Country profile: France

The tricolour flag has its roots in the revolutionary days of 1789. After the storming of the Bastille, Lafayette combined blue and red, the colours of the Paris cockade, with white, the traditional colour of the monarchy, to symbolise reconciliation between the king and the people of Paris.

In its earliest versions, the flag placed red at the hoist and blue at the fly. The law of 27 Pluviôse Year II (15 February 1794) fixed the definitive order, blue, white, red, with blue at the hoist, on a proposal by the painter Jacques-Louis David.

Abolished under the Restoration in favor of the white Bourbon flag, the tricolour became the national emblem again after the July Revolution of 1830. The Third Republic made it the official flag of the nation, and the Constitution of 1958 confirms in Article 2 that "the national emblem is the blue, white and red tricolour flag."

Contrary to popular belief, no official text formally links each colour to a specific value of the republican motto. The most widespread interpretation is nonetheless the following:

• Blue and red: the historic colours of the city of Paris, worn by the National Guard from 1789.
• White: the traditional colour of the French monarchy, placed between the blue and the red to symbolise the union between the king and the nation.

Over time, the flag came to embody on its own the three values of the motto "Liberty, Equality, Fraternity," even though no official link between any one colour and any one word was ever established.

On 25 February 1848, the day after the fall of Louis-Philippe, insurgents demanded that the red flag be adopted. Speaking from the Hôtel de Ville in Paris, Alphonse de Lamartine talked them out of it with a famous line: the red flag ‘has only ever been round the Champ-de-Mars’, whereas the tricolour ‘has been round the world with the name, the glory and the liberty of the homeland’.

In 1976, President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing had the blue and red on the flags used by the Élysée Palace lightened, for a look considered more modern on television. This lighter shade remained in use for more than forty years, until Emmanuel Macron brought back, on 13 July 2020, the darker navy blue of the original flag, the shade used by the French Navy and chosen by the Convention in 1794, to reconnect with the historic tricolor.

Between 1814 and 1830, under the Restoration, the tricolour was banned and replaced with the white Bourbon flag. It became the national emblem again after the July Revolution of 1830, immortalised by Eugène Delacroix in his painting Liberty Leading the People.