PARIS — On freedom and equality, two of three rallying cries of the revolution of 1789, the French and Anglo-Saxon worlds have differed. Each finds both important, at least if equality is defined as equality of opportunity, but disagrees on how they should be balanced.

Liberty unchecked by solidarity does not make a French heart beat faster the way freedom untrammeled lifts the American spirit. Here the state is cherished as protector rather than reviled as predator. It is seen as the balancer of economic opportunity, not the brake on it.

History and geography explain these differences: French borders have not changed much for centuries while an American’s imagination always stands at some new frontier. The Gallic cake, of static size, needs fraternal division while the U.S. cake demands eternal expansion.

So President François Hollande’s proposal for a 75 percent marginal tax rate on annual incomes over €1 million ($1.2 million) is really no surprise. It is just the latest example of the recurrent Gallic itch to deliver equality by decree and somehow divide the cake in a way that makes the world more just.

Like any fiscal measure that offends common sense, it won’t work. The people targeted will vote with their feet. But on the larger question of freedom, and who has more of it, the time has come for the Anglo-Saxon world (as the French insist on calling it) to shake off the smug assumption — comforted by Hollande’s confiscatory idea — that it enjoys a clear advantage.

Conventional measures of freedom have become inadequate. By those measures the world has been growing freer. Freedom House, the Washington-based human-rights organization, reckons 60 percent of the world’s nations are free, compared with 41 percent in 1989 [pdf]. Of the world population of almost 7 billion in 2011, Freedom House listed 3 billion, or 43 percent, as free, compared with 1.3 billion, or 25 percent, 20 years earlier.

The victories over repressive societies captured by these statistics are important. So why do we often feel less free — more crimped, more watched, more cautious, more fearful, more corralled?

The answer is that the balance between personal freedom and government oversight has gotten seriously skewed throughout the West, and especially the Anglo-Saxon West, over the past decade. Sometimes post-9/11 security is invoked, sometimes health, always safety. The temptation to monitor people’s lives often proves irresistible because the technology now exists to do so. Fear is cultivated to justify technological intrusion and ubiquitous cameras.

But safety should not be paramount; it is not a supreme value; it should not be the altar at which freedom is sacrificed. Just because more and more tools exist to control people does not mean authorities should use them, and just because accidents happen does not mean life should be lived as if they are always imminent.

If I had to pinpoint the moment when a murmur about freedom lost became an insistent clamor I’d say it occurred during the recent rewiring of The New York Times London bureau to install a state-of-the-art telecommunications system. The job involved taking up part of the floor with the result that a labyrinth of cables was exposed.

The first time a technician from the company doing the work warned me about tripping on the cables, I tried to give the appearance of listening. The second time he used the word “danger,” I grew impatient. By the fifth warning of terrible injury the former war correspondent in me lost it. London is now a city where there are signs warning of low branches and talk of padding lamp posts because of the possibility people absorbed in their electronic devices may walk into them.

The Olympics-hosting nation of “Mind the Gap” — the famous admonition on the London tube to watch the space between the train and the platform — has become the country of “Mind the very air you breathe.”

Children at various British schools have been told in recent years to wear goggles when using certain glues, avoid playing with empty egg boxes because of possible salmonella poisoning, wear a helmet when walking under horse chestnut trees, and desist from three-legged races because they are too dangerous.

In the United States, the security mantra and litigiousness and edicts in the name of health (any American should be able to buy a sugary sodas of any size if that is his or her wish) are having a similar stifling effect.

This is not the spirit that took Anglo-Saxon forces into a hail of fire and onto the Normandy beaches — to free the French, it will be recalled.

That liberation left France with complexes that endured for decades. I won’t get into them except to say that French unease with the word “freedom” was probably reinforced by the shame it now recalled.

But France is now freer in one important regard than its Anglo-Saxon cousins. A deep Gallic suspicion of technology and anonymous efficiency — allied to a deep respect for community — has curtailed the imprisonment of modernity. This is an incarceration that fences the soul more than any confiscatory tax rate.