Flag of Haiti

How to read it

Article 2 of Haiti’s constitution of 1987 names blue and red as the national colours. Article 3 makes the flag the emblem of the nation: two bands of cloth of equal size, blue above and red below, placed horizontally, with the arms of the Republic on a square of white cloth in the centre. The arms are a palm (the palmiste) topped by the cap of liberty, shading a trophy of weapons with its fronds, with the legend “L’Union fait la force”. The constitution describes only this form, with the arms, and sets no proportions or shades. The motto on the arms is not the national motto, which article 4 gives as “Liberty, Equality, Fraternity”. The flag’s day is 18 May, which the Embassy of Haiti in Washington calls one of the most revered Haitian traditions.

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The flag of 1803

Haitian tradition, as the Embassy of Haiti in Washington tells it, is that Catherine Flon sewed the first flag on 18 May 1803 in the town of Arcahaie, guided by her godfather, the revolutionary leader Jean-Jacques Dessalines. The story told at the commemorations has Dessalines tearing the white out of the French tricolour at the congress of Arcahaie that day.

Historians date the flag earlier. Michael Reyes, writing in the Journal of Haitian Studies in 2017, says Dessalines created the blue and red flag in February 1803, and that the account of the torn-out white at Arcahaie on 18 May has limited support among historians, though it is still the basis of the state’s commemorations. The Haitian historian Thomas Madiou wrote that by May 1803 the troops already had the two-colour flag, adopted in February; Nekita Lamour, writing in the Boston Haitian Reporter in 2004, found that Madiou’s volume names 630 people and Catherine Flon is not one of them.

How the flag changed

Lamour, following the Creole magazine Bon Nouvel, gives the changes after 1803: when Dessalines became emperor in 1804 he made the flag black and red, still with vertical bands. After his assassination, Alexandre Pétion went back to blue and red, set the bands horizontally and added the white, the palm, the weapons and the motto. In 1807 Henry Christophe’s north flew black and red and Pétion’s south blue and red. The Embassy of Haiti counts the versions of the flag from 1803 to 1986.

Haiti’s and the Dominican Republic’s flags

The Dominican Republic’s flag is in the same blue and red. The Dominican historian Juan Daniel Balcácer, quoted by El Día, says Juan Pablo Duarte took the flag then flying in the Spanish part of the island and set a full white cross in it, so the Dominican flag has four quarters, blue and red, with its own arms in the centre of the cross. Haiti’s keeps two horizontal bands with the arms on a white panel.

Haiti’s and Liechtenstein’s flags

Liechtenstein’s national colours are also blue and red (article 5 of its constitution), and since 1921 its flag has been blue over red, like Haiti’s plain bands. The Flag Institute, a British flag society, writes that spectators at the opening ceremony of the 1936 Berlin Olympics saw that the flags of Liechtenstein and Haiti were identical, and that Liechtenstein added a gold crown in the top corner by the pole on 24 June 1937 to tell them apart. The crown in the corner marks Liechtenstein’s flag; Haiti’s has its arms in the centre.