The French Republic’s forgotten promise of equality

Résumé détaillé

French youth learn in school about the Revolution’s values but they do not see them reflected in their own reality.

Liberté, égalité, fraternité (liberty, equality, fraternity). Every French child learns the motto long before learning what it means to live up to it. It is a powerful promise. So is France’s habit of breaking it.

France has spent more than two centuries struggling to fulfil the French Republic’s founding principles of equality, liberty and fraternity. All citizens are supposed to be equal before the law, and public institutions are meant to serve the common good, regardless of origin or social background.

So, when students at under-resourced schools in Parisian suburbs or rural areas protest against missing teachers, deteriorating conditions in school buildings and years of neglect, their grievances extend beyond the classroom. They are challenging a system that promises equal opportunity while leaving many young people to pursue it with fewer resources than others.

As the movement attracted support from workers, unions and other protesters, it has become part of a broader confrontation over the cost of living, the dismantlement of public services and the state’s retreat from its social responsibilities.

The constitutional promise is explicit. The 1789 Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen establishes equality in rights, while the Preamble to the 1946 French Constitution makes public education at every level a duty of the state.

A republic cannot indefinitely tolerate schools whose quality depends on where children live and what their families can afford. When equality exists in constitutional texts but recedes from everyday life, the state loses credibility as the guarantor of l’intérêt general (general interest).

There is a historical reason this contradiction carries particular weight in France. The Revolution of 1789 challenged a social order in which privilege was attached to birth.

More than two centuries later, there is something of a déjà vu. The French government is not the Ancien Régime, and today’s students are not a new Third Estate.

Hereditary…

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