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 shocked many Americans with its bloodshed. The caps’ “ties to the radical phases of the French Revolution limited their use as symbols for American politicians after the mid-1790s,” says Andrew Detch, 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 United States feared.”
In the 19th century, some American 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 original plan 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 Black Americans. As a result, the Statute of Freedom wears a helmet instead. Still, the liberty cap remains well represented 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 color, 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 American counterparts, who used the liberty cap largely as a symbol, many French revolutionaries actually wore the hats.
Historian Charles Downer Hazen described one momentous day, June 20, 1792, 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 violence, but having subjected the king of France to bitter humiliation,” Hazen wrote.
Satirical engravings of Louis 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.