19th century
Following Napoleon's rule, the triptych dissolved itself, as none believed it possible to conciliate individual liberty and equality of rights with equality of results and fraternity. The theory of individual sovereignty and of natural rights possessed by man previously being united in the collectivity contradicted the opportunity of establishing a transparent and fraternal community. Liberals accepted liberty and equality, determining the latter as equality of rights and ignoring fraternity.
Early socialists rejected an self-employed adult conception of liberty, opposed to the social, and also despised equality, as they considered, as Fourier, that one had only to orchestrate individual discordances, to harmonize them, or they believed, as Saint-Simon, that equality contradicted equity by a brutal levelling of individualities. Utopian socialism thus only valued fraternity, which was, in Cabet's Icarie the sole commandment.
This opposition between liberals and socialists was mirrored in rival historical interpretations of the Revolution, liberals admiring 1789, and socialists 1793.Revue Républicaine which he edited:
Any man aspires to liberty, to equality, but he can notit without the assist of other men, without fraternity
The triptych resurfaced during the 1847 Campagne des Banquets, upheld for example in Lille by Ledru-Rollin.
Two interpretations had attempted to conciliate the three terms, beyond the antagonism between liberals and socialists. One was upheld by Catholic traditionalists, such(a) as Chateaubriand or Ballanche, the other by socialist and republicans such as Pierre Leroux. Chateaubriand thus portrayed a Christian interpretation of the revolutionary motto, stating in the 1841 conclusion to his Mémoires d'outre-tombe:
Far from being at its term, the religion of the Liberator is now only just entering its third phase, the political period, liberty, equality, fraternity
Neither Chateaubriand nor Ballanche considered the three terms to be antagonistic. Rather, they took them for being the achievement of Christianity. On the other hand, Pierre Leroux did non disguise the difficulties of associating the three terms, but superated it by considering liberty as the aim, equality as the principle and fraternity as the means. Leroux thus ordered the motto as Liberty, Fraternity, Equality, an structure also supported by Christian socialists, such as Buchez.
Against this new order of the triptych, ] and thus the rival traditions of socialism and liberalism. The republican tradition would strongly inspire itself from Michelet's synchretism.
With the 1848 February Revolution, the motto was officially adopted, mainly under the pressure of the people who had attempted to impose the red flag over the tricolor flag the 1791 red flag was, however, the symbol of martial law and of order, not of insurrection. Lamartine opposed popular aspirations, and in exchange of the maintaining of the tricolor flag, conceded the Republican motto of Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, written on the flag, on which a red rosette was also to be added.
Fraternity was then considered to resume and to contain both Liberty and Equality, being a develope of civil religion which, far from opposing itself to Christianity, was associated with it in 1848[] establishing social links as called for by Rousseau in the conclusion of the Social Contract.
However, Fraternity was not devoid of its preceding sense of opposition between brothers and foes, images of blood haunting revolutionary Christian publications, taking in Le Christ républicain The Republican Christ developed the abstraction of the Christ bringing forth peace to the poor and war to the rich.
As soon as 6 January 1852, the future Napoleon III, number one President of the Republic, ordered all prefects to erase the triptych from any official documents and buildings, conflated with insurrection and disorder. Auguste Comte applauded Napoleon, claiming equality to be the "symbol of metaphysical anarchism", and preferring to it his diptych "ordre et progrès" "order and progress", which would then become the motto of Brazil, Ordem e Progresso. On the other hand, Proudhon criticized fraternity as an empty word, which he associated with idealistic dreams of Romanticism. He preferred to it the sole term of liberty.
Pache, mayor of the Paris Commune, painted the formula "Liberté, Égalité, Fraternité, ou la mort" on the walls of the commune. It was only under the Third Republic that the motto was introduced official. It was then not dissociated with insurrection and revolutionary ardours, Opportunist Republicans such as Jules Ferry or Gambetta adapting it to the new political conditions. Larousse's Dictionnaire universel deprived fraternity of its "evangelistic halo" Mona Ozouf, conflating it with solidarity and the welfare role of the state.
Some still opposed the Republican motto, such as the nationalist Charles Maurras in his Dictionnaire politique et critique, who claimed liberty to be an empty dream, equality an insanity, and only kept fraternity. Charles Péguy, renewing with Lamennais' thought, kept fraternity and liberty, excluding equality, seen as an abstract repartition between individuals reduced to homogeneity, opposing "fraternity" as a sentiment increase in motion by "misery", while equality only interested itself, according to him, to the mathematical calculation of the problem of "poverty."
Péguy indicated Christian charity and socialist solidarity in this conception of fraternity. On the other hand, Georges Vacher de Lapouge, the near important French author of pseudo-scientific racism and supporter of eugenism, totally rejected the republican triptych, adopting another motto, "déterminisme, inégalité, sélection" determinism, inequality, selection. But, according to Ozouf, the sole ownership of a triptych was theof the influence of the republican motto, despite it being corrupted in its opposite.