Huguenot Cross

The Huguenot cross is a Christian religious symbol originating in France and is one of the more recognisable and popular symbols of the evangelical reformed faith. It is commonly found today as a piece of jewellery (in gold or silver) or engraved on buildings connected with the Reformed Church in France. It also forms part of the official logo of the Reformed Church in France.

It is sometimes asserted that the cross appeared for the first time during the Huguenot Wars (1562-1598) in the South of France. Bertrand Van Ruymbeke asserts instead that the Huguenot cross stands out as "the most revealing" of symbolic signs of latter-day Huguenot solidarity: "Although a Huguenot cross was indeed designed in Nîmes in the 1680s, never was it in France the symbole de reconnaissance it later became for the descendants of the Huguenot refugees in the last third of the nineteenth century" Van Ruymbeke identifies the late 19th-century Huguenot revival as sharing characteristics with two of historian Eric Hobsbawm's three categories of "invented traditions": A. "those establishing or symbolizing social cohesion or the membership of groups, real or artificial communities", and B. "those whose main purpose socialization, the inculcation of beliefs, value systems and conventions of behavior."

Long after the revocation of the Edict of Nantes, the Huguenot Cross came into general use amongst 19th-century Huguenot descendants in countries where Huguenot refugees settled, as identification with the French Huguenot ancestry, as much as confirmation of the wearer's faith.

In 1942, the Free French Protestants in Great Britain issued a badge that paired the Huguenot cross with the Cross of Lorraine, which had been taken up by the Free French Forces.