The long-established nation of France is officially referred to nowadays as the “French Republic.” Hence, the quite frequent use of the “RF” monogram, as a sort of logo. The republican regime enjoys almost unanimous approval today but it was not always thus. During the nineteenth century, in the wake of the French Revolution, the symbols of the Republic found listed and described briefly as those of the revolutionary and later liberal France as opposed to the France of conservatism and the monarchy. It was during the twentieth century that they became the symbols of an accepted and consensual French Republic, in short the symbols of France.
Only one visual symbol has the official sanction of being endorsed by the constitution: the tricolor flag, blue, white and red, in that order from the flagstaff. Designed in 1789, associated with revolutionary and later imperial France, the tricolor was violently rejected and replaced by a white flag from 1814 to 1830. It was the “July” revolution of 1830 that brought it back and re-established it for good.
The intransigent royalist catholic Right gradually transferred its allegiance for the white flag to the tricolor, while the revolutionary Far Left, which toward the end of the nineteenth century was subversively worshipping the red flag, in its turn rallied round the tricolor (Popular Front period, circa 1935, and then the World War II). Today, the tricolor is unanimously recognized as a symbol of France.
There is a tendency to relativize the importance of the tricolor by putting other flags on almost the same footing; for instance, it is no longer rare to see three flags flying on the front of a town hall, the tricolor in the middle flanked by the (unofficial) flag of the region on one side and the gold-starred blue flag of Europe on the other.
The same sort of process occurred with another official national symbol, the Marseillaise. Created in 1792, the anthem was regarded as revolutionary, and therefore partisan, for almost a century. It was the Third Republic that in 1880 made it the legally recognized national anthem. Then the right-wing opposition rallied to the Marseillaise at the same time as it accepted the tricolor and espoused nationalism. As for the opposition on the Far Left, it accepted the anthem in its turn during the great era of antifascism and the World War II.
Today, the Marseillaise remains an official symbol as far as national and military celebrations are concerned, but its popularity “is no longer what it was” for it has fallen victim to the diffuse pacifism and implicit antinationalism of a society which is groping for other identifiers. Indeed, this is where the parallel with the history of the flag ends: whereas the European flag, as we have said, is well known and already popular, it has no equivalent in music or at least nothing with the same degree of recognition.
The representation of the French Republic by an allegorical figure, a woman, usually wearing a Phrygian cap, is not written into the constitution, but its official status cannot be denied since she is featured on the Seal of State, as well as on coins and stamps, those other symbols of public life and responsibility. Again, it all goes back to the Revolution, which in rejecting the monarchy, its coats of arms and emblematic fleur-de-lys could not help putting something in their place. The Seal of State — the convention at the end of September 1792 decreed — should include a “Liberty figure”. It so happened that for several centuries, the classical treatises on iconology had made the Phrygian cap the main emblem of liberty. With the decision of 1792, this headgear thus became the main emblem of the French Republic and entered French history, never to leave it again. Hence the time when the Republic triumphed and tended to become identified with France, the allegorical figure representing France has worn a Phrygian cap and the cap, in a sense, has been Gallicized. France’s appropriation of the Phrygian cap was sufficiently evident by the end of the nineteenth century to oblige the universal figure representing liberty to find other forms of headgear (the most famous being that of the Statue of Liberty in New York, by the sculptor Bartholdi).
However, throughout the complex history of the nineteenth century there were republicans who thought that the Phrygian cap was too revolutionary and that a legalist and peaceful Republic ought to be represented by a different sort of headgear (laurels for example). It is, however, thanks to this rather brief interlude in our history that Republican symbolism acquired some artistic creations that are still famous and indeed visible today: The first French postage stamp, the “Ceres” in 1849, the seated figure of the Republic with a crown in the form of the sun on the Seal of State, the signs of the notaries, and the head on the Légion d’honneur medal (order for civil or military merit instituted by Napoleon).
A large number of emblems of the French Republic, with or without a cap — but most often with — and officialized on coins and stamps, were produced one after the other. The most famous, because of its originality (full-length figure on a small object), its great wealth of symbolism and — quite simply — because of its charm was the “Sower” (created by O. Roly in 1897).
The representation of the revolutionary and then the moderate “French Republic”, and then France by a woman, has been used for many purposes and in a far greater variety of ways than the state symbols we have mentioned so far: statues in public squares, busts to decorate the interiors of various buildings, freestyle compositions by painters, sculptors or engravers, allegorical characters on the stage or in the street, ornaments for collections and private homes and lastly, and especially, caricatures in the press. All of this is uncontrolled, unofficial — or anti — establishment.
We find the same freedom, outside all statutory requirements, in the use recorded since 1792 of the nickname Marianne for this allegorical figure. Nowadays, use of the symbol of the Republic in the form of a woman with a Phrygian cap and called Marianne is found particularly in municipal institutions (as opposed to national politics) and sometimes lends itself to popular and headline-grabbing stunts that are a pretty far cry from official republican gravitas.
More recently, however, a serene Marianne officially portrayed in the three colors of the French flag was used to produce the mark used for visual identification of the national public service.
Created in 1999, she is now on all the stationery, brochures, forms, posters and information media produced by the ministries, prefectures and embassies.
The same ambiguity surrounded the Cockerel for a long time. The Cockerel, a Christian symbol of vigilance since the New Testament story of the Passion, had long been an integral part of French national culture because the Latin words for cockerel and inhabitant of Gaul (ancient France) are very similar (Gallus, Gallicus). Not to mention its flattering reputation for willingness to fight and bravery: such are the virtues of the Cockerel, virtues reputed to be typical of the French.
In spite of that, raising the Cockerel to the level of an official national symbol has never gone beyond the stage of wishful thinking, although there were attempts during the Revolution, July Monarchy and Third Republic. The Cockerel seems to have been rejected for two reasons: one was that the choice of an animal as a symbol had rather heraldic, i.e. “feudal” connotations and was thus a bad thing; the other was that the Cockerel, being a farmyard animal, could not in any case be placed with any credibility on a par with lions and eagles.
The Cockerel has therefore been reduced to two uses which are not trivial, but are nonetheless not as prominent in terms of the political dignity of the State: it symbolizes French sporting excellence and — occasionally — military valor on some of the memorials to those who died in the Great War. The World War II was fought and won (at least as far as French involvement was concerned) under the sign of the Cross of Lorraine, the emblem chosen by Free France and then by the Resistance to distinguish their flag from the tricolor which had been kept by Vichy. The Cross of Lorraine is therefore used regularly on monuments commemorating the 1940-1945 period, from the Mont Valérien to the humblest and simplest places marking the fighting in the maquis.
But the Fifth Republic did even more for the Cross of Lorraine by raising the office of President to new heights and making its first incumbent General de Gaulle in 1958- 59. It was he who first replaced the Republic portrayed as a woman by the Cross of Lorraine, surrounded by a V for victory, on the medal commemorating his entry into the Elysée Palace. This was actually innovatory on two counts: the significance of the Cross of Lorraine was taken to a higher level and an obligation created for the General’s successors to choose in their turn a personal coat of arms, so to speak.
Finally, can we say that there are symbolic monuments? The Third Republic in 1882 decided that the Tuileries, burned down in 1871, would not be rebuilt and continued to have the State authorities sit in palaces inherited from earlier centuries (Luxembourg, Bourbon Palace, Elysée Palace, etc). Thus, Paris does not offer anything on a par with the huge Capitol building in Washington DC which is the seat of the legislatures, a museum and a symbol of the republic at one and the same time.
The monument which comes closest to being a symbol of the Republic in Paris is thus the Pantheon, built under Louis XV as the Sainte Geneviève Church and secularized/ nationalized in 1791 as the burial place of the “Great Men”. In the nineteenth century, the Pantheon was a real focus for the hostility that the right-wing forces directed at the Republic: it was either returned to the Church — from 1814 to 1830 and again from 1851 to 1885 — or despised because it contained so many nefarious celebrities (Voltaire and Rousseau, Victor Hugo and Emile Zola, Marcelin Berthelot and Jean Jaurès, etc). It would scarcely be any exaggeration to say that by the middle of the 20th century the Pantheon was still only a pantheon for the Left and that the real pantheon for the Right was the Invalides (with Turenne and Vauban, Napoleon and Marshal Foch, etc). However, in the end right-wing France eventually came to accept the Pantheon, just as it had the Republic itself. 1964 was very probably decisive, being the year when General de Gaulle allowed Jean Moulin to be buried in the Pantheon, thereby accepting that the great temple of the Latin Quarter should be recognized as a national monument for both camps and thus as unifying, in principle, of political France as, in their time, the Republic, its flag and its Phrygian cap.
