Liberty caps and liberty trees

Past & Present, Feb, 1995 by J. David Harden

Among the first voices raised during the inaugural meeting of the French National Convention on 21 September 1792 were those expressing the need to eliminate the symbols of monarchy from the popular imagination. While discussions concerning the fate of the king himself would wait for almost four months, the institution of monarchy received no similar reprieve. The revolutionaries' acute awareness of their own symbolic image was, no doubt, at the base of the Convention's early agenda.(1) Attention focused immediately on the problem of royal representations and images of monarchical power. So it was that the abbe Henri Gregoire demanded: "We must fully reassure the friends of liberty; it is necessary to destroy this word 'king', which is still a talisman whose magical force can serve to stupefy many men. I demand therefore that by a solemn law you consecrate the abolition of royalty".(2) In response, the Convention adopted a new seal for the Republic to replace the official image of the king. The seal's motto, "Archives de la Republique francaise", framed a woman dressed in an antique robe, with fasces in her left hand and "holding, in her right hand, a pike topped with a Phrygian cap, the bonnet of liberty".(3) Medals and coins, made from the molten remains of royal medallions, were struck within days. With the adoption of the seal, the liberty bonnet had been officially consecrated as a symbol of the Republic. The persona ficta of the king began to give way to the images of a new political order. But why the Phrygian cap? Along what paths did the head-dress of an Asiatic cult travel from classical antiquity to arrive in Revolutionary Paris atop the pike as the bonnet de la liberte?

The liberty bonnet was neither monogamous in its relationship with the pike nor always faithful to Lady Liberty. Certainly the cap was seen on other heads; the widely circulated images of Louis XVI wearing the bonnet rouge of the sansculotte is a well-known example. The cap appeared atop trees as well, a requisite adornment for the arbres de la liberte. Maypoles, too, wore the bonnet. Commenting on the pole and cap at the centre of the first anniversary celebration of the fall of the Bastille, Ernst Gombrich observed: "clearly, we here have the fusion between the cap on the pole and the tradition of erecting Trees of Liberty . . . Here, the classical symbolism mingles, of course, with another old tradition, that of the Maypole".(4) Gombrich is right to link maypoles, the liberty cap and the arbres de la liberte, but the transformation from the popular pole to the revolutionary tree is, of course, not so simple.

Independently, Mona Ozouf has suggested a similar relationship between the liberty tree and the peasant mais. In a brilliant and sophisticated study of the festivals of the French Revolution, Ozouf has described a specific transformation from the insurrectional maypoles planted in Quercy (Lot) and Perigord (Dordogne) in the winter of 1790 to the "codified, not to say sclerotic" arbre de la liberte.(5) In Ozouf's analysis, a core of folkloric tradition supported the arbre de la liberte, but the pedagogical manipulations of a political elite ultimately shaped its form.(6) Even if we agree with this conclusion, two problems remain. The first is related to that "folkloric tradition". How would that pole have communicated insurrection to the peasants? Ozouf herself asks the question, "In light of what tradition could the peasants interpret that signal so rapidly?", and concludes, a bit too quickly, as we will see, "Folk scholars say nothing about a tree that might have been a signal of rebellion or riot".(7)

The second issue concerns the association between the liberty tree and the liberty bonnet. I can propose no solution to the most immediate question: why does a tree need a hat? But by widening Ozouf's Francocentric gaze, we can approach a more specific genealogy of these symbols and suggest something about symbolic transmission across geographic distance, the translation of images between social levels and the cultural frameworks that both limit and provide for the production and reception of successful representations. According to the dossier assembled here, the liberty bonnet was resurrected - reclaimed from antiquity - by a learned tradition which began in Italy and the Low Countries, then migrated first to England and then to Colonial America, where it served as a centrepiece in the symbolism of revolution. The bonnet then returned to France in a variety of complementary and coincidental ways, not least a series of events associated with the painter Jacques-Louis David. In Paris, the liberty cap atop the pike became an important icon aimed against the fading tyranny of the ancien regime. In the countryside, when the pole was exchanged for a tree, the new pairing created perhaps the most effective symbol of republican power in the French provinces: the arbre de la liberte.

I

A POPULAR CORE

In rural France, the arbre de la liberte probably owes little of its success as a political symbol to the emblem books, antiquarian writings and neoclassicist art which brought the liberty cap on the pike to Paris. And even less to the propagandists of a revolution in America. It may have been Parisian revolutionaries who imported, planted and pruned the liberty tree, but its symbolic efficacy, its ability to mean anything, depended upon roots in a system of popular beliefs associated with the peasant mai. The mai was usually a tree, painted and decorated, with all but its uppermost branches removed (a pruned tree could itself be seen as a biological as well as a morphological link between poles and trees). That the maypole and its variant forms - masts, poles, trees, even men dressed as trees - function as symbols of communal solidarity is well known and widely studied.(8) But for the rebellions in Quercy and Perigord studied by Mona Ozouf, the evidence from contemporary witnesses provides only indirect clues to the significance of the mais for the peasants who planted them.