The Paris Games’ Mascot, the Olympic Phryge, Boasts a Little-Known Revolutionary Past

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The Paris Games’ Mascot, the Olympic Phryge, Boasts a Little-Known Revolutionary Past

When France decided on a mascot for the Paris 2024 Summer Olympic Games, it didn’t go with a

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, as many other host nations have in years past. Instead, the country chose to honor, of all things, a hat.

The

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(pronounced “fri-jee-uh”), as the mascot is called, is likely to be familiar to any French schoolchild. It’s based on a floppy red cap that became, and ******** to this day, an indelible emblem of the late-18th-century French Revolution. (France also debuted the Paralympic Phryge, which has a prosthetic right leg.)

“We chose an ideal rather than an animal,”

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Paris 2024 President Tony Estanguet at a press conference. “For French people, it’s a very well-known object that is a symbol of freedom.”

On vous présente la Phryge Olympique et la Phryge Paralympique !
Les mascottes de

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Sportives, fêtardes… et françaises

Here are the Olympic Phryge and the Paralympic Phryge!
The

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mascots
They are sporty, love to party… and are so French

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— Paris 2024 (@Paris2024)

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Almost lost to history, however, is the fact that the phryge was

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of the ********* Revolution, too. If not for the hat’s

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to the colonial Patriots, it’s possible their French counterparts would never have adopted the phryge as their own.

A hat with a history

The phryge itself dates back much further than either of these revolutions. Many historians trace it to the

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, a cap worn by the formerly enslaved in ancient Rome to indicate that they had been freed.

The name phryge comes from

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, an ancient region in what is now Turkey, where similar hats were worn sometime before the seventh century B.C.E. The Phrygian cap was characterized by a distinctive cone on top that could flop over toward the front or back.

While the cap appears on many

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, usually on the head of a **** or a goddess, it gradually disappeared from symbolic use as the centuries rolled on. It

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in the 17th century as scholars in England became more interested in the classical world, and it appeared in the future ******* States as early as 1733, on the

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of the

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, who governed that colony under a charter from George II.

An ancient statue of a woman wearing a Phrygian cap

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A statue of Paris, a prince of Troy, wearing a Phrygian cap

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Phrygian caps gained wider currency in the 1760s as ********* colonists chafed under British rule. Paul Revere, the Boston silversmith best known today for his midnight ride in 1775, warning of an impending British *******, was largely responsible for this trend.

In 1766, Revere designed an

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to be erected on Boston Common in celebration of the repeal of the

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, a reviled British law that imposed a tax on the paper used in legal documents, newspapers and even playing cards in the Colonies. On one side of the obelisk, a woman representing liberty carries a Phrygian cap atop a pole. ********* revolutionaries embraced the hat as a symbol, now calling it a

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.

The liberty cap became one of the most ubiquitous images in the colonists’ ****** for freedom, frequently pictured either on the head of the goddess Liberty or atop a spiked staff she carried.

Liberty, holding a pole topped with a Phrygian hat, appears at the bottom of the rightmost side of the obelisk.

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After the

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in 1781 and the new nation came into being, the liberty cap lived on for decades, featured on many

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, state flags and seals. In at least one early rendering,

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wears a liberty cap rather than the red, white and blue top hat seen today.

A red liberty cap can still be found on the official

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, as well as the

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. The figure of Lady Liberty, often wearing a liberty cap, continued to grace U.S. coins for some 150 years, among them the

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, which was discontinued in 1945 and replaced by the Roosevelt

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but occasionally shows up in pocket change today.

“When considering options for our first coins, Congress debated over whether to feature George Washington and later presidents,” the U.S. Mint notes on its

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. “Many believed that putting the current president on a coin was too similar to Great Britain’s practice of featuring their monarchs. Instead, Congress chose to personify the concept of liberty rather than a real person.”

An 1837 print of Uncle Sam wearing a Phrygian cap

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A controversial cap

But it wasn’t long before liberty caps became the subject of controversy, in part because they were so closely identified with the French Revolution, which had

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many Americans with its bloodshed. The caps’ “ties to the ******** phases of the French Revolution limited their use as symbols for ********* politicians after the mid-1790s,” says

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, a historian at the University of Colorado Boulder. “They became symbolic of both radicalism and political faction, two things that most political leaders in the ******* States feared.”

In the 19th century, some ********* politicians found a new reason to object to the liberty cap as a national symbol. When the U.S. Capitol was being designed in the 1850s, the

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for a statue atop the dome called for a classically garbed woman wearing a liberty cap. But Jefferson Davis, then-secretary of war and soon-to-be president of the Confederacy, strenuously objected, apparently fearing that a symbol that could be traced back to formerly enslaved Romans would send the wrong message, especially to enslaved ****** Americans. As a result, the

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wears a helmet instead. Still, the liberty cap ********

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within the Capitol in murals and other artworks.

In France, meanwhile, the liberty cap—often referred to as the bonnet rouge, or red cap, after its typical ******, or bonnet de laine, after its common material of wool—began to appear in paintings and engravings around 1789, at the outset of the French Revolution. Unlike their ********* counterparts, who used the liberty cap largely as a symbol, many French revolutionaries actually wore the hats.

An early design for the statue at the top of the U.S. Capitol’s dome featured a liberty cap

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A satirical drawing of Louis XVI wearing a Phrygian cap and drinking wine

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Historian Charles Downer Hazen

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one momentous day,

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, when “several thousand men, wearing the bonnet rouge, armed with pikes and carrying standards with the Rights of Man printed on them,” stormed Louis XVI’s palace in Paris to demand that the French king sign two decrees that he’d previously vetoed. Louis refused, but possibly to placate the invaders, he put a bonnet rouge on his head and drank a glass of wine they provided him. “The crowd finally withdrew, having committed no *********, but having subjected the king of France to bitter humiliation,” Hazen wrote.

Satirical

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with a wine bottle in his hand and a red cap on his head soon started circulating in France. The revolutionaries still weren’t satisfied, however, and they removed his head altogether by sending him to the guillotine in January 1793. Louis’ wife, Marie Antoinette, followed him to the grave that October.

When Charles Dickens published his fictional account of the French Revolution, A Tale of Two Cities, in 1859, he

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in “coarse” or “rough” red caps throughout the book. The novel’s illustrator also featured the caps in several accompanying

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.

An illustration of revolutionaries wearing Phrygian caps in Charles Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities

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The cap similarly appears in Victor Hugo’s 1862 novel about the

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, Les Misérables, in which rebels once more donned and displayed the

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in their attempt to oust a newly formed French monarchy. “In Burgundy and in the cities of the South,” Hugo

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, “the tree of Liberty was planted. That is to say, a pole surmounted by a red cap.”

From those days to these, the liberty (or Phrygian) cap has been as celebrated in France as it has been ignored in the U.S. When a female French admirer wished to honor Benjamin Franklin, then the ambassador to France, in 1783, she gave him a cane or

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capped with a small gold replica of a liberty cap. Franklin so valued the present and all it symbolized that he

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to his friend George Washington upon his ****** in 1790. The artifact

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in the collections of the Smithsonian’s

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.

The History of America in Ben Franklin’s Walking Stick

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