Abstract – Does the word and concept of fraternité play a role of parent pauvre in the lexicon of the Revolution, as Mona Ozouf states and as the revolutionary his¬toriography has unanimously and for a long time asserted? In the light of the new potentialities of research, which the digitalization of the sources has made available, and of the tools of the computational linguistics involved, the answer has to be re¬calibrated: partly yes and partly no. The number of occurrences is rather small, not only as compared to the other two words of the devise républicaine («liberté, égalité, fraternité»), but also as compared to most of the words with a high socio-political content of the period of the French Revolution. Small, but not irrelevant. The inter-rogation of the Archives parlementaires by PhiloLogic4 (PhiloLogic4 Databases) shows 59429 occurrences of «liberté», 13508 occurrences of «égalité» and 3243 occurrences of «fraternité». This essay – on the basis of the lexicological and lexicometrical evi¬dences reconstructed in the different digital corpora – examines the polysemy of the word fraternité in the lexicon of the Revolution, its linguistic and conceptual difficul¬ties in entering the public revolutionary argument and its gradual shrinking from an expansive dimension to an identity one.
