An exploration of the captivatingly convoluted history of the Phrygian Cap
There are few symbols today as quintessentially French as the Phrygian cap, so much so that the organizers of the Paris Olympic and Paralympic Games unhesitatingly opted for Les Phryges as the ideal mascots to convey their uplifting message that sports can revolutionize the world (image 1).
As it happens, their choice was far more fitting for worldwide sporting achievements than they had likely realized, because that famous red headgear now firmly entrenched in the French psyche is a subtle combination of two very different historical symbols—neither of which, intriguingly, have anything to do with France at all.
The first concept, and the one most frequently associated with the hat throughout history, is that of liberty.
In ancient Rome, the freeing of a slave officially occurred in a ceremony in which the former slave put on a triangular cap, called a pileus, and was touched by a rod.
Eventually, the cap became both less triangular and a more general metaphorical symbol of liberty. Brutus featured it in his newly-minted coin right after the assassination of Julius Caesar in an attempt to portray himself as the restorer of republican liberties (image 2), a notion which periodically rippled down the ages, such as the 1552 commemorative medal of France’s Henry II that explicitly portrays his 1552 military victory over Charles V as the actions of a liberator (image 3).
By the time the American Revolution was brewing, the “liberty cap” had become a common propaganda tool, from its prominent display on Paul Revere’s Sons of Liberty bowl (image 4) to William Hogarth’s celebrated engraving of John Wilkes (image 5).
After the Americans had firmly established their independence, they were first keen to use it to commemorate their revolutionary accomplishments, as can be seen from various preliminary designs for the Great Seal (images 6 and 7), as well as a 1783 commemorative medal Libertas Americana that Benjamin Franklin commissioned from the French artist Augustin Dupré (image 8).
But eventually the notion of placing such emphasis on a symbol that had its origins in freed slaves became too problematic for their new republic, a victim of the ongoing compromises involved in producing a Constitution that would encompass both the North and the slave-owning South who were terrified of how the hat might be used in precisely the way that abolitionist Samuel Jennings was explicitly encouraging (image 9).
Which is roughly when, finally, the liberty hat made its appearance across the Atlantic in France—with a twist. Because the French chose their symbol of the liberty bonnet to be one long associated with people from faraway eastern lands: initially the Phrygian region in Anatolia, before generally becoming extended to anyone from Asia Minor, as witnessed by Jacques Louis David’s 1788 painting of Paris and Helen, where the exotic Trojan prince Paris is sporting the Phrygian cap (image 10).
A few months later, in that fateful summer of 1789, the same Augustin Dupré that Franklin had relied upon to make Libertas Americana, teamed up with Benjamin-Pierre-Simon Duvivier to make a medal commemorating the establishment of the newly created Mayoralty of Paris, with the hat perched on Liberty’s rod now clearly a Phrygian “eastern” type rather than the more standard conical variety (image 11).
It’s not at all clear why. Some say it was out of a determination to distinguish the French cap from the American version, while others maintain it was more in keeping with the stocking cap then commonly worn by French workmen (image 12), but whatever the reason, it didn’t take long for the Phrygian cap to become the primary visual trope of the French Revolution, featured prominently on the Declaration of the Rights of Man (image 13).
A few decades later, as tends to happen, the French Phrygian cap morphed from a strictly revolutionary symbol to stirring national mythology, vividly reflected in Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People that vividly commemorates the 1830 July Revolution, with its bare-breasted, flag-waving Liberty—later identified as Marianne, the personification of the French Republic—spurring on her people while proudly bedecked with a Phrygian cap (image 14).
All of which brings us to the point two centuries later where boisterous French crowds hosting a famous quadrennial athletic event spontaneously break into passionate renditions of an Italian melody (see HERE) while surrounded on all sides by stylized representations of Turkish hats.
Now that’s a revolution I can most definitely believe in.
(For more background on the Phrygian cap, see Yvonne Korshak’s 1987 article,”The Liberty Cap as a Revolutionary Symbol in America and France”, upon which this piece was largely based.)
Howard Burton, August 12, 2024
Howard is the author of six non-fiction books on various topics and he is the Director of Pandemic Perspectives (2022), Through the Mirror of Chess: A Cultural Exploration (2023), Raphael: A Portrait (2024) and Botticelli’s Primavera (2025) which is the first film in our Renaissance Masterpieces Series.
