Flag of Belgium

How to read it

Article 193 of the Belgian Constitution says the Belgian nation adopts red, yellow and black as its colours, and the Lion of Belgium with the motto “Union is strength” as the arms of the kingdom. It does not say in which direction or order the colours go. The provisional government adopted a flag of horizontal stripes, red, yellow and black from the top, on 23 January 1831, and on 12 October that year decided to set the bands vertically, Store norske leksikon says. The national and state flag has the proportions 13:15; the merchant flag is a longer 2:3.

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Telling it from the German flag

Germany’s flag has black, red and gold in three equal horizontal stripes, black at the top, Store norske leksikon says. Belgium’s bands are upright, black by the pole, with yellow in the middle where Germany has red.

Why the stripes are vertical

The first flags of the 1830 revolution had horizontal stripes. The Ghent museum S.M.A.K. and VRT give the same reason for turning them: red, yellow and black across the flag could be mistaken from a distance for the Dutch flag, and the Netherlands had ruled Belgium. VRT adds a second reason from the Brussels guide Erik Baptist: vertical bands kept a link with the French tricolour and the values of the French Revolution. Store norske leksikon also compares the change with France’s flag.

S.M.A.K. goes further and says the horizontal design was written into the constitution, which was not updated afterwards, so the present flag is “in principle unconstitutional”. VRT reads it differently: the constitution named the colours but not their direction or order, which is also what Article 193 says today.

The first two flags

On 26 August 1830 Mrs Abts made the first two Belgian flags in her fabric shop on the Grasmarkt in Brussels, a plaque on the building says. In Erik Baptist’s account, rioters had waved a flag in the French colours after an opera performance the night before, and two journalists of the Courrier des Pays-Bas, who did not want Belgium to become French again, asked the shop owner to sew a tricolour quickly.