There have been some memorably weird Olympic mascots over the years, like the ice cube and snowball with legs at Torino and whatever the hell those things were in London. At first glance, the mascot for the Paris Olympics is… honestly, I had no idea what it was. Alien? Pillow? Slug of some kind? Nope, none of the above. It's a hat. But it's a hat with a lot of history.
The pair of phryges, one for the Olympics and one for the Paralympics, who sports a running blade, are adorable anthropomorphic phrygian caps. The soft, usually red caps have symbolized freedom in France since the French Revolution, but the history goes back much further.
A similar hat called a pileus was worn by freed Romans as an indication of their formerly enslaved status. The Phrygian cap, made of wool and a cone-shaped top that could flop forward or backward, was popular in ancient Turkey. It faded into obscurity until 17th-century intellectuals' interest in the classics revived the cap because of its association with the Roman goddess of liberty, who was often portrayed wearing a pileus.
Prior to and during the American Revolution, the cap was known as a "freedom cap." It was displayed on an obelisk erected on Boston Common in celebration of the repeal of the Stamp Act, and still appears today:
A red liberty cap can still be found on the official flag of the U.S. Army, as well as the seal of the U.S. Senate. The figure of Lady Liberty, often wearing a liberty cap, continued to grace U.S. coins for some 150 years, among them the Mercury dime, which was discontinued in 1945 and replaced by the Roosevelt dime but occasionally shows up in pocket change today.
Smithsonian Magazine
For the French, it was not just a two-dimensional symbol of liberty. Thousands of men wearing the cap, the bonnet rouge, stormed the Paris castle of Louis XVI in 1792. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables and Charles Dickens' Tale of Two Cities both described the revolutionaries wearing the bonnet rouge. The use of the Phrygian cap in the United States waned soon after, as the association with the brutality and radicalism of the French Revolution proved to be a bit much for the founding fathers. In addition:
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.
Smithsonian Magazine
Previously: Vancouver 2010 Olympic mascots include a Sasquatch
