Vive la Revolution!

Fleur-de-lis

A stylized lily. In French, fleur means flower, and lis means lily.

It was long the symbol of the French monarchy.

Blue and red are the traditional colours of Paris, used on the city's coat of arms. At the storming of the Bastille in 1789, the Paris militia wore blue and red cockades on their hats. White had long represented the monarchy. White was added to the "revolutionary" colors of the militia cockade to "nationalise" the design, thus creating the tricolour cockade.

Royalist flags

Marianne

Marianne is a national emblem of France and an allegory of Liberty and Reason. She represents the state and values of France.

Phrygian caporbonnet rouge

In revolutionary France, the cap was first seen publicly in May 1790, adorning a statue representing the nation.

By wearing the red Phrygian cap, the Paris sans-culottes made their Revolutionary ardour and plebeian solidarity immediately recognizable. During the period of the Great Terror, the cap was adopted defensively even by those who might be denounced as moderates or aristocrats and were especially keen to advertise their adherence to the new regime.

A cockade is a knot of ribbons, or other circular- or oval-shaped symbol of distinctive colors which is usually worn on a hat.

“A cockade uses distinctive colours to show the allegiance of its wearer to some political faction…In pre-Revolutionary France, the cockade of the Bourbon dynasty was all white (far right, above). Once the Revolution started, the French pinned the blue-and-red cockade of Paris onto the original white cockade of the Ancien Regime- this producing the original Tricolore cockade. Later, distinctive colours and styles of cockade would indicate the wearer’s faction.”

The Politics of Appearances: Representations of Dress in Revolutionary France By Richard Wrigley Berg Publishers, 2002

Two sans culottes seeking to impose the tricolor rosette on a passer by.

Over-dressed: a gentleman on trial before French Revolutionary sans-culottes, September 1792

Sans culottes