Let us turn to a lighter aspect of our theme.
France rejoices, humorously, yet sincerely, in the cock as her emblem—the strutting, crowing, combative chanticleer that arouses respect while it tickles the French sense of fun. When curiosity led me to inquire how this odd representative for a glorious nation came into existence, I was met by a complete lack of readily accessible information. The generally accepted theory seemed to be that it was to be explained by the likeness of sound between the Latin word gallus, a dunghill cock, and Gallus, a Gaul—the general appellative by which the Romans of mid-Republic days designated the non-Italian, Keltic-speaking inhabitants of the country south and west of the Swiss Alps. But whence came the name “gaul”? and why was a pun on it so apt that it has survived through long centuries? I knew, of course, of the yarn that Diodorus Siculus repeats: that in Keltica once ruled a famous man who had a daughter “tall and majestic” but unsatisfactory because she refused all the suitors who presented themselves. Then Hercules came along, and the haughty maiden surrendered at Arras. The result was a son named Galetes—a lad of extraordinary virtues who became king and extended his grandfather’s dominions. He called his subjects after his own name Galatians and his country Galatia. This is nonsense. Moreover “Galatia” is Greek, and was applied by the Greeks, long before the day of Diodorus, to the lands of a colony of Keltic-speaking migrants who had settled on the coast of Asia Minor, and became the Galatians to whom Paul wrote one of his Epistles. The Greek word Galatai was, however, a form of the earlier Keltai.
As has been said, what we call Savoy and France were known to the Romans as Gallia, Gaul; but this term had been familiar in Italy long before Caesar had established Roman power over the great region between the German forests and the sea that he tersely described as Omnia Gallia; and it seems to have originated in the following way:
About 1100 B. C. two wild tribes, the Umbrians and the Oscans, swept over the mountains from the northeast, and took possession of northern Italy. These invaders were Nordics, and used an antique form of Teutonic speech. They were resisted, attacked, and finally overwhelmed by the Etruscans, who about 800 B. C., when Etruria was at the height of its power, extended their rule to the Alps and the Umbrian State disappeared. In the sixth century new hordes, calling themselves Kymri, coming from the west, and speaking Keltic dialects, swarmed into northern Italy from the present France. The harried people north of the Po, themselves mostly descendants of the earlier invasion, spoke of these raiders by an old Teutonic epithet which the Romans heard and wrote as Gallus, the meaning of which was “stranger”—in this case “the enemy.”
The word Gallus, Gaul or a Gaul, then, was an ancient Teutonic epithet inherited by the Romans from the Etruscans, and had in its origin no relation to gallus, the lord of the poultry-yard. It is most likely, indeed, that the term was given in contempt, as the Greeks called foreigners “barbarians” because they spoke some language which the Greeks did not understand; for the occupants of the valley of the Po at that time were of truly Germanic descent, and did not regard the round-headed, Alpine “Kelts” as kin in any sense, but rather as ancient foes. What the word on their lips actually was no one knows; but it seems to have had a root gal or val, interchangeable in the sound (to non-native ears) of its initial letter, whence it appears that Galatai, Gael, Valais, Walloon, and similar names connected with Keltic history are allied in root-derivation. Wales, for example, to the early Teutonic immigrants into Britain was the country of the Wealas, i.e., the “foreigners” (who were Gaulish, Keltic-speaking Kymri); and the English are not yet quite free from that view of the Welsh.
The opportunity to pun with gallus, a cock, is evident, just as was a bitter pun current in Martial’s time between Gallia, a female Gaul and gallia, a gall-nut; but in all this there is nothing to answer the question why the pun of which we are in search—if there was such a pun—has endured so long. I think the answer lies in certain appearances and customs of the Keltic warriors.
Plutarch, in his biography of Caius Marius, describes the Kymri fought by Marius, years before Caesar’s campaigns, as wearing helmets surmounted by animal effigies of various kinds, and many tall feathers. Diodorus says the Gauls had red hair, and made it redder by dyeing it with lime. This fierce and flowing red headdress must have appeared much like a cock’s comb, to which the vainglorious strutting of the barbarians added a most realistic touch in the eyes of the disciplined legionaries. Later, the Roman authorities in Gaul minted a coin or coins bearing a curious representation of a Gaulish helmet bearing a cock on its crest, illustrations of which are printed by G. R. Rothery in his A B C of Heraldry. Rothery also states that the bird appears on Gallo-Roman sculptures. Another writer asserts that Julius Caesar records that those Gauls that he encountered fought under a cock-standard, which he regarded as associated with a religious cult, but I have been unable to verify this interesting reference. Caesar does mention in his Commentaries that the Gauls were fierce fighters, and that one of their methods in personal combat was skilful kicking, like a game-cock’s use of its spurs—a trick still employed by French rowdies, and known as la savate. In the Romance speech of the south of France chanticleer is still gall.
The question arises here in the mind of the naturalist: If the aboriginal Gauls really bore a “cock” on their banners and wore its feathers in their helmets (as the Alpine regiments in Italy now wear chanticleer’s tail-plumes), what bird was it? They did not then possess the Oriental domestic fowls to which the name properly belongs, and had nothing among their wild birds resembling it except grouse. One of these wild grouse is the great black capercaille, a bold, handsome bird of the mountain forests, noted for its habit in spring of mounting a prominent tree and issuing a loud challenge to all rivals; and one of its gaudy feathers is still the favorite ornament for his hat of the Tyrolean mountaineer. By the way, the cockade, that figured so extensively as a badge in the period of the French Revolution was so called because of its resemblance to a cock’s comb.
Now comes a break of several centuries in the record, illuminated by only a brief note in La Rousse’s Encyclopédie, that in 1214, after the Dauphin du Viennois had distinguished himself in combat with the English, an order of knights was formed styled L’Ordre du Coq; and that a white cock became an emblem of the dauphins of the Viennois line.
The cock did not appear as a blazon when, after the Crusades, national coats-of-arms were being devised; nevertheless the le coq de France was not forgotten, for it was engraved on a medal struck to celebrate the birth of Louis XIII (1601). Then came the Revolution, when the old régime was overthrown; and in 1792 the First Republic put the cock on its escutcheon and on its flag in place of the lilies of the fallen dynasty. When this uprising of the people had been suppressed, and Napoleon I had mounted the throne, in 1804, he substituted for it the Roman eagle, which he had inherited from his conquests in Italy and Austria, and which was appropriate to his ambitious designs for world domination. This remained until Napoleon went to Elba, and then Louis XVIII brought back for a short time the Bourbon lilies; yet medals and cartoons of the early Napoleonic era depict the Gallic cock chasing a runaway lion of Castile or a fleeing Austrian eagle, showing plainly what was the accepted symbol of French power in the eyes of the common folks of France. One medal bore the motto Je veille pour le nation.