Henri IV's white plume
In the first half of the 17th century, Agrippa d'Aubigné coined the phrase "Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc" ("Rally to my white plume"), which Hardouin de Péréfixe and Voltaire later added to in the highly successful La Henriade.
In 1873, to justify his plan for monarchical restoration and his rejection of the tricolor flag, the Comte de Chambord appealed to the imagination associated with the white plume.
Henri IV wore a large bouquet of feathers, making him "quite remarkable for the large white plume he wore on his teste, and another on his horse", according to the Discours véritable de la victoire obtenue par le Roy en la bataille donnée près le village d'Ivry...,[1] often attributed to Étienne Pasquier, published shortly after the battle and widely circulated.
[5] The Gascon poet Guillaume de Saluste du Bartas dedicated another work to the battle of Ivry in the same year as the event, just before his death in August 1590.
"[7]Beyond the poetry, the king wanted to be highly recognizable to demonstrate his bravery and galvanize his troops, whose courage depended in part on the sovereign's physical presence on the battlefield.
[8] At Ivry, Henri IV didn't hesitate to put himself in harm's way, charging to the front of his cavalry, surrounded by the Grands, and finding himself in a furious melee.
[14] In the Wars of Religion context, the white plume was an emblem that united both Catholics, who rallied to Henri IV because they considered him the legitimate sovereign, and Protestants, who supported their co-religionist.
[17] The motifs of Henri IV's helmet and white plume were taken up as emblems attached to his person when Lyon submitted to the king's authority in 1594[18][19] or during royal entries into cities, as in Avignon in 1600.
In it, he recalls the battle of Ivry and describes Henri IV "putting a white plume in his headdress and saying to the nobility around him: here is this feather which will serve you today as a guidon, following which we will triumph over our enemies".
[25] Historian François Lavie points out that Péréfixe's book is the culmination of a practice of compiling the king's bon mots and formulas that began as early as the reign of Henri IV.
[27] In 1713, Jesuit Father Gabriel Daniel retained Péréfixe's addition, linked the two elements by describing the king pointing to the plume on his helmet, and slightly modified the meaning of the phrase: "Enfants, si les cornettes vous manquent [etc.]
During the Revolution, Henri IV, depicted with his plume, was likened by royalist propaganda to a "French Perseus", who came to save Andromeda, symbolizing France, from a sea monster.
[31] In 1800, a local scholar, Abbé H. M. Garnesson, parish priest of Chavot-Courcourt, asserted that the Maréchal de Biron, killed by a cannonball at the siege of Épernay in 1592, had been targeted instead of the sovereign because he had worn the royal plume for fun.
Nevertheless, this apocryphal anecdote, which has been repeated to this day, shows that in the early 19th century, the white plume was seen as an emblem specific to Henri IV, directly linked to his person, without being a political sign.
[33][34] The task was not an easy one, as the images conveyed by the two monarchs clashed: a dashing cavalryman versus a fat character returning from abroad in the back of his carriage.
[35] In mid-March 1815, just after Napoleon's return from Elba, the royalist press evoked Henri IV's white plume to hold back - unsuccessfully - the soldiers who were in danger of rallying to the deposed emperor.
[37] The images produced at the time used the white plume as the emblem of Henri IV, the organizer of the reconciliation of the French, in opposition to Napoleon, seen as an heir to Robespierre.
[38] According to some royalists, Henri IV's plume symbolizes the victories of the kings of France at Fleurus, which they contrast with Waterloo, the shameful defeat of the usurper Napoleon.
[40] In 1816, for the fête de la Saint-Louis (August 25), in the village of Tauves, Puy-de-Dôme, the bust of King Louis XVIII was carried on a stretcher by men "wearing Henri IV-style hats with a bouquet of lilies ".
[41] That same year, 1816, Jean-Baptiste Augustin Hapdé, a former Empire thurifer who had rallied to the Bourbons, published a work with an eloquent title: Le Panache blanc de Henri IV, ou les Souvenirs d'un Français.
[42] The following year, the king's gesture of displaying his plume at the head of his troops before the battle was used in an illustration by Alexandre-Joseph Desenne for a reprint of La Henriade.
[46] By using the figure of Henri IV, royalist propaganda sought to make white an ancient national color, at a time of intense rivalry with the tricolor flag.
[47]Under the July monarchy and subsequent regimes, these depictions of Henri IV were less numerous, because the tricolor flag was once again in use, but its white plume continued to symbolize the legitimist movement.
This revival can be linked to the development of school education, from Victor Duruy to Jules Ferry, which increased the number of history textbooks for children, featuring numerous images.
[53] In 1912, Ernest Lavisse was able to propose Henri IV's white plume as a symbol of courage to the schoolchildren of Le Nouvion-en-Thiérache during a prize-giving speech, without needing to explain the circumstances.
[58] In 1969, in his Rubrique à brac published in Pilote magazine, cartoonist Marcel Gotlib hijacked the story of the white plume, which becomes, in three vignettes, a subterfuge used by the king to send someone to be killed in his place.
[59] Thirty years later, writer Michel Peyramaure entitled one of his historical novels about Henri IV Ralliez-vous à mon panache blanc.
[61] During the 2007 presidential election campaign, candidate François Bayrou, a Béarnais like Henri IV, called on the French to rally behind his white plume.
Through its successive metamorphoses, the plume has become an enduring icon of French political life,[59] while the formula is famous enough to appear in compilations aimed at the general public.
