Flag of France

How to read it

Article 2 of the constitution of 4 October 1958 says the national emblem is the tricolour flag, blue, white and red, and the Élysée calls it the only national emblem the constitution defines. The order of the bands comes from the decree of the National Convention of 15 February 1794 (27 Pluviôse, Year II): blue attached to the staff, white in the middle and red flying free. The flag began as a cockade. The Élysée tells the story that La Fayette gave Louis XVI a tricolour cockade three days after the fall of the Bastille, with the white for the monarchy and the blue and red taken from the colours of Paris.

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What does the French flag look like?

Three vertical bands, blue at the pole, white in the middle and red at the fly, in the order the decree of 1794 set. The first naval flag, of autumn 1790, had them the other way round: the Constituent Assembly put red next to the staff, a white band wider than the others in the middle and blue on the outside, the Élysée says.

Telling it from the Dutch flag

The Dutch flag has the same three colours in horizontal stripes, red at the top. The difference was deliberate. The Élysée says the Assembly made France’s naval flag of 1790 vertical to tell it apart from the Dutch flag, whose red, white and blue stripes had already flown horizontally on every sea for a century.

A darker blue at the Élysée

Since July 2020 the flags on government buildings and at the President’s official engagements have used a navy blue, the blue of the French Navy, in place of the cobalt blue used before. The Italian newspaper Il Post reported in November 2021 that Emmanuel Macron decided the change on 13 July 2020 without announcing it, and that the government later confirmed it to French newspapers. Government sources quoted by the press linked the darker blue to the tricolour of 1793 and the Revolution. The lighter blue dated from 1976, when Valéry Giscard d’Estaing lightened it to match the European flag. The historian Jean Garrigues told France Info that no official announcement or general instruction to change the flag was made.

Lost and restored

The tricolour lost its blue and red when the monarchy returned from 1814 to 1830 and kept only the royal white. It came back on the barricades of 27 to 29 July 1830, and Louis-Philippe accepted it. On 25 February 1848, when the Republic was proclaimed, insurgents wanted an all-red flag, and the poet and politician Alphonse de Lamartine talked the crowd out of it, the Élysée says.