrong and stigmatised mankind with the mark of original sin. Man was no longer perfect, but he was still free. That is to say he was still human – freedom was to remain his immanent property for ever.
Yet that’s not what liberté meant to the vandalising vulgarians, and it’s no accident that the distinction between freedom and liberty doesn’t exist in French. Their liberty came to them not from God but from the guillotine. Liberty was delivered to them on a platter containing piles of severed heads.
No wonder that their vulgar prophets talked about social contracts: their liberty was a transactional deal enforced by violence. Contracts replaced covenants; vulgarity replaced beauty; falsehood replaced truth.
Equality was another Christian property suffering the same gruesome fate. To the previous owners of the house, all people were equal before an authority infinitely higher than earthly kings or magistrates.
Everyone was regarded as an autonomous human being, to be cherished not because of any towering achievement or superior character but simply because he was indeed human. In fact, people short of achievement or incapable of it, like frail boys routinely drowned by the Spartans or unwanted baby girls left to die in the woods by the Romans, began to be seen as God’s creatures to be loved before all others.
Though some people may have been wicked, some weak and some moribund, none was useless. They all had redeeming qualities because they had all been redeemed. They were equal in a way that trumped the mundane inequality of birth, wealth or status.
The vulgarising vandals replaced that sublime equality with crude levelling. That was a lie even on its own puny terms: if anything, worldly, material inequalities multiplied.
But at a higher, spiritual level, humanism proved its inhumanity. If both prince and pauper used to be equally sustained by the hope of salvation and life everlasting, modernity gave the pauper the false promise of becoming a prince, and it gave the prince the false hope of keeping the pauper at arm’s length.
What followed was a series of increasingly destructive wars, the likes of which the world had never seen. Hundreds of millions of corpses later, the only equality on offer was proved to be equality of the grave.
Brotherhood was another item of furniture vulgarised by the vandals. The old owners knew they were all brothers for the simple reason that they all had the same father. Even if at times they, like Cain and Abel, didn’t behave in a brotherly fashion, they always knew that their kinship would survive even if one of the brothers didn’t.
The new owners knocked the stuffing out of that furniture and upholstered the hard wood with a thin layer of gaudy, kitschy fabric. The chair became uncomfortable and eventually impossible to sit on – one hears today’s leaders address their flock as fellow citizens but never as their brothers. And fellow citizenship is a much flimsier bond than ultimate kinship.
Tomorrow, we’ll celebrate the birth of Jesus Christ, which fact everyone knows, but most people would rather forget. What most people don’t even know or might have forgotten is that we’ll also be celebrating real freedom, real equality, real brotherhood.
Let the vulgarians celebrate their fake triad. Christians will acclaim the real Trinity.