Pre-Revolution The first seals were created by the
Merovingian kings to authenticate their orders. Merely rings originally, later worn on a necklace, the royal seals grew bigger and bigger under the
House of Capet to reach around . These are the modern dimensions of the seal. All the seals under the
Ancien Régime featured the king sitting on this throne and giving justice, yet every king had his own personal seal, a unique item which passed with him. All edicts, orders, decrees and declarations were then sealed.
Revolutionary period On August 13, 1792, representatives of the
National Convention arrested King
Louis XVI. He was imprisoned, and later
executed on January 21, 1793. This act of regicide demonstrated that "the Convention had irreversibly ruled out any compromise with the Revolution's opponents." With the absence of the king, the
French Republic sought a new national symbol. It was from these tumultuous times that the French symbol of
Marianne emerged. The
French Revolution not only challenged the political authority of the
Old Regime led by the monarchy; it also challenged the traditional symbols that had thus far defined the French people. Anthropologists have argued that every society needs a "center" which includes social and political mapping that gives the people a sense of their place. In the traditional model of authority, "the king was the sacred center and culture was firmly fixed in the longstanding notions of a catholic hierarchical order." By de-centering this frame of traditional authority while overthrowing the monarchy, revolutionaries realized that the cultural framework of the past could not be carried into the future, and that the use of the king as the insignia of the seal had to be replaced with a new seal signifying the Republic. Revolutionaries began iconoclastically destroying tangible reminders of the Old Regime, such as breaking the seals of royalty, the scepter and the crown and melting them into republican coins. The abolition of royalty, however, led to questions about the importance of having a unified symbol. In the beginning, seals were only used to compensate for the imperfection of writing. Yet as
Henri Grégoire argued, civilized people found that "a sign, a type, was necessary to give character to authenticity" to all public acts. The French Revolution stood for the notion that members of a society could invent culture and politics for themselves. As the National Convention worked to unify the Republic after the fall of the monarchy, the process to declare a national symbol became more urgent. In the end, "the choice of a new insignia seemed almost automatic." In order to dispel all traces of monarchical influence, the members of the National Convention "proposed the choice of Liberty." This notion of Liberty is, in a sense, "the very essence of the Republic." Liberty was officially represented by the female figure of Marianne, which adheres to traditional iconographic expectations. The
Phrygian cap worn by this figure of liberty was representative of the inherent freedom of the French people and provided a sharp contrast to the crown of the monarchy. She was depicted as "a woman holding a stave surmounted by a cap and trampling a yoke underfoot; this is the emblem that the ancients gave to Liberty won through valor." The feminine civic allegory of Marianne was distant from the controversial personalities of National Convention; therefore, Marianne's "abstraction and impersonality" allowed the symbol to endure the different phases of the Revolution. In addition, Marianne's close resemblance to the Catholic figure of Mary created unity between the rational revolutionaries and the devout peasantry. However, as the Revolution radicalized in 1793 with the rise of the Committee on Public Safety, the emblem of Marianne was replaced by a far more formidable symbol of the Revolution:
Jacques-Louis David's statue of
Hercules.
Post-Revolution Napoleon,
Louis XVIII, and
Charles X all used monarchical seals like the Old Regime,
Louis Philippe I used one showing only his bust. The present seal dates back to the
Second Republic, which briefly used the seals of the First Republic before having a new design made by the artist
Jacques-Jean Barre on the 8 September 1848. 's offices in France are identified by a plaque bearing a simplified version of the seal's obverse. == Usage ==