Two centuries after 1798 the tensions inherent in the revolutionary slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity, remain unresolved.
For most of these two centuries, liberty has been the dynamic of political development worldwide. The middle classes and then the masses sought the freedom to vote and to choose their governments; peoples worldwide sought freedom from alien rule; and latterly individual freedom and human rights have become the dominant theme of political discourse.
For a period, equality challenged liberty as an alternative goal of society. This challenge began in the 19th century and reached its apogee in the middle of this century when socialism seemed for a moment likely to sweep the board; albeit largely through the dominant military might of one major socialist country rather than through the sheer force and attraction of the idea of equality.
That challenge failed for a combination of reasons. At one level the Soviet military threat did not sit well with the ideal of equality. Although for a brief moment between 1946 and 1948 the combination of these two seemed momentarily irresistible, the internal contradiction between them soon proved fatal to the project.
Eventually the equality challenge failed even in the Soviet Union because the power exercised by the "dictatorship of the proletariat", which was supposed to bring about an equal society there, corrupted those who exercised it. Although I had few illusions about the matter before visiting the Soviet Union as minister for foreign affairs 22 years ago, that truth was brought brutally home to me during my stay there.
Thus an offer of a Russian cigarette by one of our party to our host was met by an indignant rejection: "Those are for the common working people; I smoke only Marlboros". A query by my wife, Joan, to the interpreter's wife about whether she and her husband lived in a flat of the kind we were passing in the car was met by a similar indignant rebuttal: "Those flats are for the common working people".
When Joan asked her if she went often to the Bolshoi Theatre, the answer was in the affirmative: her father had been a member of the Supreme Soviet, so she had the use of a box there.
Whatever the theoretical merits of equality may be, the fact that it is achievable only if enforced by an unchallengeable, and therefore corruptible, political authority proved to be as fatal a flaw as the incapacity of centralised planning to cope with the needs of a consumer society.
The Roman Catholic Church, facing these two most potent heresies, liberalism and socialism/communism throughout the two centuries after the French Revolution, rightly identified the former as posing the most fundamental long-term danger to its value system and to its authority and directed its fire principally towards that target.
It was only for a handful of decades in the middle of this century that it temporarily switched its main attention to communism, principally because not just in the Soviet Union but also - however politically incorrect it may be to say so today - in other countries such as Spain and Mexico in the 1930s and China from the 1950s onwards bishops, priests and nuns were persecuted, and in some case murdered, by forces of the left.
In the long run, however, the individualism fostered by elevating liberty to an unchallenged role has proved a far more subversive force than equality could ever have been. The problem is that throughout this 200-year struggle between liberty and equality, the third member of this famous trio has scarcely been allowed to show its face.
Fraternity - charity in theological terms, or solidarity as we might call it today - has been remarkably absent from the arena of political ideas. Yet fraternity, or solidarity, is perhaps the most crucial of these three concepts.
On the one hand it can offer a useful substitute for unattainable equality, but it also mitigates the harshness of the individualism that liberty so often fosters. Finally it can stand as a barrier against the excesses of extreme nationalism and of its equally evil twin, sectarianism.
In modern society, liberty and the liberalism which is based on this concept are almost always seen as a good thing. Upon it are built the human rights which we all cherish: the right to life, personal liberty and freedom under the law; inviolability of the dwelling; freedom of expression, speech, association and non-association and assembly; the right to privacy; freedom of religious conscience and practice, and so on.
However, there is a great reluctance to face the fact that this concept of liberty also has a downside. At one level, necessary limitations of these rights are only grudgingly admitted and are sometimes strongly challenged: thus in Northern Ireland restrictions on the right to assemble and march on the highway are vigorously contested by the Orange Order.
Even where no public issue is at stake, the press in Britain has been most reluctant to concede individuals' right to privacy when it stands in the way of the freedom of the press to print stories which will sell papers. Moreover, in our State there have been challenges by advocates of a closed shop to the right of workers not to associate in a trade union.
More serious, perhaps, in the long run has been a striking unwillingness to face some of the undesirable consequences of pushing freedom beyond reasonable limits. At one level we have seen how the right of freedom of expression has been abused by pornographers.
More widespread, perhaps, has been the refusal to face the reality of conflicts of rights: one person's right may entail an imposition on someone else. Thus, the right to drive into the city at rush hour imposes a burden of slower movement on all other drivers and, as suggested above, the right to freedom of expression intrudes on the right to privacy.
However, what unbalances society most seriously of all is, I believe, the failure to accept that rights have a corollary in responsibilities. If everyone insists on his or her rights and no one accepts his or her responsibilities - in other words, if liberty is pursued at the expense of fraternity - society can become totally lopsided and unworkable.
Listening to the French long-wave radio stations during the semi-revolutionary events of May 1968 in France, I was greatly struck by the constant repetition by all concerned - revolutionary students, workers' representatives, police and government spokesmen - of the phrase: "Il faut prendre ses responsibilities."
They all interpreted their responsibilities quite differently, but it was interesting that it was responsibilities they all talked most about, not rights. Fraternity, whether in the form of obligations by revolutionaries to each other or, in the case of the police and government, their perceived obligations to society in general, seemed to loom just as large to all of them as abstract rights.
Somehow, I don't detect much fraternity in our urban society today, although I know that in rural areas a sense of mutual obligation survives. Many people now seem preoccupied with rights rather than obligations, even within the family unit, which save in a minority of dysfunctional cases used to offer a model of mutual solidarity.
For example, the scale of marriage breakdown revealed by our census and labour survey statistics does not appear to me to be compatible with the sense of parental obligation to children which was traditionally a feature of our society, and indeed of other societies elsewhere. For a large and apparently growing minority of parents, a belief in their right to pursue what they see as their "right" to personal happiness outside the marital union seems to have replaced the former sense of obligation to spouse and children.
As we reflect on the contribution of the French Revolution to our so ciety, mediated through the United Irishmen, I offer these stray reflections on its famous slogan, Liberty, Equality, Fraternity. I should perhaps add that in the later revolutionary Ireland of 80 years ago, not everyone looked back to the events of the 1790s with enthusiasm or approval.
Thus in the GPO in Easter week 1916 my father had a particular worry. He feared that it might be thought that his presence there had been inspired by the French Revolution, of which he strongly disapproved, but then many of our nationalist revolutionaries were at heart deeply conservative people. Which explains much about the history of our independent State - much that was good, I should add, as well as much that was not.