The Cocarde: France Folded Into a Rosette

Représentation de la cocarde nationale, décembre 1789. Anonymous engraving published by Imprimerie Prudhomme, with an attached silk cockade. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.27039). CC0 Paris Musées / Musée Carnavalet.

Each Bastille Day, July 14th, between the flags and the military flyovers, an important emblem older than the French flag hides in plain sight: a small pleated ribbon pinned to old military hats called the Cocarde. If you are familiar with our Souliers, you can probably guess why it caught our eye. This is its story.

La cocarde de 1789 portée par les clubs révolutionnaires. Wikimedia commons.

A knot on a soldier's hat

Before the Revolution, a cocarde was a knot of ribbon worn on a military hat, as a way of declaring which army owned your allegiance. The French king's army wore white, while Britain's Hanoverian kings wore black; every crown had its colors.

The Académie française traces the word “coq” to a sixteenth-century coiffe à la coquarde, a cap worn tilted and proud, trimmed with rooster feathers and named for an old word meaning a strutting fool. The first cocardes were the clasps that cocked such a brim up on one side, and the ribbon badge grew from them.

American troops already wore a black cocarde, a habit kept from their old British service. In 1780, Washington's army pinned the white of the French king's army onto that black in honor of the alliance, and French troops answered by adding America's black to their white. Nine years before Paris turned it tricolor, the cocarde was already a token of friendship between France and America.

All of this was the old world's cocarde, a badge of armies and kings. What 1789 did was claim the object and give it a new meaning.


Portrait of John Paul Jones, drawn from life by Jean-Michel Moreau le Jeune, Paris, May 1780, etched by Moreau and completed in engraving by Jean-Baptiste Fosseyeux, 1781.	George Washington, the Virginia Colonel, three-quarter-length painting by Charles Willson Peale, 1772. Courtesy National Archives

The Revolution

By the late 1780s, the French crown was effectively bankrupt, partly from the wars it had funded, including the American one, along with failed harvests, pushing the price of bread beyond the reach of many.

By May 1789, with the crown out of money and options, Louis XVI summoned the Estates-General, an old kingdom-wide assembly of representatives that had not met in over 175 years. Once gathered, its commoner members broke away, declared themselves the National Assembly, and claimed the right to draft a French constitution. Paris, hungry and armed, did the rest.

On July 12, 1789, Paris learned that the king had dismissed the finance minister, Jacques Necker, who was extremely trusted by the public. An enraged crowd gathered at the Palais-Royal, where a young lawyer-turned-journalist, Camille Desmoulins, climbed onto a café table and called the city to arms and to cocardes "by which we may know each other."

Le 12 juillet 1789. Motion de Camille Desmoulins au Palais-Royal, hand-colored etching by Philippe Joseph Maillart, published by Chateigner, 1795-1799. Musée Carnavalet.

The crowd stripped the garden's trees and pinned on the leaves, green, the color of hope. The Revolution would consume Desmoulins in time, as infighting would eventually send him to the guillotine in 1794 for being too lenient toward suspected anti-revolutionaries.

The color green lasted about a day, but unfortunately, it was also the house color of the comte d'Artois, the king's youngest and least popular brother, so it was dropped in favor of Paris's ancient colors: blue and red. Within days, white, the king's color, had slipped in between the blue and red, by an unknown hand. The image was hard to miss: Paris holding the crown between its hands.

On July 17, three days after the Bastille fell, King Louis XVI came to the Hôtel de Ville and pinned the new cocarde to his hat. Legend gives the line to Lafayette, the French general who had fought beside Washington in America and now commanded Paris's new National Guard: "I bring you a cocarde that will go around the world." Or, as the French say, "on raconte", "so the story goes."

1789 engraving of Louis XVI's carriage leaving the Paris Hôtel de Ville on 17 July 1789, escorted through a crowd by soldiers of the Parisian National Guard.

Louis XVI quitte l'Hôtel de Ville escorté de la garde nationale parisienne, 17 juillet 1789, anonymous engraving published by Imprimerie Prudhomme, 1789. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.27861).

Portrait of the Marquis de Lafayette in the blue and gold uniform of a French lieutenant general, holding a map in one hand and a bicorne hat with a tricolor cockade plume in the other, painted by Joseph-Désiré Court in 1834.

Gilbert du Motier, marquis de La Fayette, lieutenant général, oil on canvas by Joseph-Désiré Court, 1834, depicting Lafayette in his 1791 uniform as a lieutenant general of the national army. Château de Versailles (MV 2346). Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Compulsory ribbon

The Revolution took its ribbon seriously. From July 1792, every man living in or traveling through France was required to wear the tricolor cocarde, and any other cocarde was seen as a sign of rebellion that could carry the death penalty. From April 1793, anyone caught in public without one could be arrested and questioned. Cocarde sellers became fixtures of the Paris street.

Revolutionary-era gouache by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur showing two sans-culottes stopping a passerby to enforce the compulsory wearing of the tricolor cockade, while officials check another man's papers.

Obligation du port de la cocarde tricolore, gouache by Jean-Baptiste Lesueur (1749-1826), c. 1792-1794, from his series of Revolutionary gouaches. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (D.9083).

Even fabric turned political. The elegant ribbon-and-silk cocardes of 1789 grew suspiciously aristocratic, while the people's cocarde was made of wool. Paris twice ordered only wool, banning silk ribbon. One deputy was turned away from the Convention (the assembly that governed revolutionary France) over his "aristocrat's cocarde." That same assembly ruled, and repeated in 1793, that a cocarde could be made of anything, so long as it carried the three colors.

Round tricolor cockade of small linen pleats in blue, white and red, gathered at its center, from 1793, held by the Musée de Bretagne in Rennes.

Cocarde révolutionnaire, tricolor cockade in pleated linen, 1793. Musée de Bretagne, Rennes (inv. 891.0011.3). Photo: Jean-Claude Houssin and Alain Amet, Collection Musée de Bretagne.

Hats the cocarde was pinned to:

	Tricorne: Three-cornered hat of the 1700s, worn by soldiers and civilians alike, its brim cocked up on three sides. In its own day it was simply called a cocked hat, and the word tricorne came later. It was the hat of both revolutions, and the one Washington's officers pinned their black-and-white cocardes to.
Aux Trois Ordres, enseigne d'un marchand de cocardes au Palais-Royal, anonymous oil on canvas, 1789-1800. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (EN120).

	Bicorne: A hat with both brim sides folded up. Napoleon made the silhouette famous by wearing his sideways, pointed ear to ear, while his officers wore theirs front to back, so any soldier could find him at a glance through the smoke of the battlefield.
Bonaparte franchissant le Grand-Saint-Bernard, oil on canvas by Jacques-Louis David, 1800-1801. Musée national du château de Malmaison (MM 7149).

	Shako: A tall cylindrical cap with a short visor that replaced the bicorne for soldiers after 1800.
Maréchal des logis de hussards, n°18, lithograph by Eugène Devéria after a drawing by Théodore Géricault completed by Nicolas-Toussaint Charlet, 1824. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.7802).

Bonnet phrygien (Phrygian cap): The people's cap of the Revolution, a soft red hat with its tip curled forward. In antiquity, these types of hats served as a badge of freedom: in Rome, one was placed on the head of an enslaved person on the day of their release. French revolutionaries wore the cap as a physical symbol of liberty. However, they were not the first, as the cap had already crowned the American Revolutionaries, so visibly that French mapmakers even marked America with it. It still tops Liberty's staff on New York's state flag. France adopted the symbol as a national emblem, and the red cap has been known as French ever since.

Bouton à miniature, jeune homme au bonnet phrygien, gouache miniature on ivory under glass, mounted in engraved copper, by an anonymous artist initialed "C.P.". Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (B1637).

By June 1792, a Parisian crowd had Louis XVI himself in the red Phrygian cap with a cocarde pinned to it, toasting the health of the nation. Marianne, the face of the Republic, wears a cap and cocarde together to this day.

Hand-colored 1792 caricature of Louis XVI wearing the red Phrygian cap [raising a glass], from Villeneuve's series of caricatures against the king.

Louis XVI avoit mis le bonnet rouge, il avoit crié vive la nation..., colored aquatint by Maurice Valet de Villeneuve, c. 1792, from the series Caricatures contre Louis XVI. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.13029).

In September 1793, weeks of street fights known as the war of the cocardes pushed the Convention to order women to wear the cocarde as well, on penalty of prison. At the time, women had no vote and no place in political life, so for the women who petitioned for the law, pinning the nation's badge to their bonnet was a way of declaring they belonged to the nation as well.

Carte postale "Alsacienne", printed by Ch. Hiller, Strasbourg, 1918-1944. Musée de la Libération de Paris, musée du Général Leclerc, musée Jean Moulin (2002.1492).

As of 1789, the fashion journals were selling cocardes "à la nation" as luxury objects, priced at up to three times a seamstress's daily wage, adorning satin bonnets and even fine shoes. A pair of women's mules from that very year still survives at the Musée international de la Chaussure in Romans, France, in green fabric trimmed with a red ruffle, each carrying a tricolor cocarde.

Marie Antoinette's own marchande de modes bent to the circle too. Rose Bertin, the merchant Paris nicknamed the queen's Minister of Fashion, ran the celebrated shop Le Grand Mogol and helped lay the foundations of haute couture.

Eighteenth-century engraved portrait of Rose Bertin, Marie-Antoinette's dressmaker and unofficial minister of fashion, after a lost painting by Louis-Roland Trinquesse.

Rose Bertin, engraving by Jean-François Janinet (1752-1814) after the painting by Louis-Roland Trinquesse, before 1790. The original painting, kept in Bertin's family, was destroyed during the First World War. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

By most accounts, Bertin sold tricolor cocardes while she continued dressing the queen under the queen's house arrest. Bertin's one concession to revolutionary fashion was the occasional cocarde. The clothes the queen wore the day she was moved to the Conciergerie, the Paris prison where she spent her final weeks, came from Bertin's shop.

The banquet and the black cocarde

On October 1, 1789, the king's bodyguard gave a banquet at the Versailles opera house for the officers of a newly arrived regiment. Louis XVI, Marie Antoinette and the dauphin, their four-year-old heir, appeared, and the room rose. The Paris papers described the rest as scandal: tricolor cocardes trampled underfoot, black ones pinned on in their place.

1789 engraving of the royal bodyguards' banquet in the opera house at Versailles, uniformed officers at candlelit tables, during which the tricolor cockade was trampled and black cockades were put on.

Fête des gardes du corps... foulant la cocarde nationale, ils arborent la cocarde noire, anonymous engraving published by Imprimerie Prudhomme, 1789, depicting the banquet of 1 October 1789 in the opera house at Versailles. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.27933).

Historians still argue over how much of that evening was real and how much was ink. However, its effects are not argued. Within days, thousands of Parisian women, already furious over the price of bread, marched on Versailles, and when they returned, they brought the royal family with them. A simple rumor about a ribbon pulled one of the world's great monarchies out of its palace.

Nineteenth-century engraving of the market women of Paris setting off from the Place de Grève for Versailles on the morning of 5 October 1789, armed with pikes and muskets behind a banner reading "Du pain", a drummer at their head and the Hôtel de Ville behind them.

Départ des femmes de la Halle pour Versailles, le matin du 5 octobre 1789, engraving by Achille-Désiré Lefèvre after Ary Scheffer, c. 1801-1850. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.27958).

Before the French flag

The tricolor was a cocarde before it was a flag. This little circle was the first revolutionary object to mix the three national colors, and it helped make them popular. But a cocarde only works at arm's length, and a nation also needs its colors legible from a distance, on a mast or above a regiment.

So the flag followed in stages: on October 24, 1790, the navy raised a white ensign with the three colors folded into its corner, and on February 15, 1794, the full tricolore arrived, with blue at the staff. Designed by Jacques-Louis David, painter of the Revolution and later of Napoleon.

Those who would not wear it

Not every hat in France displayed the ribbon. In the villages around Congénies, in Languedoc, a small community of dissenters had worshipped in silence for generations before joining the Society of Friends (the Quakers) in 1788. Quakers swore no oaths, bore no arms, and, famously, honored no one with their hats. On February 10, 1791, their spokesman, Jean de Marsillac, appeared before the National Assembly beside William Rotch, a Nantucket whaling merchant whose Quaker colony had settled at Dunkirk, to ask that Friends be excused from military service and civic oaths. The two men kept their hats on, bearing no cocarde. The deputies heard them courteously, but warned what the townspeople might do to someone with a bare hat. At the time no law had yet required the cocarde.

However, the law soon caught up, and in the summer of 1792, Marsillac was arrested in Paris, "because I had not the National Cockade," as he wrote to Friends in London. He was released only after explaining his conscience to the judges and mayor of Paris. By 1793 the Dunkirk Quakers left France altogether. Today, nearly all the cocardes once worn by the French have vanished together with the hats that bore them. Ironically, a handful of Quaker cocardes remain, preserved in the Library of the Society of Friends in London, quietly tucked into diaries and letters, collected but never worn.

What the three colors of the flag stand for

Ask around today, and you may hear that blue stands for liberty, white for equality, red for fraternity. It is a lovely idea with no documentation. The motto is its own, younger story: carved onto France's public buildings on July 14, 1880, the very first official Bastille Day, nearly a century after the colors were first pinned together. The republic kept the original colors of the revolution, but rewrote the story for a new generation.

Hand-colored Revolutionary etching bearing the motto "Unité, indivisibilité de la République", [describe the emblems in your copy, e.g. a Phrygian cap raised on a pike among tricolor ribbons and oak branches].

Unité, indivisibilité de la République, anonymous hand-colored etching, after 1793, from the series Figures et emblèmes allégoriques. Musée Carnavalet, Histoire de Paris (G.26925).

Fading, then flying

After 1795, the cocarde slowly left civilian hats and transitioned to the army, which at the time meant living on Europe's most recognizable hat. Napoleon wore the tricolor cocarde on his plain black bicorne, and under him, in 1812, the colors settled into the order they keep today, with red at the rim.

One of his bicornes sold at auction in 2023 for 1.9 million euros. Its cocarde, the house said, was pinned on by Napoleon himself, aboard a ship in 1815, as the French coast came into view on his return from Elba.

After Napoleon's fall, the old royal house of the Bourbons returned to the throne, and the tricolor cocarde turned seditious, a ribbon worn at your own risk. The three colors came back for good with the revolution of July 1830, and the king who lost his crown to them was the very same comte d'Artois whose livery had doomed the green cocarde, by then reigning as Charles X. However, this was not France's last revolution; 1848 would unseat another king, but the three colors never left again.

Delacroix's painting of Liberty personified as a woman in a Phrygian cap, holding the tricolor flag aloft and a musket in her other hand as she leads armed revolutionaries over a barricade during the July Revolution of 1830, a boy brandishing pistols beside her.

La Liberté guidant le peuple, oil on canvas by Eugène Delacroix, 1830, first exhibited at the Salon of 1831. Musée du Louvre, Paris. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In 1912, the cocarde learned to fly as France became the first country to order a national insignia painted on its military aircraft, and the mark it chose was the cocarde, blue at the heart. Britain soon answered with the colors reversed. It is still there today on the wings of French state aircraft.

Genuine 1917 colour autochrome of a French Nieuport 23 biplane fighter parked on an airfield in the Haut-Rhin, with the tricolor cockade roundel visible on the fuselage or wings.

Nieuport 23 C.1 fighter, autochrome photograph by Paul Castelnau (1880-1944), Haut-Rhin, France, May 1917. Source: Bibliothèque nationale de France. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

A protected designation

The cocarde is now close to a legal signature. A decree of 1989 reserves cocardes on vehicles for the President, the government, parliamentarians, prefects and a few others. Each July 14, the emblem passes down the Champs-Élysées, on the bicornes of Polytechnique, the engineering school the Revolution itself founded, and the shakos of the Saint-Cyr Military Academy's cadets.

Of the millions of cocardes the Revolution produced, the historian Dominique Godineau counts the survivors in the hundreds. One of them, faded silk, five centimeters across, rests at the Musée de la Révolution française in Vizille. It's strange how a revolution of such magnitude left so few of these small relics. The rosette we recognize

France never lost the habit of folding ribbon into meaning. An officer of the Légion d'honneur still wears a small red silk rosette on the lapel.

And we at Suliers Dulion make a rosette of pleated silk and set it on a shoe, as shoemakers did long before the French Revolution of 1789. The cocarde is another circle of ribbon, with a different story. We know a beautiful rosette when we see one.