Fleur-de-lis

The French royalty paired this symbol with ermine, the fur of purity.^*Insert joke about France and promiscuity here.

French for "flower of the lily," the fleur-de-lis (⚜) is a common symbol used in medieval heraldry, often to signify purity (in some cases, it was associated with the Virgin Mary).

The symbol was used in many countries, but is most notable with pre-revolutionary French royalty, because of their common use of gold fleur-de-lis on royal blue backgrounds. It was used on their flags, on their coats of arms, and as Symbol Motif Clothing on the kings' royal robes and the queens' Pimped Out Dresses (as in the picture on the right and this one◊).

The actual French spelling is "Fleur-de-lys."

In modern fiction, it's often a motif to refer to the grander styles of old. In Historical Romance, it's often used, sometimes correctly and sometimes not, to prove that the Love Interest is actually hidden royalty or nobility.

May occasionally show up in particularly creative Wingding Eyes.

Note that in anime and manga the white lily motif refers to [[Yurigenre something else]] entirely.

See also Four-Leaf Clover.

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Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The Ashford Academy insignia in Code Geass is a fleur-de-lis. These motifs show up in several other places as well, particularly around the Britannian royals (since it is also a symbol of royalty). The emblem that the Emperor and Knights of the Rounds wear is a type of fleur-de-lis, as is the symbol Prince Clovis wore, that is also seen on the Purebloods' uniforms.
• The Death Note anime gives Misa fleur-de-lis earrings, though they were Creepy Crosses in the manga.
• The protagonist PMC Tekkadan (Iron Flower) in Mobile Suit Gundam: Iron-Blooded Orphans has a stylized fleur-de-lis as their emblem.
• The heavy valances in the manor house of the noble Serian family in Snow White with the Red Hair are decorated with a fleur-de-lis motif. They are possibly stylized representations of the blade on a spontoon or glaive given the family's martial background.

Literature

• In The Call of Cthulhu the Mad Artist Henry Antony Wilcox lives in the Fleur-de-lys Studios building, which is a real place in Providence. This, in turn was the inspiration behind "Fleur-de-lys Cigarettes", the fictitious sponsor of the H. P. Lovecraft Historical Society's Dark Adventure Radio Theatre series of audio dramas.
• In the Ciaphas Cain novel Duty Calls, the Order of the White Rose (a Sororitas chapter) uses a lot of fleurs-de-lis. One Battle Sister he meets has a fleur-de-lis tattoo on her forehead, and they're all over the convent as well.
• Used in The Da Vinci Code as the symbol of The Priory of Sion.
• The name of a character in The Hunchback of Notre Dame.
• The call girl service in L.A. Confidential was called "fleur-de-lis," with the slogan "Whatever You Desire."
• An important plot point in The Three Musketeers is that Milady has her shoulder branded with a fleur-de-lis, which marks her as a convicted felon.

Live-Action TV

• Moxey in Auf Wiedersehen, Pet has a tattoo on his arm of a fleur-de-lis; he was drunk when he got it, so he has no idea what it's supposed to represent.
• The 2013 CSI: Miami season finale had a serial killer use a spray-painted fleur-de-lis as the taunting clue to the next victim.
• CSI: NY: In "The Untouchable," a disturbed, homeless young lady seeks out Mac to report the death of "the woman with the purple flowers." The flowers turn out to be the tattoo of a fleur-de-lis on a murder victim's wrist.
• Interview with the Vampire (2022):
  • Lestat de Lioncourt's Season 1 character teaser and "One Week" promo feature the fleur-de-lis in the corners of the border to indicate that he's from France (and if the series adheres to book canon, it also alludes that he's a French aristocrat). Moreover, combining the thumbnails of two Lestat-themed Instagram posts from the official Immortal AMC account forms a fleur-de-lis design◊ on the ornamental fence.
  • A fleur-de-lis motif serves as the background for the titles and captions of the show's TV spots and trailers because a few characters and the story have a connection to France: Louis de Pointe du Lac is a Creole with French ancestry and a native of New Orleans (which was colonized by France), Lestat is a Frenchman, Armand was The Leader of the Parisian vampire coven, and most of the Season 2 Flashbacks are set in Paris.
• On Merlin, the spokes of King Arthur's crown were fleur-de-lis.
• In Moonlight, Mick's ex-wife Coraline had a fleur-de-lis on her shoulder. She told him it was the brand of a prostitute, but he later learned it was a mark that she was part of the French Royal family, who had been vampires at the time of the Revolution.

Music

• Japanese hip-hop group Dragon Ash have the fleur-de-lis as a symbol, and have several songs with lily imagery. Even one of their albums is explicitly titled "Lily of the Valley".

Tabletop Games

• Bretonnia of Warhammer Fantasy, being pretty much a Fantasy Counterpart Culture, uses fleur-de-lis a lot.
  • In Warhammer 40,000, it is a common symbol among Sisters of Battle, the female representatives of the local Church Militant.
• The piecepack, an open-source game system for creating board games, normally uses a blue fleur-de-lis for the suit of arms.
• Dogmatika Fleurdelis, the Knighted is a Yu-Gi-Oh! monster card based off the fleur-de-lis. She is a Lady of War, idolized by Ecclesia and acting as her mentor. And even after defecting from Dogmatika, she keeps her fleur-de-lis motif by calling herself Swordsmaster of the Bewitching Iris. The iris flower is typically associated with fleur-de-lis.

Theatre

• Cesare - Il Creatore che ha distrutto opens with a projection of Cesare Borgia's coat of arms from real life, which features these because he married into French royalty after leaving the church. It is anachronistic, as the play takes place about half-way through his life, a good seven years before that happened. However, it could also be considered fitting, since it goes right from that projection into a prologue about his birth.

Video Games

• Jeanne's symbol in Bayonetta is a heavily stylized fleur-de-lis. Since she is both the heir of the Umbra throne and strongly implied to be of French descent (perhaps even the actual Joan of Arc), it is rather fitting.
• Some of the Castlevania games have this on the walls in some areas.
• Chantelise: A fleur-de-lis is engraved onto the coins of Pix that are dropped from monsters.
• In the Civilization series, the fleur-de-lis is the symbol for the French civilization from the fourth game onward.
• In Hype: The Time Quest, the hero wears the livery of King Taskan IV: white and blue, with a gold fleur-de-lis. As he is sent into the past, he is always mistaken for a foreigner, as previous kings had other liveries. Hype stumbles upon a mythical armor in the past with this livery, during the reign of Taskan II. When he meets not-yet-king Taskan IV about a century later, it turns out the prince (who is still a child) like the livery so much he decides to make it his own when he becomes king; thus, Hype's livery is actually his own.. His fighting his evil double has a black and white livery with an upside-down grey fleur-de-lis.
• Kingdom Hearts uses this symbol as a motif, stylising both the Heartless and Nobody emblems after it. Also, it features on Sora's Valour Form, one of his Super Modes.
• The Third Street Saints of Saints Row use it as their symbol.
• Fleur-de-lis is used in the flag of Temeria in The Witcher Series.

Web Comics

• Girl Genius: The Master of Paris has a prominent fleur-de-lis on his clothes, and when the presumptive new Storm King has a parade through the streets of Paris there are fleurs-de-lis on many banners lining the parade and on his armor.

Western Animation

• Princess Lyna from LoliRock has this as her symbol.
• In the My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic episode "The Cutie Pox", Apple Bloom develops a cutie mark shaped like this, causing her to speak French.
  • Later, in "Sweet and Elite", there's an elegant socialite pony with three fleurs-de-lis as her cutie mark. Her name is appropriately Fleur Dis Lee.
  • Princesses Celestia and Luna have this integrated into the 'boots' they wear as part of their royal regalia. Nightmare Moon also has it as part of the design of her collar as well.
• Lancer, from My Little Pony Tales, had a fleur-de-lis as his cutie mark. He turns out to be quite wealthier than he lets on, as well as, while not quite pure, the Only Sane Man amongst the trio of boys.

Real Life

• The French fleur-de-lis first was used as a royal symbol in the 10th century and since Louis VIII (died 1226) the blue shield covered in fleurs-de-lis (Azure semé-de-lis Or) became the French royal arms. In 1340 King Edward III of England quartered the English arms with those of France to illustrate his claim to the French throne, and thus the fleur-de-lis became part of the English and later British arms until the claim was finally renounced by King George III in 1802. Interestingly, when King Charles V of France altered the royal arms to just three fleurs-de-lis on blue in 1376 (allegedly to honour the Holy Trinity), the claimants across the Channel followed suit. As branches of the French royal house got onto thrones of other countries, the French arms also sometimes ware added to the arms of these states. This is currently the case with Spain, where the king is a Bourbon descended from King Louis XIV of France. As the traditional colour of the House of Bourbon is white, the French naval ensign during the ancien régime was white covered with golden fleurs-de-lis.
  • The French Republics got rid of the fleur-de-lis, as did Napoleon Bonaparte, who changed the French arms to a golden, Roman-style eagle, and used gold bees as his new dynastic symbol. The latter stemmed from an archeological discovery: when a Merovingian royal tomb was opened, decorations that were identified as bees were discovered in it. In 1814 and 1815, as Napoleon and Louis XVIII kept moving in and out, the staff of the royal palaces became very adept at transforming the omnipresent golden bees into fleurs-de-lis and and vice versa.
  • Many French cities' coats of arms feature gold fleurs-de-lys on blue in the chief, symbolizing their status as a "bonne ville" (good town), which dates back to the ancien régime.
  • Once French kings had decided on golden fleurs-de-lis on blue as their arms, these were also retroactively applied to the older monarchs by heralds. One interesting case of this is the arms thus given to Charlemagne, from whom both the French and German monarchs derived their succession: A shield bisected vertically, one half showing the French lilies on blue, the other half of the black eagle of the Kingdom of Germany and the Holy Roman Empire. These arms are still currently used as arms of the bishop of Aachen in Germany, in whose cathedral Charlemagne is buried.
• The fleur-de-lis is a general symbol for the city of New Orleans. It's on the city flag, buses, trash cans, etc. Even the New Orleans Saints use it as the symbol on their helmets.
  • And since Hurricane Katrina, it's found as a tattoo on every other person you meet. It certainly saved at least a couple of local tattoo parlors in the aftermath.
  • It's also widely used in St. Louis, another city with a lot of French heritage.
  • Also used in Louisville, Kentucky, for the same reason. Noticing a pattern here?
• Within Canada, the fleur-de-lis symbolizes Quebec, as well as French-Canadian people across the country
  • The fleur-de-lis appears in the Canadian coat of arms in the shield, supporters (flag held by one supporter) and the compartment, all as a symbol of the French-Canadian with the one in the shield referring specifically to Quebec.
  • The province of Quebec uses the fleur-de-lis on their flag, coat of arms and license plates
  • Quebecois UFC welterweight champion Georges Saint-Pierre has one tattooed on the back of his right calf.
  • The Quebec Nordiques hockey club, founding member of the World Hockey Association, added a fleur-de-lis to each shoulder of its jerseys in 1974, and redesigned their jerseys to be primarily blue and white the following season, adding fleur-de-lis along the waistline for a total of eight. They would keep that look throughout their time in the NHL. Their planned 1995 redesign only kept the shoulder emblems, but those jerseys would never hit the ice due to the swift sale and relocation of the team to Colorado that offseason.
    • The short-lived Quebec Rafales of the now-defunct IHL used a fleur-de-lis using hockey sticks in place of the left and right petals.
  • Major League Soccer's CF Montreal have a fleur-de-lis in their logo.
• The French city of Lille's coat of arms shows a single silver fleur-de-lis on red; this however is a case of "speaking arms" (a pun on Latin lilium "lily", which sounds a bit like "Lille") and dates back to before the city becoming French.
• The city and republic of Florence in Tuscany uses a white (silver) shield with a red fleur-de-lis of a distinctive design (with added stamens) as its arms.
  • The arms of another Italian city, Trieste, subvert the trope. What looks very much like a silver fleur-de-lis on red is actually the head of a glaive (it's meant to be the head of the lance of St. Sergius).
• The symbol of the Boy Scouts and other scouting organizations in many countries. Scouting's World Crest is a silver fleur-de-lis surrounded by a rope tied at the bottom in a square knot, on a purple background.
• The old flag and coat of arms of Bosnia. This is distinct from the flag and arms of the modern country of Bosnia and Herzegovina, which is different.
  • Notably, this was taken from the Medieval Kings of Bosnia, who even used the same colors as France. Oddly, the adoption of the fleur-de-lis by both monarchies was completely independent.
• Pink fleurs-de-lys are one of the iconic symbols of the "Stade Français", one of the two Parisian rugby teams.
• The French Foreign Legion, which was founded under King Louis Philippe, has as its symbol a seven-flamed grenade strongly resembling a fleur-de-lis.
• The far-right French party Action Française, being monarchist, uses a yellow fleur-de-lis over blue as its symbol.
• The symbol was used as a Slave Brand, usually as a punishment for runaway slaves. As if that wasn't bad enough, they also had their ears cut off.
• The two leading merchant and banker families of the city of Augsburg in the late Middle Ages and Renaissance have fleurs-de-lis in their arms. The Fugger arms divided in two halves down the vertical center line, showing a blue lily on gold on the viewer's left and a golden lily on blue on the right^BlazonPer pale or azure, two fleurs-de-lis in fess counterchanged. while the Welser arms consist of a bisected fleur-de-lis, one-half red on silver, the other silver on red.^BlazonPer pale gules and argent, a fleur-de-lis counterchanged.

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