Great Seal of France

The Great Seal of France (French: Grand Sceau de la République française) is the official seal of the French Republic.

The Great Seal features Liberty personified as a seated Goddess of Liberty wearing a crown with seven arches. She holds a fasces and is supported by a ship's tiller with a cock carved or printed on it. At her feet is a vase with the letters "SU" ("Suffrage Universel", "Universal suffrage"). At her right, in the background, are symbols of the arts (painter's tools), architecture (Ionic order), education (burning lamp), agriculture (a sheaf of wheat) and industry (a cog wheel). The scene is surrounded by the legend "RÉPUBLIQUE FRANÇAISE, DÉMOCRATIQUE, UNE ET INDIVISIBLE" ("French Republic, democratic, one and undividable") and "24 FEV.1848" (24 February 1848) at the bottom.

The reverse bears the words "AU NOM DU PEUPLE FRANÇAIS" ("in the name of the French people") surrounded by a crown of oak (symbol of perennity) and laurel (symbol of glory) leaves tied together with wheat and grapes (agriculture and wealth), with the circular national motto "LIBERTÉ, ÉGALITÉ, FRATERNITÉ".

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 12 centimetres. 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.

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 decentering 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.

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