Marianne's red cap began as a mix-up between two ancient hats
The floppy red cap on France's Marianne is a Phrygian cap, a soft, bent-tipped hat once worn by Persians, Scythians and Trojans. The real Roman symbol of freedom was a different hat, the pileus handed to freed slaves. By the 18th century the two had merged, and revolutionaries made the result their badge.
The oldest known image of the cap comes from Persepolis in Iran. It was common across Iranian peoples, from the Cappadocians in the west to the Sakas in the northeast, made of soft material with long flaps over ears and neck, and the Greeks called the Iranian versions tiaras. Greeks attached the name Phrygian to it and then used it as shorthand for any eastern outsider: Trojan heroes such as Paris and Ganymede, Amazons, Thracians and the god Attis all wear it in their art. Romans carried the habit on, putting the cap on Dacian warriors on Trajan's Column, and followers of the mystery god Mithras depicted him in it. Early Christian artists even gave the three wise men Phrygian caps.
The liberty idea came from elsewhere. In the late Roman Republic, a freed slave received the felt pileus, marking both personal freedom and citizenship. After Julius Caesar was killed in 44 BCE, Brutus and his allies used that emblem to proclaim the end of dictatorship. When Roman imagery of the goddess Libertas was revived in the 16th century, she carried the pileus, and the Doge of Venice wore a Phrygian-style cap in place of a crown until 1797, blurring the two.
By the early 1790s French prints showed the liberty cap in its Phrygian form. It first appeared as a revolutionary emblem in May 1790 at festivals in Troyes and Lyon, and Parisian workers wore the bonnet rouge alongside trousers in place of aristocratic breeches. The Convention decided convicts could not wear it, and in 1794 a red cap was placed on Strasbourg Cathedral's spire to spare it from demolition.
Regimes rose and fell with the cap. The restored Bourbons banned it along with the Marseillaise; the July Monarchy after 1830 embraced it as national heritage. Argentina, Cuba and Nicaragua put it on their coats of arms in place of a crown.
Source: Phrygian cap
