History of mankind has been marked with several moments of the paradigm shift that has changed the course of our existence and intellectual conjecture of Homo Sapiens. The French Revolution was one such among several transitory pages of the political history of human beings.
The French upheaval was successful to the extent that even in the modern contemporary world its reverberations can be heard. Not a single political system in the third world era is left untouched by the echoes of Révolution française and, the Indian political superstructure, based on a sound constitutional philosophy doesn't remain an exception.
In this article, I'll be discussing with the major ideas of the French Revolution and their influence in the making of the Indian Constitutional regime.
Fundamental Ideas of the French Revolution
"If they can't afford bread, let them eat cakes"
- Marie Antionette
To understand the major takeaways of the French revolution, let's first try to fathom into the causes of the revolution, which loomed large in the future shaping of public conscience across the globe.
Naturally, this radical popular revolution was the result of discontent among the people of France during the regime of Louis XVI. However, popular discontent was only an extemporary reason for this major regime-change in France.
Other reasons were the age-long class divide in French society and discrimination with the denizens of the third-estate.
The dawn of the post-revolution era came with the popular ideas of Liberty! Equality! Fraternity! Other major influential ideas born in the wake of the French Revolution were of Popular Sovereignty, Natural Rights and Constitutionalism.
Now, let's discuss the impact of these Fundamental Ideas upon the Indian Society and Constitution.
Liberty!
When the Preamble of the Indian Constitution claims that The People of India ought to secure Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity for all its citizens, it is not a mere proclamation. These three concepts, which are often considered as fundamental rights also, are deeply rooted in the Indian constitutional scheme.
If we see through the backdrop of the French Revolution, Liberty essentially was synonymous with emancipation from any kind of torture or oppression by the state or the ruler. At the same time, if we look into Indian Constitutional philosophy, the preamble grants Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship.
If juxtaposed on a similar kind of footing, we may infer that both the ideas are in consonance with each other, and somehow similar. By granting a Liberty of thought, expression, belief, faith, and worship, the Indian Constitution imposes a positive duty on the state which essentially guarantees freedom from oppression by the state.
In the present Indian backdrop, Liberty implies for, from the rudimentary mentality and social practices and from the oppression of the state. It must be noted that these two notions represent two phases of post-independence Indian society. These two phases can be classified as the pre-emergency era and post-emergency era. The rationale behind this classification lies in the fact that before the imposition of National Emergency in the year 1975, the Constitutional philosophy of India emphasized greatly upon liberty from the rudimentary mentality and dogmatic social practices. The major challenge confronting our constitution framers was to accommodate the social disparity among different classes of society, like between upper-caste & lower-caste or literate and illiterate people into a single legal document. That's why, just after the independence, the focus of the organs of the state remained convergent to the social issue like child marriage, sati practices or widow remarriage.
And, to ensure emancipation from clutches of these evils, various provisions were included in the Constitution of India, like the Article 15 and Article 16 of part III, which ensures prohibition of discriminatory, casteist and untouchability practices.
The second phase which totally redefined the connotations of liberty in India dawned during the infamous Emergency period. A curious look at the socio-political backdrop of India during the 1970s would make us understand the argument behind this transition. The state started to interfere with the freedom of expression and thought of the hoi polloi. There were cases when people from particular sects were tortured like mass sterilization of Muslim men and several political activists, largely those from the anti-establishment bunch were locked up behind the bars.
Dissenting the government was an unannounced moral crime during those days.
Pertaining to such state of affairs, the judiciary took up its role of balancing the unethical and immoral acts of the legislature and the executive and thus, the post-emergency jurisprudence of Indian Courts more or less is now based upon the idea of Liberty from the oppression of the state. The cases like ADM Jabalpur vs Shivakant Shukla, Maneka Gandhi vs UOI, Bijoe Emmanuel vs the State of Kerala and Navtej Singh Johar vs UOI, famously known as the LGBTQ+ case, reflects the same school of thought.
However, these two notions are not strictly cleaved across these two phases. Rather, they always co-existed with one philosophy being dominant and the other one being dormant.
Thus, right from the 1950s to the present day, the French thesis of liberty has always had a say in the synthesis of the Indian consciousness of liberty.
Equality!
"Equality is not a concept. It's not something we should be striving for. It's a necessity."
- Joss Whedon
As rightly asseverated by comic writer and film director Joss Whedon, equality indeed is a necessity in a society where human beings want to have a life with dignity. According to the Oxford dictionary, equality corresponds to the state of being equal, especially in status, rights or opportunities.
So, in the backdrop of the French Revolution, this equality was sought regarding political participation & the taxation process.
Those were the days when a neo-third-estate class was emerging in the form of the bourgeoisie population which was more aware and conscious about their rights & privileges. Thus, they wanted equality in the social order in respect of voting rights and taxation burden. The post-revolution period saw the shaping of public belief towards a system of equality which was to be purely based upon meritocracy and abilities.
However, the constitutional notion of equality in India doesn't reflect the same idea, rather it is based on neo-socialist lines i.e. it ensures equality among equals.
Nevertheless, the evolution of the idea of equality in India somehow can be traced back to the French philosophy of equality. Back in the pre-independence era, Indian society was fractioned into social classes just like the estate system in France. These social classes or the castes were a kind of ascribed status that an individual was born with.
This whole caste system became the reason for the advent of dogmatic and discriminatory practices against some classes that were considered as Dalits or lower castes.
Just like the post-revolution period in France saw doing away with privileges, in India, such a phase came after attainment of the independence and enactment of the constitution. In the making of the Indian constitution, equality was one of the foremost ideas which sculpted the constitutional philosophy of India. In other words, we can also say that equality was among one of those noble ideas that inspired the making of our constitution.
Now let's discuss those constitutional provisions which guarantee & safeguards the notion of equality for the Indian denizens.
The first provision which gets the seal on the philosophy of equality is Article 14 of Part III. This constitutional provision guarantees to every person the right to equality before law & equal protection of the law, as it reads.
When this provision was tabled before the constitution framers, it was not a discrete draft rather it included the philosophy which was later enshrined in the form of Article 20 & 21. The initial draft didn't even had the equality before law part of the Article.
It's this provision, which gave birth to the Article 20 & Article 21 and thus forms the Golden Triangle of Indian Constitutional apparatus.
Ensuring and pursuing equality in the Land of Hierarchy, as Marc Galanter, an American jurist has described India, was something arduous to be embraced by the people of this nation.
Originally, during the French Revolution, the revolutionaries sought to achieve the goal of fraternite along with Liberte & Egalite, as they believed that liberty without fraternity would grant too much unlimited rights to pursue individual longings. On the other hand, equality without fraternity is something unachievable and would be barbaric, as suggested by Ms. Besant.
Many visual sources from the late 1780s and early 1790s suggest that Fraternity was a central theme in realizing the objectives of the revolution.
The idea of fraternity was synthesized out of the social divisions and political discrimination prevalent in French society, prior to the uprising. The revolutionary thinkers believed that the distrust, social anarchy, and absolutism can only be kept a tight rein upon by means of achieving fraternity among the citizens of the estates.
When India got her tricolor unfurled on the Red Fort in the year 1947, one of the major challenges awaiting its tryst with Hindoostan was of unity & solidarity. Fraternity, in newly independent India, was need of the hour as without achieving unity, solidarity and a sense of brotherhood among the denizens of the nation, the goals of equality couldn't have been achieved and in a broader sense, is yet to be achieved.
For Ambedkar, Fraternity was something that would realize the dreams of having an India without differences along the casteist lines and on the basis of religion.
For the people of the constituent assembly and for the constitution by large, fraternity is indispensable while venturing to the paths of assuring the dignity of the individual & unity and integrity of the nation.
Now, let's understand, what does the idea of fraternity entails in a society like India.
The idea of fraternity includes the notions of social empathy, solidarity & unity in diversity.
Social empathy, or beginning to understand how others do feel is an essential part of fraternity as we know it. And, what does social empathy connotes?
Empathy, especially in the Indian context, implies understanding the sentiments and beliefs of the people from community, caste, class, religion, gender other than yours. And, the moment you start feeling compassionate about others, the objective of realizing the feeling of fraternity across the differences and classes is achieved.
The next baby step after social empathy is nurturing a sentiment of solidarity. Solidarity essentially means a sense of likemindedness or unanimity among the people, which consequently leads to the curbing of various social contrasts prevalent in our society, and would ensure a greater whole of equality among denizens.
When all is said & done, a nascent sense of unity in diversity would effervesce across the units of the social interaction, as described by the famous sociologist Erving Goffman.
Now, let's embark on our rove to understand the judicial apparatus and its confrontation with fraternity in India.
The very first encounter the Indian Judiciary faced with fraternity was in the case of Indira Sawhney vs Union of India, famously remembered as the Mandal Commission case. The question raised out of this case was related to the constitutional validity of the recommendation of reservation by the Mandal Commission in the early 1990s.
Fraternity, which was & is seldom used by the apex court in its ratio decidendi, was used to defend the practice of compensatory discrimination or reservation. The apex court used the notion of fraternity to justify the practices of reservation and established that by means of reservation, we actually are progressing towards achieving fraternity, which in a larger sense would ensure equality among the citizens of India.
Another independent argument, which the Supreme court used in its 1992 judgment scrutinized the relation between equality and fraternity to the extent that, in a society where inequality and animosity persists, equality can't be achieved. Also, they feared that this policy of reservation may also pose a danger to the fraternity among the Indian hoi polloi.
Thus, concluding to the arguments presented above, we must admit that fraternity doesn't exist as a mere proclamation in the preamble of the Indian constitution, rather forms an indispensable part of the Indian way of living in a constitutional reign evolving itself since last 70 odd years.
The whole idea indeed was an aspiration of the constitution framers but, like the other constitutional democracies across the globe, it traces back its origin to the French revolution and thus, had its echoes heard in the making of the Indian Constitution.
So, in the backdrop of the French Revolution, this equality was sought regarding political participation & the taxation process.
Those were the days when a neo-third-estate class was emerging in the form of the bourgeoisie population which was more aware and conscious about their rights & privileges. Thus, they wanted equality in the social order in respect of voting rights and taxation burden. The post-revolution period saw the shaping of public belief towards a system of equality which was to be purely based upon meritocracy and abilities.
However, the constitutional notion of equality in India doesn't reflect the same idea, rather it is based on neo-socialist lines i.e. it ensures equality among equals.
Nevertheless, the evolution of the idea of equality in India somehow can be traced back to the French philosophy of equality. Back in the pre-independence era, Indian society was fractioned into social classes just like the estate system in France. These social classes or the castes were a kind of ascribed status that an individual was born with.
This whole caste system became the reason for the advent of dogmatic and discriminatory practices against some classes that were considered as Dalits or lower castes.
Just like the post-revolution period in France saw doing away with privileges, in India, such a phase came after attainment of the independence and enactment of the constitution. In the making of the Indian constitution, equality was one of the foremost ideas which sculpted the constitutional philosophy of India. In other words, we can also say that equality was among one of those noble ideas that inspired the making of our constitution.
Now let's discuss those constitutional provisions which guarantee & safeguards the notion of equality for the Indian denizens.
The first provision which gets the seal on the philosophy of equality is Article 14 of Part III. This constitutional provision guarantees to every person the right to equality before law & equal protection of the law, as it reads.
When this provision was tabled before the constitution framers, it was not a discrete draft rather it included the philosophy which was later enshrined in the form of Article 20 & 21. The initial draft didn't even had the equality before law part of the Article.
It's this provision, which gave birth to the Article 20 & Article 21 and thus forms the Golden Triangle of Indian Constitutional apparatus.
Ensuring and pursuing equality in the Land of Hierarchy, as Marc Galanter, an American jurist has described India, was something arduous to be embraced by the people of this nation.
To guarantee equality to all its citizens especially in a land which is not only hierarchical along the lines of caste but also along the lines of gender, income, religion, geography, etc, was something brave which our constitution-makers dared with.
However, equality, among other constitutional ideas remains something that is still to be achieved in totality and, we still need to look out for answers to the questions posed by B.R. Ambedkar in the constituent assembly that, "How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social & economic life and, if we continue to do so, we will be putting our political democracy into peril."
However, equality, among other constitutional ideas remains something that is still to be achieved in totality and, we still need to look out for answers to the questions posed by B.R. Ambedkar in the constituent assembly that, "How long shall we continue to deny equality in our social & economic life and, if we continue to do so, we will be putting our political democracy into peril."
Fraternity!
Fraternity, as an idea of the French Revolution, remains most vague and least talked about by the judicial apparatus in the country. However, this doesn't unsettle the relevance of Fraternity as a constitutional mandate in India.
Originally, during the French Revolution, the revolutionaries sought to achieve the goal of fraternite along with Liberte & Egalite, as they believed that liberty without fraternity would grant too much unlimited rights to pursue individual longings. On the other hand, equality without fraternity is something unachievable and would be barbaric, as suggested by Ms. Besant.
Many visual sources from the late 1780s and early 1790s suggest that Fraternity was a central theme in realizing the objectives of the revolution.
When India got her tricolor unfurled on the Red Fort in the year 1947, one of the major challenges awaiting its tryst with Hindoostan was of unity & solidarity. Fraternity, in newly independent India, was need of the hour as without achieving unity, solidarity and a sense of brotherhood among the denizens of the nation, the goals of equality couldn't have been achieved and in a broader sense, is yet to be achieved.
For Ambedkar, Fraternity was something that would realize the dreams of having an India without differences along the casteist lines and on the basis of religion.
For the people of the constituent assembly and for the constitution by large, fraternity is indispensable while venturing to the paths of assuring the dignity of the individual & unity and integrity of the nation.
Now, let's understand, what does the idea of fraternity entails in a society like India.
The idea of fraternity includes the notions of social empathy, solidarity & unity in diversity.
Social empathy, or beginning to understand how others do feel is an essential part of fraternity as we know it. And, what does social empathy connotes?
Empathy, especially in the Indian context, implies understanding the sentiments and beliefs of the people from community, caste, class, religion, gender other than yours. And, the moment you start feeling compassionate about others, the objective of realizing the feeling of fraternity across the differences and classes is achieved.
The next baby step after social empathy is nurturing a sentiment of solidarity. Solidarity essentially means a sense of likemindedness or unanimity among the people, which consequently leads to the curbing of various social contrasts prevalent in our society, and would ensure a greater whole of equality among denizens.
When all is said & done, a nascent sense of unity in diversity would effervesce across the units of the social interaction, as described by the famous sociologist Erving Goffman.
Now, let's embark on our rove to understand the judicial apparatus and its confrontation with fraternity in India.
The very first encounter the Indian Judiciary faced with fraternity was in the case of Indira Sawhney vs Union of India, famously remembered as the Mandal Commission case. The question raised out of this case was related to the constitutional validity of the recommendation of reservation by the Mandal Commission in the early 1990s.
Fraternity, which was & is seldom used by the apex court in its ratio decidendi, was used to defend the practice of compensatory discrimination or reservation. The apex court used the notion of fraternity to justify the practices of reservation and established that by means of reservation, we actually are progressing towards achieving fraternity, which in a larger sense would ensure equality among the citizens of India.
Another independent argument, which the Supreme court used in its 1992 judgment scrutinized the relation between equality and fraternity to the extent that, in a society where inequality and animosity persists, equality can't be achieved. Also, they feared that this policy of reservation may also pose a danger to the fraternity among the Indian hoi polloi.
Thus, concluding to the arguments presented above, we must admit that fraternity doesn't exist as a mere proclamation in the preamble of the Indian constitution, rather forms an indispensable part of the Indian way of living in a constitutional reign evolving itself since last 70 odd years.
The whole idea indeed was an aspiration of the constitution framers but, like the other constitutional democracies across the globe, it traces back its origin to the French revolution and thus, had its echoes heard in the making of the Indian Constitution.
Popular Sovereignty
In December 1933, 19 American nation-states met and signed a treaty on what later came to be known as Montevideo convention on rights & duties of states. So, you must be pondering upon how this convention is related to sovereignty?
This convention sets out the definition of the states and acts as a yardstick for deciding if a population and a mere piece of land can be called a state, and how self-governance and sovereignty are two essentials of a state.
But here, we would not discuss the notion of sovereignty with a state perspective, rather with an individualistic approach and, how this approach has evolved significantly since the French revolution.
Until the renaissance happened in the west, the ruling people and the general masses too, used to believe that the kings & the rulers derive their authority and legitimacy from a divine being. This was what Austin described as the Theory of Divine Origin.
Nevertheless, with the dawn of the renaissance era, this whole conjecture was repudiated as a result of the political and social awakening of the multitude.
Consequently, as a result of the process of thesis and antithesis, the synthesis incepted in the form of the theory of popular sovereignty.
The political and sociological academicians trace back the origins of this theory to the works of philosophers like John Locke & Rousseau in the Social Contract theory.
A consequence of this idea of popular sovereignty is that if the government and the rulers fail to meet the needs of people or abuses the authority, the general masses have a right to replace and reject that ruler or government.
This was the corollary upon which the radicals justified the whole French Revolution. According to them, rejecting the kingship and its rule and, its replacement by the Jacobins was in the exercise of the above-mentioned right.
Today, most of the democracies and all of the republican democracies derive their structure & function from this specific notion.
India, as a republican democracy, does also legitimizes its features like representative democracy, universal adult franchise and the concept of free & fair elections from this hypothesis of popular sovereignty.
However, another school of thought claims that, in the Indian constitutional framework, there exists no place for popular sovereignty at all. This argument is based on the assumption that constitutionalism and popular sovereignty are two contrasting ideas.
This also acknowledges the belief that in a country that stands firmly on the idea of constitutionalism which ensures law & order and avoids any kind of populism, there is no place for popular sovereignty.
Nonetheless, in my submission, I would reckon that the current constitutional framework in India lucidly accommodates the notion of popular democracy as is gives certain rights to the people to elect the government and indirectly control the legislative branch of the state.
Nonetheless, in my submission, I would reckon that the current constitutional framework in India lucidly accommodates the notion of popular democracy as is gives certain rights to the people to elect the government and indirectly control the legislative branch of the state.
Thus, the idea of popular democracy still is pertinent in India and had a significant say in the making of the basic structure of the Indian constitutional framework upon which the Indian Constitution stands adamantine.
Natural Rights
Intellectual enlightenment during the 16th & 17th centuries in western Europe was one of those Olympic events, that became asymptote in the transition in the history of Homo Sapiens.
The concept of Natural rights or Inalienable rights also emerged during the days of the dawn of the intellectual awakening of the modern man.
When John Locke, in his work Treatise on Government wrote about the three natural rights of human beings, even he must not have thought that these natural rights would make the cornerstone of most of the constitutions in the Third World era.
According to John Locke, the following were the three natural rights:
- Life
- Liberty
- Property
Achieving all these rights was something which motivated the bourgeoisie class, during the French revolution to embark upon a reign-shift. They were keen on protecting these natural rights of the third estate.
In India, longingness for the natural rights to all the subjects can be traced back to colonial times. During the pre-independence era, all the three above mentioned rights were not available to the general masses in India.
Thus, when the constituent assembly embarked upon the venture of framing the constitution book, they kept special care for the induction of these rights into the basic structure of the constitution.
These rights were safeguarded as the provisions of the constitution as Article 19, 21 and 31 of part III.
Articles 19 and 21 ensured the realization of the right to life and liberty, while Article 31, ensuring the right to property was amended and abolished in the year 1978 in light of pursuing the welfare policies by the government of India.
Though the right to property was abolished back in the late 1970s, the significance of the natural rights endorsed during the Enlightenment and French revolution remains intact in the Indian context and had a consequential say in the making of the Indian constitution.
Conclusion
Many historians often attribute the emergence of the idea of constitutionalism to the Magna Carta of 1215. However, in my opinion, this is a result of plain ignorance of the contribution of the French Revolution in evolving the idea of constitutionalism and rights.
These french ideas, through the channels of swadeshi Rennaissance of Bengal, influenced the early Indian intelligentsia. These connotations essentially shaped the struggle for independence and making of the constitution.
All the notions of Indian constitutionalism, be it liberty, equality, fraternity, sovereignty, constitutionalism or secularism, somehow traces back their origin to the French revolution.
Like most of the post-French revolution constitutions, the Indian constitution was greatly shaped by these ideas.
The uniqueness of the constitution of the world's largest democracy lies in the fact that while being influenced by so many foreign historical events and colonial documents, it somehow reflects an indigenous character that keeps the wheel moving towards the realization of the constitutional objectives and goals.
Dhruv Vatsyayan
B.A.LL.B.(Hons), 2019-2024
Faculty of Law
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
Mobile- (+91)7320863840
Email- dhruv11vats@gmail.com
B.A.LL.B.(Hons), 2019-2024
Faculty of Law
Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi
Mobile- (+91)7320863840
Email- dhruv11vats@gmail.com
References
- https://alphahistory.com/frenchrevolution/revolutionary-ideas/#Fraternity
- https://www.history.com/topics/france/french-revolution
- https://ijcal.in/popular-sovereignty-constitutionalism-the-indian-constitution/
- Basu, D.D, Introduction to the Indian Constitution, Lexis Nexis
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