When we think of red, the first things that come to mind are fire, heat, love and anger. It is a strong, aggressive, stubborn and proud colour that insists on asserting itself. In many languages, "red" is synonymous with "colour": coloratus in Latin and colorado in Spanish can mean both red and coloured. In Russian, krasnyj means red but also beautiful: etymologically speaking, Red Square is therefore the "Beautiful Square".
In an era when the colours perceived were essentially three, black represented "dirt", white represented colourlessness and red was the only one worthy of being considered a true colour. While a pigment such as blue was difficult to obtain, red had been widespread since the Palaeolithic, obtained from ochre earth, madder, minerals or animals such as the murex. It was a divine colour: that of Mars (the god of war), the centurions and the priests.
Red evokes fire and blood, ambivalent symbols: fire is life, as in the tongues of flame that descend upon the apostles at Pentecost, but it is also hell.
Blood is that of Christ, shed in purification, but also that of sin and the impurities of the biblical taboos. Between the 13th and 14th centuries, the Pope — previously dressed in white — chose red, which would remain the distinctive colour of cardinals, to symbolise the readiness to shed one's blood for Christ. In the Middle Ages, the lustre of the colour, its "enamel", was more important than the dye itself: the more precious the material, the more luminous and resistant the garment appeared, becoming a symbol of power.
With the Reformation, red came to a standstill because Luther considered it a terrible colour. In a passage from the Apocalypse of John, the prostitute of Babylon appears dressed in red while riding a sea monster; for Luther, Babylon was Rome. Red thus disappeared from men's clothing, remaining the preserve of cardinals and chivalric orders, but continued to be accepted for women. A peculiar reversal took place: if in the Middle Ages men wore the red of war and women the blue of the Virgin, in modern times men chose discreet tones, leaving women the more striking red. A trace of this change is still preserved today in the use of light blue for males and pink (a faded red) for females.
Red was also the preferred colour of brides: the white wedding dress is a modern invention. Peasant brides dressed in red because it was the most precious pigment, but paradoxically, by law, prostitutes also had to wear a red mark so they could be identified.
With the French Revolution, red became the colour of danger and revolt. In 1789, the Constituent Assembly decreed that the display of the red flag indicated a ban on assembly and the imminent intervention of the armed forces. When the King was asked to abdicate, fire was opened on the crowd even before the warning: thus were born the martyrs of the Revolution and the flag, from a symbol of the oppressors, became that of the oppressed. "The dye of the blood of the martyrs", it remained a symbol of the break with the past in 1848, to be later adopted by Soviet Russia and Communist China. Perhaps it is precisely because of this long history of tension that even today we use expressions such as "red with anger" or "seeing red".
The ambivalence of red persists even today. It is a noble colour, the one we find in theatres and at the Opera. Festivals and Christmas are tinged with red, but at the same time it remains an alarming colour: that of prohibition signs, traffic lights, and the Red Cross. A dichotomy that has crossed the centuries and reached us.
