A propaganda poster from 1793 representing the French First Republic with the slogan ‘Unity and Indivisibility of the Republic. Liberty, Equality, Fraternity or Death,’ together with symbols such as tricolour flags, Phrygian cap and the Gallic rooster.

“The elimination of all social and political inequality” is also a very questionable phrase in place of “the abolition of all class distinctions”. Between one country and another, one province and another and even one locality and another there will always exist a certain inequality in the conditions of life, which it will be possible to reduce to a minimum but never entirely eliminate. Alpine dwellers will always have different conditions of life from those of people living on plains. The idea of socialist society as the realm of equality is a one-sided French idea modelled upon the old “liberty, equality, fraternity” – a concept which was justified as a stage of development in its own time and place but which, like all the one-sided ideas of the earlier socialist schools, should have been overcome by now, for it only produces confusion in people’s heads and more precise modes of presentation of the matter have been found.

Friedrich Engels to August Bebel in Zwickau; London, March 18-28, 1875, Marx Engels, Selected Correspondence, Progress Publishers, Moscow, 1982, 276

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