The colour of fraternity

I am a longstanding, unquestioning admirer of the various adventures of Asterix and Obelix, the redoubtable, boar-eating, comic-strip Gauls who, in the process of sharing the happiness of their freedom, joyously decimate countless Roman legions sent to conquer their village. I might have been a more questioning admirer if I imagined that the day would come when I would feel put into the position of one of those puny Roman legionaries. As I was yesterday evening.

As part of its series of talks on the contributions of the French Revolution, the French Embassy invited me to be a respondent to the keynote speaker, Alain Blondy, a historian attached to the Sorbonne. This, I thought, is like inviting a Roman legionary to sit by the side of the Hercules-like giant, Obelix. But since the subject was fraternity, which would surely be extended to me, I felt safe, overcame my trepidation and accepted.

Fraternity was not initially part of the Revolution's slogan. In the beginning, it was "Liberty, Equality or Death" - of which there was plenty. Nor, once it was proclaimed as an ideal by the National Convention in 1792, did it mean the same thing it means today. To follow Prof. Blondy's talk was to follow the fascinating genealogy of a concept.

Originally, fraternity meant something like sharing with other peoples the happiness to be free (from the feudal monarchies). In time, it came to signify, for Prof. Blondy, the unity of society - an identity that ought to unify a people over and above internal divisions. Such a unity, in feudal times, was given not by a notion of "society" but by the idea of the king's "two bodies" - his own and that of the state.

Key to the development of the meaning of fraternity was the growing political importance of the notion of social justice. The economic ruin of the early 1790s led to the taxation of the rich on behalf of the poor. In the 19th century, the development of socialism, in various guises that included Christian socialism, led, in time, to the appearance of the notion of solidarity.

It was the outcome, for Prof. Blondy, of the failure of the idea of fraternity - that is, the failure of the idea that unity could overcome the class fractures of society, particularly between the working masses and the conservative and republican middle classes. Speeding along, by the end of World War II, the notion of social solidarity became an important organising principle of society.

It was on its basis that the three main parties in the new Assembly then, the Communists, the Socialists and the Christian Democrats, all attached in their different ways to solidarity, began the process of developing the "French social model", to which the majority of the French are still attached today.

In response to Prof. Blondy, I asked what the relevance of fraternity is today. Despite the history of failure traced by Prof. Blondy, it is still an idea of great resonance. Understanding why requires us to add something to the notion as he presented it: fraternity is not just the unitary conception of society; it represents a way of living liberty and equality with warmth.

This is an idea that was genially presented by the Polish film director Krysztof Kieslowski in his Three Colours trilogy on liberty, equality and fraternity.

The latter, represented by the warmest colour, red, is illustrated in a series of epiphanies, particularly to do with the growing humanity of a cold retired judge. The climax of the film is a shipwreck, where the survivors (and film spectators) discover a common bond not previously apparent, and where the growing recognition occurs as the survivors are being warmed up with blankets and hot drinks.

It is striking that fraternity is difficult to imagine today.

Indeed, one seldom hears it mentioned; it has been almost completely replaced by solidarity - except in the language of far-right groups, that offer an exclusive grotesque version, a fraternity that picks and chooses, fraternity without solidarity.

One reason, I suspect, has to do with the shrinking size of the European family.

With national birth rates reaching an average of fewer than two children per family (though not in the case of France), we may well reach a situation where the idea of being a brother or a sister, or having an uncle or an aunt, can only be explained by looking at the past.

This situation has contributed to creating a crisis for the notion of solidarity. First, it weakens the experience of warm bonds of intimacy that may well be an essential enabling condition of social solidarity.

Perhaps, solidarity without any vestige of fraternity is difficult to uphold.

Some students of contemporary welfare states have observed that reluctance to pay taxes to support social welfare benefits tends to grow when taxpayers cannot identify in any way with the recipients.

Second, more directly, the shrinking size of families has contributed to the creation of the welfare gap - the gap between recipients of social benefits, including pensioners, and the available number of people working to pay for the benefits.

In short, we have found ourselves in a position where we must somehow work our way back from solidarity to fraternity.

Particularly when one remembers that one solution to the welfare gap is immigration, but that there is so much popular resistance to the idea, because no social bond is felt by much of the native population with immigrants.

Other urgent challenges - from world poverty to climate change to the potentially dangerous manipulation of human DNA - seem insuperable when considered only from the perspective of liberty and equality, without the moving epiphanies of fraternity.

And, yet, these challenges need to be faced if human life is to be secured. Maybe we need to adapt the early slogan of the Revolution, and chant: "Fraternity or Death!"