Every nation is built upon some kind of social mythology that defines a value system and gives people something to live for. France is no exception to the rule, and our seminal event was the taking of the Bastille. For all its romantic appeal, I still have a hard time decoding the value system that came out of it eventually. Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité is engraved on the entrance of most public buildings, but is hardly something that a whole country can put to use. Liberté (Freedom) is a given, but is such an abstract and open-ended concept that it does not provide much of a guideline for action. Égalité (Equality), taken in its pure mathematical sense — don’t forget that France is first and foremost the country of Descartes — is so totalitarian that it undermines any individual initiative from the start, while making no distinction between equality of rights, equality of duties, and equality of dues. Finally, Fraternité (Brotherhood) sounds almost naïve when applied at the level of a whole country. How could I really consider myself a brother of over 60 million people?
Today, I witnessed the tensions that are created by a value system that cannot support the society that created it anymore. I was having dinner at the restaurant Les Éditeurs, a stone’s throw away from La Sorbonne. Demonstrators were fighting against the police, urging the Government to drop its proposal for more flexible labor laws that would help reduce unemployment for the younger part of the population. While the proposed law itself is far from being perfect, it looks to me as something that most French people would benefit from, but our love story with an utopian vision that very few can legitimately promote is preventing us from considering such an evolution. We French people love revolutions, our collective memory is built upon them, and nothing will change in the aging country of Général de Gaulle until we get to the next one.
I am not much of a revolutionary myself, and will always favor dialogue over violence. I also believe that evolution lends itself to better long-term results, for it creates less stigma. Therefore, I would like to propose an evolution to our founding ontology: To Liberté, I would substitue Libéralité (Liberality), which is a neologism that I would put halfway between Liberté and Libéralisme (Liberalism), the later having too bad of connotation in France today to be used in any meaningful way. To Égalité, I would substitute Équité (Fairness), which is much more pragmatic and tolerant to the very concept of diversity that makes life interesting in the first place. And to Fraternité, I would substitude Solidarité, which should serve as a foundation for any social welfare system. Libéralité, Équité, Solidarité could serve as a program to lead fundamental transformations within today’s French society, taking the best of its heritage while helping preserve its relevance within a world that is not waiting for the French to undergo its own transformations. This program also transcends the Left-Right political fraction that has proven to be utterly inoperative over the past twenty years. Instead, it brings together democrats and liberals into a new deal that will need the contributions of many to build. Granted, such a program does not have the romantic appeal of the original one, but if more people can better relate to it and turn it into actions that will foster unilateral progress, I just like it better.
