Bicorne
cocked hat with two sides of the brim turned up against the crown
The bicorne or bicorn (two-cornered) is a hat widely adopted in the 1790s as a form of military headgear by European militaries. Bicornes saw widespread usage during the French Revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars, and the hat survived as widely-worn full-dress headdress until the 20th century.
Historic use
Descended from the tricorne, the black-coloured bicorne originally had a rather broad brim, with the front and the rear halves turned up and pinned together forming a semi-circular fan shape; there was usually a cockade in the national colours at the front. Later, the hat became more triangular in shape, with its two ends becoming more pointed, and it was worn with the cockade at the right side. That kind of bicorne eventually became known in English as the cocked hat, but it is still known in French as the bicorne.
Worn in the side-to-side athwart style during the 1790s, the bicorne became normally seen fore-and-aft in most armies and navies from 1800. The change in style coincided with the flattening out of the pronounced front peak of the original headdress. The French gendarmerie continued to wear their bicornes in the classic side-to-side fashion until about 1904, and the Italian Carabinieri still do so in their modern full dress.
Some forms of bicorne were designed to be folded flat so that they could be conveniently tucked under the arm when they were not being worn. A bicorne of such a style is also known as a chapeau-bras or chapeau-de-bras.
“Bicorne” enters the record as cocked hat with two sides of the brim turned up against the crown. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Bicorne, cocked and sides can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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Vocabulary and entity names are the principal evidence signals here, because they determine the precision of every later search. The source revision retrieved here is dated Aug 26, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q233104. 1 of 1 selected statements include explicit references; 1 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1800 and 1904.
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This entry incorporates text from “Bicorne” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.