On Fraternity: The Forgotten Third Word
Liberty and equality get the speeches. The word that holds them together barely gets a footnote.
Of the three words the republic wrote into its preamble, fraternity is the one we say fastest. It sits at the end of the sentence like an afterthought, and most of us read it that way — a courtesy, a softening, something to round off the harder demands of liberty and equality. But the order matters less than the grammarThe word carries a longer history in the French republican tradition than in ours, and that lineage deserves an essay of its own..
Fraternity is not a third value beside the other two. It is the condition under which the other two can be held by strangers without tearing them apart, which is why it is so hard to legislate and so easy to lose.
It is the condition under which the other two can be held by strangers.
You can write liberty into a charter and equality into a statute. Fraternity has to be practised — in queues, in classrooms, in the small daily refusals to treat a neighbour as a category.
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