France hoist band

Why this color matters

The tricolore looks like the easiest blue on earth to remember, which is exactly the trap. The hoist band — the stripe next to the flagpole — is a deep navy, not the bright royal blue most people picture. And which navy it is has quietly changed within living memory.

The navy a president restored — in secret

On 13 July 2020, President Macron swapped the flag over the Élysée Palace for a darker navy and told no one; the change went unnoticed for more than a year. He was reversing the lighter blue that President Giscard d'Estaing adopted in 1976 to match the brighter blue of the European flag, so the two would not clash on adjacent poles. The switch reportedly cost about €5,000 — and the navy, the presidency said, evokes the Revolution's volunteers, the First World War poilus, and the Free French.

The flag that all the presidents had been dragging around since then was not the real French flag.

Arnaud Jolens, Élysée operations director

Older than the Republic

The colours are older than the Republic. In July 1789 the Paris militia pinned on a blue-and-red cockade — blue and red are the colours of the city of Paris, not the nation. White, “the ancient French colour” and the king's, was added (Lafayette is usually credited) to fold the monarchy into the people's cockade. The flag became a peace treaty in cloth: Paris on the outside, the crown in the middle. A law of 15 February 1794 fixed the order — blue at the hoist.

The exact blue

The scoring blue is #000091 — HSB(240°, 100%, 57%): a pure blue hue, fully saturated, but only medium in brightness. Hold two things — there is no green in it (not cyan, not azure), and it is genuinely dark. Picture the navy beside the white centre stripe: the white should almost glow.

What the three colours are said to mean

The French love decoding them — the three estates (clergy, nobility, third estate), or liberté, égalité, fraternité, or even three flowers: cornflower, marguerite, poppy. All are later readings; the flag's own logic is simpler and more political — a city's colours wrapped around a king's. That template went on to be copied worldwide, from Italy to Ireland to much of Africa.