The French icon Marianne à la mode

PARIS— She has been seen as a Greco-Roman goddess, a harpy, a warrior, a mother, a flapper and Brigitte Bardot. Her head, always coiffed by the traditional Phrygian bonnet, appears on France's postage stamps, wine-bottle wrappers and baser euro coins. She is Marianne, symbol of the republic, her name, like that of the national anthem, having been brought up to Paris from the south.

On Bastille Day, the Marseillaise is trumpeted, troops parade beneath grandstands where V.I.P.'s watch the birdie and each other and the president of the republic lays a wreath at the Arc de Triomphe, under the bulging eyes of Rude's sculpted Marianne. This Marianne is so fierce that it was thought prudent, amid the political turmoil of the first part of the 19th century, to decide that her mouth was not contorted in a battle cry but in song, and so she is always called not Marianne but La Marseillaise.

Marianne has caused problems since the Convention in 1792 decided that the official state seal would feature a new goddess in a red hat symbolizing liberty and republican pride. A subject of contention from the start — Danton didn't want her, Marat did — the story of Marianne is pocket French history, as Jean-Michel Renault shows in his bulky new biography, "Les Fées de la Republique." While Uncle Sam and John Bull are relatatively immutable, Marianne follows political fashion: "Like a Barbie doll she has many outfits," Renault writes.

The one constant is the red Phrygian bonnet, worn by rebelling slaves in ancient Rome and by French streetwives in the uprising of 1789. She is accessorized by a republican pike, scales of justice and sheaves of wheat, causing a confusion with the goddess Ceres and, often, Masonic symbols, since the Masons were among the first to adopt her while the church disapproved of Marianne as a sign of secular republicanism.

Her bust has replaced the crucifix or statue of the Virgin in public schools and town halls. Although not obliged to by law, most of the mayors of France's 36,000 towns, villages and communes display a plaster mail-order Marianne.

If she has been disputed on religious grounds, there have also been those who find Marianne a little too, well, common, with her somewhat bared breasts and robust stances. The great painting by Delacroix, "Liberty Leading the People," was found vulgar: gross, people said, with her smudgy skin and the hair under her uplifted arm.