The French Flag

 The French flag

 

The national emblem of the Fifth Republic, the tricolor flag was born during the French Revolution, from the union of the colors of the king (white) and the city of Paris (blue and red). Today, the flag is hung on all public buildings. It is displayed in most official ceremonies, whether civil or military.

 

Historical background. 

The tricolor flag has not yet found its inventor. The historical vagueness that surrounds its creation gives free rein to the legends that surround it with poetry: many illustrious men, it is said, have bent over its cradle to adorn it with its colors.

 

Before becoming a flag, the tricolor was a cockade. It is said that it was La Fayette who gave it to King Louis XVI at the Hôtel de Ville three days after the storming of the Bastille, a tricolor cockade, declaring: "I bring you a badge that will go around the world". The white represented the monarchy, while the blue and the red took again the colors of the city of Paris, sign, according to the mayor of the city, of "the august and eternal alliance between the monarch and the people". The tricolor cockade then became a symbol of patriotism and began to flourish on buttonholes.

 

In the fall of 1790, the Constituent Assembly decided that all French warships and merchant ships would wear a flag with three vertical stripes: red near the flagstaff, white in the center, a stripe wider than the others, blue on the outside. The vertical direction made it possible to distinguish it from the Dutch flag, whose red, white and blue colors, arranged horizontally, had been flying on all seas for a century.

 

The tricolor flag did not take its final form until February 15th, 1794  when the national convention decreed that the national flag "will be formed of the three national colors, arranged in vertical bands, so that the blue is attached to the shoulder of the flag, the white in the middle and the red floating in the air. Legend has it that it was the painter Louis David who chose the order of the colors.

 

Léon Cogniet, Allegorical piece on the different flags of France : [print] © Bibliothèque nationale de France

 

On several occasions, the tricolor flag was threatened.  It lost its blue and red during the return of the monarchy from 1814 to 1830, which kept only the royal white. It reappeared proudly with the three colors on the barricades of the Three Glorious, July 27th, 28th and 29th, 1830, brandished as a sign of Republican rallying against Charles X. Louis-Philippe accepted the return of the blue, white and red flag, proclaiming that "the nation was taking back its colors".

 

On February 25th 1848, during the proclamation of the Republic, the insurgents wanted a totally red flag. It is Lamartine who knew how to find the words, as a poet, and to galvanize the crowd, as a politician, to save the national flag.

 

“... the tricolor flag has gone around the world, with the name, the glory and the freedom of the fatherland. [...] If you take away the tricolor flag from me, know this well, you take away half of the external strength of France, because Europe knows only the flag of its defeats and of our victories in the flag of the Republic and the Empire. When she sees the red flag, she will think she sees only the flag of a party; it is the flag of France, it is the flag of our victorious armies, it is the flag of our triumphs that must be raised before Europe. France and the tricolor flag, it is the same thought, the same prestige, the same terror if necessary for our enemies.”

 

Alphonse de Lamartine.

 

Its eventful genesis, crossed by the great and the small history, its multiple representations in novels or pictorial works, the symbolic richness of its colors where the hot and the cold are mixed, anchored it in the heart of our identity. Today, it is the only national emblem defined in article 2 of the constitution of the Fifth Republic.