Camille Desmoulins urged Parisians to wear green cockades on 12 July 1789. He made the appeal in the garden of the Palais-Royal, shortly after news spread that King Louis XVI had dismissed finance minister Jacques Necker.
Desmoulins climbed onto a table outside the Café de Foy and called the crowd to arms. Green represented hope, and people reportedly made early cockades from leaves taken from trees in the Palais-Royal gardens. The badge gave supporters a visible way to recognize one another during the rapidly escalating unrest.
Green did not remain the revolutionary color for long. It was also associated with the king’s brother, the Comte d’Artois, whose politics were hostile to the revolutionary movement. The green cockade was soon replaced by the red-and-blue colors of Paris; white, the traditional royal color, was later combined with them to create the tricolor cockade. The Bastille was stormed two days after Desmoulins’s speech, on 14 July 1789.