Justice is the civil name for freedom

Then societies grew. Small groups became villages, cities, empires. Personal reputation was no longer enough. Singing did not reach far enough. Peer control became unstable, exposed to revenge and the spiral of feuds. It was at this moment that impersonal institutions were born. Not as ornaments of civilisation, but as attempts to remove justice from the mood of the moment, the strength of the clan or the wounded memory of relatives. Greek tragedy has recounted this passage better than any legal treatise. In the Oresteia, Aeschylus explains the need to consign private vengeance to public judgement. The Furies do not disappear, but turn into the Eumenides, gods of justice instead of revenge. The city does not deny pain, it sublimates it. It does not erase guilt, but gives it a judged form. It is one of the great founding gestures of political civilisation that separates justice from vengeance.

But every institution is born incomplete, ambiguous. It can protect cooperation or capture it. It can make freedom possible or turn into domination. It can give voice to the voiceless or legitimise the silence imposed by the powerful. The history of justice is also the history of this ambivalence. Thomas Hobbes saw fear as the principle of order. Metus et spes, the fear that founds hope. Men, exposed to violence against each other, surrender pieces of freedom to Leviathan in order to be freed, by the sword, from the war of all against all. It will take the free soul of John Locke to shift the question from fear to trust, from the sword to the limitation of power.

It is a bumpy path, never linear. Each thinker illuminates one section and leaves something else in the shadows. Closer to us, John Rawls teaches us to think about justice from the point of view of the last, the most disadvantaged. Robert Nozick for his part emphasises the moral force of individual rights. Von Hayek reminds us that no mind can possess all the knowledge necessary to design a just society from above. And his is a valuable lesson against any centralist presumption. From here on, however, the question becomes more complicated. What do we owe others when it is fate that distributes talents, starting conditions and vulnerabilities unequally? What goods must remain removed from the logic of the market? And what happens when the social contract only works because it is someone, often weak and invisible, who takes care of the conditions that make it possible? It is on this terrain that contemporary reflection progressively widens its gaze. Justice is now no longer just about the rules of the game, but about the resources with which we enter the field. Not only income and opportunities, but recognition, representation, care, the quality of social relations. To the point of realising that a just society is not simply one in which everyone receives their due share, but one in which no one is forced to live by looking down, living in humiliation or deference.

In this sense, the Liberation did not only mark the end of a regime. It restored justice to its political space. And fascism was not only the denial of political freedoms. It was systematic destruction of the conditions of recognition. It made hierarchy a destiny, violence a public language, obedience a virtue, dissent a guilt, diversity a threat. It reduced citizenship to disciplined membership and established, at root, that not everyone had the same right to be heard, protected, respected, recognised as effective members of the political community.

Injustice, even before being a violation of a norm, is the experience of a wound. Humiliation, exclusion, devaluation, invisibility. It is not just a material interest that is affected, but the relationship a person manages to have with himself. Self-confidence, self-respect, self-esteem. That is why social struggles are never just struggles for more. They are struggles to see one's dignity denied. To be able to say that one's suffering is not private, not imaginary, not individual guilt, but the sign of a wrong inscribed in the way society itself is organised.

How, then, can we not also read the Resistance as a great struggle for recognition? It was not only armed conflict, political choice and national insurrection. It was also the moment when men and women, often very young, refused the place the regime had assigned them. Subjects, cogs, obedient spectators of violence. Not only with weapons, but also with the underground press, strikes, disobedience, the protection offered to the persecuted, they affirmed that dignity is not a concession of power. They testified that freedom is not a prize for those who obey.

It is precisely to remember their contribution that we cannot reduce 25 April to a cult of past courage. Because a memory that does not question the present risks becoming an empty and silent celebration. We must continue to ask ourselves: what remains of that promise today? Where are the new forms of oppression and misrecognition hiding in our formal democracies? Where is it that power continues to be arbitrary? Where is it that proclaimed freedom is, at the same time, betrayed? Where is it that the market claims to measure the value of people and work remains a space of accepted subordination, a free zone of democracy? And poverty turned into guilt, care into a comfortable natural vocation and marginality into inescapable destiny?

A democracy can die even without being formally abolished. It can empty itself from within. It can maintain elections, rules, institutions, and yet lose the ability to make citizens feel part of a common world. It can become a mass of resentful spectators, of lonely individuals, of segregated groups, of workers without a voice, of young people without confidence, of poor people without representation, of citizens who vote but do not feel heard. And when the voice does not find institutions capable of receiving it, the wound becomes anger, resentment, nostalgia for the strong man, a desire for revenge and vengeance. It is here that democracies are again exposed to their oldest temptation, that of trading justice for order, freedom for protection, and conflict for silence.

The feast of 25 April tells us the opposite, reminding us that there is no just order without freedom and that, at the same time, there is no true freedom without justice. Celebrating this feast together also means remembering that freedom is never definitively acquired because justice is never definitively accomplished. Each generation inherits institutions that others have built, but must decide whether to preserve them, empty them out or renew them. The Constitution born from the Liberation is not a monument to the end of history. It is an unfulfilled promise of social, political, economic and civil justice. It is the road that must be travelled so that freedom does not remain the privilege of those who already have a voice and can make it heard, and have an income, education, social networks, and security. Liberation is the commitment to build a society in which no one is forced to ask permission to feel equal to others.

That is why 25 April cannot just be a celebration of the past. It is remembrance of the work we still have to do. It is Liberation every time a humiliated person finds a voice again, every time a formal right becomes a substantial possibility, every time an institution chooses not to crush but to include, every time memory prevents violence from disguising itself as normality, every time someone refuses to turn away from injustice.

Justice is the civil name for freedom. And freedom, when it takes justice seriously, stops being just the right to be at peace alone. It becomes the possibility of living together without domination, without humiliation, without fear. This, perhaps, is the most demanding promise of Liberation. Not only to be free from the vile Nazi-fascist occupation, but the possibility to remain vigilant against all forms, old and new, of domination through which human dignity can still be denied.