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What are the proportions of the three colors of the French flag?

The national flag is the symbol of a country. Different national flags reflect the different historical and cultural backgrounds of various countries and reflect specific ethnic and religious traditions. Therefore, with the changes of history and the integration and division of nations and countries, national flags also show certain regional characteristics. For example, the national flags of continental European countries are mostly tricolor flags; in tricolor flags, red, white and blue are used. Three colors are the majority.

When it comes to the tricolor flags of European countries, people naturally think of the red, white and blue tricolor flag of France, which may be related to the influence of French culture. As we all know, blue, white and red represent freedom, equality and fraternity, and are the banner of the bourgeois revolution .

On July 14, 1789, Lafayette, the commander of the National Army during the French Revolution, was the representative color in Paris—between blue and red, plus white, which symbolized the French royal family, as the hat badge of the National Army, the famous three. The color flag was born.

The current French flag is composed of blue, white and red rectangular vertical bars from the side near the flagpole, with a width ratio of 1:1:1 . The current ratio of the French navy flag is: 30:33:37.

After the start of the French Revolution, the French flag of 1790 was made in the same width and width as blue, white and red. But red is on the flagpole and blue is outside. On February 15, 1794, one side of the flagpole was changed to blue, and red was moved to the outside, and was officially adopted as the flag of France, which began to be used on May 20 of the same year. – This is the French flag today.

The origin of the tricolor comes from the hat badge worn by the revolutionary army during the French Revolution in July 1789. The cap badge was designed by Marquis de Lafayette, the commander-in-chief of the Revolutionary Army. The color, the meaning is to hope that the people and the royal family will work together to build a new country of freedom and equality .

As for the widely circulated statement later: “Blue is the color of Saint Martin’s robe, white is the color of the national hero Joan of Arc, and red is the color of the flag of Saint-Denis” – this is a secondary annotation.

During the Restoration of the Bourbon Dynasty (1815-1830), the tricolor was abandoned in favor of the old king’s flag, the iris flag on a white background. Among them, the white background represents the purity of the royal family, and the iris is the badge of the Capet family (the Bourbon Dynasty is a branch of Capet), and later became the national flower of France.

In the July Revolution of 1830, the Orleans dynasty overthrew the Bourbon dynasty. Although the Orleans dynasty also came from the Bourbon royal family, he advertised that power came from the French people, so he reinstated the tricolor.

In 1836, people found that because the white in the middle is brighter than the colors on both sides, the human eye has an illusion that the red bands on both sides always seem to have no blue bandwidth. In order to overcome this illusion, the blue strip is narrowed and the red strip is widened until the human eye looks very natural and well-proportioned, thus becoming a ratio of 30:33:37.

After the Revolution of February 1848, the new French Second Republic changed the order of the three colors on the national flag again, “blue, red and white”. The Second Republic changed the color order of the flag this time, which lasted for a short time. On March 5, it changed back to the original color order of “blue, white, red”.

On May 17, 1853, after the establishment of the Second Empire, the three-color ratio of the French flag was 30:33:37, and was ordered by Napoléon III to change back to equal width, but the naval flag did not change, and continued to use 30:33: The 37 scale tricolor is still there (because the parallax is more pronounced when the sea breeze blows).

From 1940 to 1944, Free France during World War II also used a flag with the red cross of Lorraine added in white in the middle. The Cross of Lorraine, known as the “true cross” (crux vera), became the emblem of the Lorraine family in 1099. But the true meaning of the Cross of Lorraine lies in the spirit of the free France of the Lorraine girl Jeanne d’Arc who resisted the invaders.

After the victory of World War II, Article 2 of the Constitution of the Fourth Republic of 1946 stipulated that the French national flag shall be composed of three colors: blue, white and red, and the three colors shall be vertical color bars of the same size .

Article 2 of the 1958 Constitution of the present Fifth Republic reaffirms this provision. But the issue of the three-color ratio is not mentioned. So in informal occasions, such as on TV, the proportion of the flag may change a bit. But in formal occasions, people are still used to the same three-color ratio.