Tree of Liberty (symbol)
[1] In Paris, until the end of the Ancien régime, the clerics of the Basoche planted a rootless tree in the palace courtyard every year, providing the occasion for a celebration.
The first person in France to plant a Tree of Liberty, even several years before the Revolution, was Count Camille d'Albon, in 1782, in the gardens of his Franconville home, as a tribute to William Tell.
At the time of the Revolution, in imitation of what had been done in the United States following the War of Independence with the Liberty poles,[2] the custom was introduced in France of ceremoniously planting a young poplar tree in French communes.
The planting of Tree of Libertys multiplied in the spring and summer of 1792: France, at war with Austria, was seized by a patriotic impulse, and the defense of the homeland became synonymous with that of the conquests of the Revolution.
[5] The planting of the Tree of Libertys was a very solemn affair, always accompanied by ceremonies and popular rejoicings in which all the authorities, magistrates, administrators and even the clergy, priests, constitutional bishops and even generals took part in the same patriotic enthusiasm.
Adorned with flowers, tricolor ribbons, flags and cartouches with patriotic mottos, these trees served as stations, like altars of the fatherland, for processions and civic celebrations, along with many others.
In Bédoin, Vaucluse, 63 people were executed, 500 houses razed to the ground for failing to report those guilty of uprooting such a tree,[7][8] and farmland sterilized with salt.
[11] On the other hand, the revolutionary Marie Joseph Chalier planned to use a large ditch around the Tree of Liberty to smoke the blood of the guillotine victims on Pont Moraud in Lyon.
In a collection of Marceau's unpublished letters, published by Hippolyte Maze, the young republican general wrote to Jourdan on October 27, 1794: "that the tree of liberty was planted yesterday in Coblence in front of the Elector's palace".
A violent reaction led to the cutting down of almost all the Tree of Libertys in Paris at the beginning of 1850, by order of Police Prefect Carlier, and nearly caused bloodshed in the streets of the capital.
A tree offers a beautiful image of freedom without violence, and can in no way threaten ideas of social inequality, since in the development of a plant all branches are unequal precisely because they are free".
The tree, whose branches, roots and trunk (encircled by the initials R and F) radiate out from a hexagon representing the French territory, is framed by the motto Liberté, égalité, fraternité written in all caps; the whole is surrounded by a circle of twelve stars.
According to its author, this new tree of liberty symbolizes a France whose roots and branches, turned towards the stars of Europe, tell its story and bear witness to its openness and growth.
For the author, this new tree of liberty is the ideal subject to illustrate the French motto, as Victor Hugo made clear in his speech on March 2, 1848, a century and a half before the design was created.
The day after his death, Charles de Gaulle was depicted as a felled oak in a front-page drawing by Jacques Faizant in Le Figaro (November 11, 1970).
For historian Bernard Richard, "it could be said that it has taken the place occupied on the RPR 'logo' by the cross of Lorraine, which some people find annoying, or the Phrygian bonnet, which already offended some Gaullist deputies".
