Liberty or Emancipation?
While the United States celebrates its national day on 4 July, commemorating the Declaration of Independence, France marks its national day on 14 July, commemorating the Storming of the Bastille in 1789. The Bastille, a fortress and prison, had come to symbolize the arbitrary power of the French monarchy, and its fall marked the beginning of the French Revolution.
In August of the same year, the French National Assembly adopted the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen (Déclaration des droits de l’homme et du citoyen). Like the American Declaration of Independence, it articulated universal claims about liberty, rights, and political legitimacy. Together with the American Declaration of Independence and the United States Constitution, it became one of the principal sources of inspiration for later formulations of universal human rights, most notably the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, adopted by the United Nations in 1948.
The Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen.
When Americans and Europeans speak of freedom, they often assume they are talking about the same thing. Both invoke democracy, human rights, and popular sovereignty. Both regard their societies as heirs to the Enlightenment. Yet beneath this shared vocabulary lie partly different historical experiences and different understandings of the relationship between the individual, the state, and society.
No two events have shaped the modern Western political imagination more profoundly than the American Revolution and the French Revolution. Both challenged the old order. Both insisted that political power must ultimately derive its legitimacy from the people rather than from God or tradition. Yet whereas the American Revolution was largely founded on the belief that individuals already possess their liberties and that the state’s primary task is to protect them, the French Revolution developed a different narrative—one centred on emancipation.
At first glance, the distinction may seem subtle. In reality, it has had far-reaching consequences. Liberty and emancipation are not the same thing. Liberty begins with the assumption that individuals already possess certain rights that no legitimate authority may violate. Emancipation begins with the assumption that individuals are not yet truly free and must therefore be liberated from the forces that constrain them. In the first case, the central political question becomes how power should be limited. In the second, it becomes which obstacles must be removed in order for human beings to become free.
The Revolution and the Secular State
The French Revolution emerged from the Enlightenment’s critique of privilege, ecclesiastical power, and absolute monarchy. For decades, philosophers such as Voltaire, Diderot, and Rousseau had questioned the legitimacy of the old order. When the Revolution broke out in 1789, its assault was directed not merely against a particular king or government, but against an entire social and political system.
Unlike the American Revolution, which primarily legitimized the independence of the thirteen colonies and their right to govern themselves, the French Revolution claimed to formulate principles applicable to all humanity. Already in the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen of 1789, a universal aspiration emerged that would later shape both the French Republic and much of Europe’s political development.
The idea of universal human rights was not, of course, entirely new. It had evolved through a long intellectual tradition in which Roman law, Stoic philosophy, and Christian natural law converged. The Revolution, however, transformed these principles into the foundation of a new political order.
French universalism was about more than individual rights. It also expressed an ambition to build institutions, laws, and norms grounded in reason rather than tradition, privilege, or religion. The same spirit would later find expression in everything from the metric system and the modern centralized state administration to the Code Napoléon and the French republican conception of citizenship.
The Declaration articulated many of the principles that would later become central to modern democracy and human rights. Yet the Revolution was about more than protecting individual liberties. It sought to create a new society and, to some extent, a new kind of citizen. The old France was not merely to be reformed—it was to be transformed.
It is here that the Revolution’s relationship with religion becomes particularly significant. The revolutionaries regarded the Church not merely as a religious institution but also as a political power. It possessed enormous wealth, controlled education, and formed an integral part of the ancien régime. Limiting the Church’s influence therefore appeared to be an essential part of the broader project of emancipation.
During the Revolution’s most radical phase, developments went far beyond what many Enlightenment philosophers would probably have imagined. Priests were persecuted, churches were closed, and attempts were made to establish new forms of republican civic religion. Although this radical campaign of de-Christianization proved short-lived, it left a lasting imprint on French political culture. The essential objective was not merely to separate Church and State. It was to liberate the State from the power of religion.
It was Napoleon Bonaparte who ultimately gave many of the Revolution’s ideas their most enduring institutional form. Napoleon was no democrat in the modern sense, and he crowned himself Emperor. Yet he became perhaps the Revolution’s greatest exporter.
Napoleon crowns himself Emperor in the presence of Pope Pius VII.
Through the Code Napoléon, a legal system was established on the principle that all citizens should be equal before the law. Feudal privileges were abolished. The state was centralized. Meritocratic ideals were strengthened. Across much of Europe, Napoleon’s reforms proved more durable than either the political systems they replaced or those that succeeded them.
Paradoxically, parts of this new order rested upon much older intellectual traditions. Roman law, preserved and developed for centuries within Europe’s universities and ecclesiastical institutions, became one of the principal sources of inspiration for the legal code that Napoleon later promulgated.
Napoleon reconciled himself with the Catholic Church through the Concordat of 1801, but the Church never regained its former position. Religion was tolerated and officially recognized, yet it was simultaneously subordinated to secular authority. In this respect, Napoleon became an important precursor of later forms of the secular state.
The Lutheran princes of Northern Europe had already placed the Church under secular authority during the sixteenth century. Peter the Great later did the same with the Russian Orthodox Church. France, however, faced a fundamentally different situation. There, state authority confronted a universal Church whose centre lay beyond the nation’s borders. During the Revolution, and later under Napoleon, the Catholic Church was therefore subordinated to the French state, while the political influence of the papacy was sharply curtailed.
Pope Pius VII is arrested and deported on Napoleon’s orders.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the conflict between Republic and Church continued to shape French political life. When the Third Republic expanded the public education system in the late nineteenth century, schools became one of the Republic’s principal instruments for forming republican citizens. Education was to be secular. Children were to be educated as republicans rather than as Catholics. In this way, the state assumed functions that had previously belonged to the Church.
Laïcité – The French Model
The decisive turning point came with the Law on the Separation of Churches and the State in 1905. From that point onward, the Catholic Church ceased to be subordinated to the state in the manner established during the Revolution and under Napoleon. At the same time, it also lost its privileged public position. The modern French model of laïcité rests on the principle that religious institutions are institutionally independent while religion itself remains separated from both the state and the public sphere.
Here we encounter a distinction that continues to shape relations between Europe and the United States. In the American tradition, the separation of Church and State has primarily served to protect religion from the state and the state from religion. In the French tradition, separation has more often been understood as a means of protecting the public sphere from religious influence, thereby making liberty and emancipation possible.
French universalism has also possessed a geopolitical dimension. France has often regarded itself as the bearer of universal values rather than merely one nation among others. As a consequence, its relationship with the United States has periodically been marked by ambivalence. France has remained a central member of the Western alliance while repeatedly asserting its independence from American leadership. Charles de Gaulle’s decision in 1966 to withdraw France from NATO’s integrated military command can be understood as one expression of this tradition. Elements of the same outlook remain visible today in debates over European strategic autonomy.
This dual heritage is still reflected within NATO itself. The Alliance continues to recognize both English and French as its two official languages, and summit meetings are consistently presented as both NATO Summits and Sommets de l’OTAN. The continued formal status of French reflects not contemporary linguistic realities so much as the historical role France played in shaping the institutional order of the West.
The universal aspirations of the French model also found considerable resonance beyond France itself. Many states drew inspiration from French republicanism, its centralized administrative state, and the principle of laïcité. One of the most interesting examples is Turkey (Türkiye).
From France to Turkey
When Mustafa Kemal Atatürk founded the Republic of Türkiye after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, he drew many of his institutional models from France rather than from the United States. The Caliphate was abolished. Religion’s political role was curtailed. The state was to be modernized and secularized. Yet, just as in nineteenth-century France, secularization did not mean that the state withdrew from religion. On the contrary, through the establishment of the Directorate of Religious Affairs (Diyanet), the Turkish state acquired extensive influence over religious life. Religion was not to govern the state. Rather, the state would define religion’s place within society.
The state ideal of the Kemalist Republic therefore came to resemble the French republican and secular tradition more closely than the federal and Christian democratic model that, after the Second World War, came to characterize West Germany and, later, much of the European Union. Turkey’s early European orientation was directed largely toward an integration project in which the French republican tradition still played a significant role.
The American and French republics are often presented as two expressions of the same Western tradition of liberty. Yet the narratives through which they legitimize political power differ in important respects. In the United States, the state has ultimately been legitimized through the individual’s pre-existing liberty and through institutions designed to limit governmental power. In France, by contrast, the state has more often been legitimized through its capacity to emancipate citizens from those structures of power thought to obstruct their freedom. For this reason, the French state has historically been assigned a far more active role in shaping both the public sphere and the republican citizen.
Perhaps this distinction becomes particularly visible in our own time. While the United States is increasingly marked by conflicts over the national narrative that long underpinned its political legitimacy, the French Republic continues to base much of its self-understanding on the state as the guardian of the Republic’s shared values.
The difference between the American and French conceptions of the state’s role remains visible in contemporary Europe, not least within the European Union. Even current European debates over freedom of expression, social media, disinformation, and hate speech can be understood, at least in part, against this historical background. Where many Americans instinctively ask how the state should be restrained in order to protect liberty, many Europeans ask what social conditions are necessary for liberty to be realized. Beneath these different approaches lie not merely different legal systems, but different historical traditions.
Different Traditions, Different Narratives
For Scandinavians, the contrast between the American and French models may be less obvious. Historically, the Nordic countries developed a third tradition, in which the Lutheran Church remained closely integrated with the state and where religious symbols and ceremonies gradually came to be understood as part of the national cultural heritage rather than as expressions of religious worship. The recurring debate over the Summer Hymn (Suvivirsi/Sommarpsalmen) in Finnish schools illustrates how arguments rooted in a more continental European understanding of secularism sometimes collide with a Nordic tradition in which Christian elements are often regarded as cultural heritage rather than confessional practice. In the Nordic countries, the church and religion have generally not been viewed as obstacles to Enlightenment and emancipation in the same way as on the European continent. On the contrary, they have often been associated with popular education, national cohesion, and the modernization of the state
From the very beginning, the Western civilization has been shaped by several competing narratives of political legitimacy and by different understandings of freedom itself. The American narrative is largely centred on what English distinguishes as liberty—the individual’s right to define and exercise freedom without undue interference from the state. The French narrative, by contrast, revolves around emancipation, in which the state has been entrusted with the task of liberating citizens from those social and political structures believed to stand in the way of their freedom. Both traditions have contributed to the development of democracy, human rights, and modern Western societies. Yet they offer different answers to the fundamental question of what ultimately makes political power legitimate.