Flag waving

Natural History, Dec, 2001 by Michel Pastoureau

In the Western world, the wearing of stripes originally constituted a handicap or liability. Medieval society, literature, and iconography endow a great number of individuals--real or imaginary--with striped clothing. In various ways they are all outcasts and reprobates: ranging from the heretic to the clown, the gamut includes not only the leper, the hangman, and the prostitute but also the disloyal knight of the Round Table, the madman of the Book of Psalms, and the character of Judas. They all disturb the established order; they all have more or less to do with the devil.

At the end of the Middle Ages, stripes make a very rapid transition from the diabolic to the domestic (though perhaps retaining their old connotation of impurity) and gradually be come the sign of a servile condition or subordinate function, such as that of a lord's household staff. Parallel to the development of the domestic stripe is the evolution of another category--the aristocratic stripe, sometimes sophisticated, always in good taste. This stripe triumphs during the second half of the eighteenth century, the first period of romanticism and revolution.

In the late 1770s a rage for stripes is found among the Americanophiles in France and in other countries hostile to England. The American Revolution was an offshoot of the Enlightenment; the flag, with the thirteen red and white stripes for the thirteen American colonies rebelling against the British crown, appears as the image of Liberty and the symbol of new ideas. The stripe quickly acquires an ideological and political status: wearing it, adorning oneself with it, displaying it at home or outside can proclaim one's Anglophobia or one's support of the movement for freedom. But it also becomes, quite clearly, a fashion trend.

Everywhere on the continent, there is an unfurling of stripes. Dresses, jackets, jerkins, coats, frock coats, waistcoats, petticoats, blouses, stockings, pants, trousers, aprons, ribbons, scarves: as much in court as in villages, most pieces of clothing are, or can be, striped. The aristocratic stripe and the peasant stripe meet up with each other and sometimes merge, as in the country and shepherd scenes of which painters and engravers have left so many examples. This rage for stripes lasts more than half a century, involving all social classes. Gradually the fashion in stripes extends to fabric for interiors and furniture.

It is difficult to say precisely why the French Revolution made such wide use of stripes and striped surfaces, to the point where they end up in its emblematic repertoire side by side with the fasces, the pike, the tricolor rosette, and the liberty cap. For two centuries, in paintings, engravings, picture books, theater--and later in film, television, and comic strips--all Revolutionary decor is striped decor, and every patriot or sansculotte is a figure wearing striped pants or vest.

Is it going too far to see in the French Revolutionary stripe a vestige of the image of the devil, juggler, or madman, all transgressors against the established order? Is it going too far to establish an a posteriori connection, at once dreamlike and geometric, between the bars of the Bastille, those prisons of the Reign of Terror, and the striped clothing so prized by the men of the French Revolution?

At the end of the eighteenth century, however, the Revolutionary stripe is neither a creation nor a monopoly of the French. Having come from America, it retains--even up to our own times--its American connotation.

Michel Pastoureau is an authority on medieval heraldry and a professor of history at the Sorbonne. He is also the author of Blue: The History of a Color (Princeton University Press, 2001).