Abstract
Abstract In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, theater and pageants played an especially powerful role in communicating the basic nature and functions of the fasces. In France, the emblem was familiar enough that after the storming of the Bastille in July 1789, the revolutionaries almost immediately chose the fasces as a symbol of their movement’s strength, power, commitment to justice, unity, and—with a conscientious nod to the tradition on the insignia in Rome’s Republic—dependence on the assent of the people. When combined with a Roman freedman’s cap, they meant for the fasces to connote liberty, too. In 1792, in a first for any nation, the fasces figured in the semi-official seal of the new revolutionary state. The spirit of revolutionary coin types with fasces had a certain influence in the Americas even beyond France’s colonies in the New World, finding a place on the money of Mexico (1823–1863), then Ecuador and Chile (after 1830). In North America, it was the distinctly non-Roman theme of the fasces representing unity that prevailed, facilitated by the Second Continental Congress’s decision in August 1776 to adopt e pluribus unum (Latin for “out of many, one”) as a national motto. Though the new nation’s official seal (adopted 1782) did not include the fasces, it soon featured prominently in the repertoire of patriotic images, including an official place in American political life when the House of Representatives in 1789 adopted a fasces-like mace to serve as the badge of its sergeant-at-arms.
Published Version
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