Rousseau and French revolutionary tradition: An enigma for republicans

Stemming from Rousseau, a tradition of specifically republican political thought emphasizes that there can be no individual liberty without some kind of equality of material conditions; without such an equality, equal rights would amount to a fallacy or would transform themselves into instruments of oppression. What should we do of such an idea today ? The paper explores several possible answers put forth in order to answer that question by French political philosophers of the XIXth century and it stresses its relevance in the in the intellectual ambit of contemporary liberalism.