The French Motto Used to End in Or Death

The French national motto began as a dress code for an armed militia.

On 5 December 1790, in a printed speech on the organization of the National Guard, Robespierre proposed that guardsmen wear the words on their chests. Article 16 of his text has it exactly. They will bear these words engraved on their breast, the French people, and beneath it, liberty, equality, fraternity.

Not a declaration of universal values. A uniform specification, for citizens under arms, in a revolution that expected to be attacked.

The Assembly did not adopt it.

Or death

The phrase came back three years later with an ending attached. In June 1793 Jean-Nicolas Pache, mayor of Paris, ordered it painted on the Hôtel de Ville and other public buildings in its full form. Unity, indivisibility of the Republic, liberty, equality, fraternity, or death.

It was a municipal order rather than a national law, which is worth holding onto. This was the city of Paris describing itself, during the Terror, on the front of the building where the decisions were being made. Fraternity was not being offered. It was being required, with the alternative named in the same breath.

How the ending disappeared

After Thermidor the last clause became impossible to keep. It was painted over and chiselled off, and it went well before the rest of the motto came back into use. Almost nothing of it survives in place today.

Then the whole thing went. Napoleon's empire had no use for it, the Bourbon Restoration less. The Second Republic revived it in 1848 and wrote it into Article 4 of that year's constitution. The Second Empire took it back out of official use.

The Third Republic settled it, ordering the three words onto the pediments of public buildings for the Bastille Day celebrations of 14 July 1880. That is the version on every mairie in France.

The slow legal life of a famous sentence

Here is the part that surprises people. For a slogan associated with 1789, it took an extraordinarily long time to become law.

It was not in any constitution until 1848, and that republic lasted four years. It appears again in the constitution of 1946. It is fixed in Article 2 of the constitution of 1958, which states plainly that the motto of the Republic is liberty, equality, fraternity, and that is the text still in force.

A hundred and sixty-eight years passed between Robespierre's breastplates and the sentence becoming permanent law, and the version that survived is the one with the consequence removed.

What the edit conceals

There is a comfortable reading where the motto is a statement of values and the guillotine is an unfortunate episode that happened nearby. The 1793 wording does not permit it. For a period, the state's own summary of itself named the penalty alongside the principle.

Cutting four words let the sentence become an ideal again. It is a good sentence. It is also a redraft, and we can still read the draft.

Why it ends up on a shirt

The Liberté Égalité Fatalité tee puts Marianne with a guillotine. The wordplay swaps fraternity for fatality, which turns out to be closer to the source text than the official motto is.

Every national motto is an edit of something. This one is unusual in that the earlier version was written down, painted on a town hall, and then deliberately removed.

Related: the full catalogue.

More arguments about who the state answers to in Mikhail Bakunin: The One Who Out-Argued Marx.