The Chinese Origins of the Enligthment and the French Revolution

Conceived during the Age of the Enlightenment, born during the Revolution, the motto of the French Republic, "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity", contains three of the most essential, universal values of Modern Civilization that in a way partially originated in Chinese culture. Concretely stated, the establishment of two natural rights, liberty and equality, owes much to the advocacy of Chinese culture by Voltaire and Francois Quesnay, both of them Sinophiles. During the Revolution, the prevalence of the notion of "fraternity"-the only moral obligation that might reconcile the potential conflict between liberty and equality is in fact only possible from the secularization of traditional Christian ethics, which was facilitated by the "Sinophilia," highly fashionable in France during the eighteenth century. A "misunderstanding" of Chinese culture might have occured with the philosophes; however, this "misunderstanding" represents rather a "distillation" or a "revelation" than certain universal values latent in Chinese culture.