The original color of the béret was brown like the natural pigment of the sheep's wool in the valleys of the western Pyrenees. It has been said that its origin are to be found in the Aspe and Ossau valleys of south Béarn, an area that borders directly on to the Basque Country to the west. The oldest witness to the béret's existence, however, is a sculpture on the portal of the 13th-century fortified church of Bellocq (on the Pau river) further up north depicting a pilgrim on his way to Santiago de Compostela. Béarn today prides itself in its Gascon (Aquitanian) roots and Romanic language as opposed to the Basquic culture of its immediate neighbors to the south and west, or, for that matter, the Francilien culture of its centralistic administrators north of the Loire river. In the mid 19th century the berét's authorship was erroneously ascribed to the Basques by Napoleon III who used to spend his holidays in the posh coastal Basque town of Biarritz. Upon seeing the heads of so many Basques covered with this accessory, he thought that they were surely its inventor. The béret, or berret, is however believed, by those who have researched the matter a bit more seriously, to be of Béarnais origins, not Basque, and surely not French. It was the artist, or perhaps the bohemian of the early 20th century who in Paris began to identify with peasant immigrants from the valleys of Béarn as a form of liberal protest, or simple identification with the otherness of the peasant world of the western Pyrenees. It was around this time that the béret began to make its début on the screen. Now, one could argue that the ancient roots of the valleys of Ossau and Aspe, were at one time Basque as attested by the basque root of many béarnais toponyms; but by the time the béret had become the standard headdress of Béarnais shepherds around the 13th century, the area was by then of a distinctly Romanic culture.
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