The Origin and Spread of the Tricolor: How a Design Pattern Conquered the World

On July 17, 1789, Louis XVI arrived in front of the Paris Hôtel de Ville. Three days earlier, the Bastille had fallen, and the king had to accept some kind of token in front of the crowd. The newly appointed commander of the National Guard, the Marquis de Lafayette, offered him a small knot of ribbon worn on the hat—a cockade. Blue and red were the colors of the city of Paris; white was the color of the House of Bourbon. The king pinned that three-colored band onto his hat.^[1]

This scene was more than a simple concession. The moment the king agreed to place his color alongside the citizens’ colors, those three hues began to turn from a monarch’s banner into a people’s flag. Over the following two centuries, the same design pattern would spread to Italy, Germany, Ireland, and the Slavic world.

Yet it was not France that created the oldest horizontal tricolor. About 200 years earlier, the Dutch had already been using the same form.

The Prinsenvlag: The True Original Tricolor

At the heart of the Dutch War of Independence, which began in 1568 and is also known as the Eighty Years’ War, stood William of Orange. The rebels he led fought against the rule of Habsburg Spain, and in the process they needed a flag to identify themselves. During the Siege of Leiden in 1574, officers were already wearing orange-white-blue bands on their arms, and the same colors appeared when William entered Ghent in 1577.^[2]

In 1587, the Admiralty of Zeeland officially ordered warships to fly this flag. This is the oldest horizontal tricolor on record.^[2] It is the so-called “Prinsenvlag,” or “Prince’s Flag.” The colors came from William’s family coat of arms, but the simple design itself—three horizontal stripes laid side by side—was a new idea.

What happened next is intriguing. From around 1597, orange gradually began to shift toward red, and by the 1630s the change had become widespread.^[3] Several explanations have been offered. A practical one suggests that orange dye faded quickly under the sun at sea and started to look red. A political one suggests that republicans deliberately erased the color of the House of Orange. Both factors likely played a part. Either way, the result was the same: the red-white-blue “Statenvlag,” or “States Flag,” replaced the monarch’s colors.^[3]

This simple design ended up becoming the flag of another great power through an unexpected route. In 1697–1698, Tsar Peter the Great worked under an assumed name at a shipyard in Zaandam, the Netherlands. To build a new Russian navy, he brought home not only Dutch technology but also its visual language. The Russian tricolor first hoisted on the St. Peter in the White Sea in 1693 was simply the Statenvlag with its colors flipped.^[4] Flags travel with people, and their travel routes are maps of influence.

Paris 1789: Politics Painted onto Color

Two centuries after the Dutch tricolor first appeared, the French Revolution gave the same design an entirely different meaning. Where the Dutch flag began as a family color, the French tricolor was political from the start.

On July 13, 1789, one day before the storming of the Bastille, the citizens of Paris formed a city militia and adopted a cockade for their hats. Two colors: blue and red. Both were traditional symbols of the city of Paris. Blue came from the cloak of the city’s patron, Saint Martin; red came from the war banner of another patron, Saint Denis.^[5]

It was Lafayette who decided to add white. According to his memoirs, when he inserted a white band between the two colors he is said to have remarked that “this cockade will go around the world.”^[5] White was the color of the House of Bourbon, and at the same time it was regarded as the “color of ancient France.” By tying the city’s blue and red together with the royal white in a single ribbon, Lafayette was attempting to reconcile the Revolution with the monarchy.

On July 17, Louis XVI accepted this cockade at the Hôtel de Ville and at the same time recognized the legitimacy of the new mayor, Jean Sylvain Bailly, and the National Guard.^[5] The king consented reluctantly, but that small ribbon on his hat would shape the visual language of the next two hundred years.

The flag itself was made official somewhat later. On October 24, 1790, the National Assembly adopted a horizontal red-white-blue tricolor as the naval ensign, and on February 15, 1794, a vertical blue-white-red tricolor was decided on as the new national flag, designed by the painter Jacques-Louis David. From May 20 of that year, all warships flew this flag.^[5]

Two changes happened simultaneously here. First, the flag shifted from horizontal stripes to vertical ones. The leading explanation is that this was needed to distinguish it from the British naval ensign. Second, and more importantly, the meaning of the flag changed. The blue-white-red of France began to be received not as a family color but as a visualization of abstract ideals: liberty, equality, fraternity. Around the same time, the very concept of a national flag was being established in Europe, and the French tricolor became the benchmark of that new genre.

Italy: France’s Form, Italy’s Colors

The French revolutionary armies carried their flags with them. Napoleon’s Italian campaign in 1796 was both a military conquest and a visual contagion.

On January 7, 1797, the assembly of the Cispadane Republic met at Reggio Emilia in northern Italy. The deputy Giuseppe Compagnoni made a motion: “I propose that the standard or flag of three colors—green, white, and red—be made universal.” Passed unanimously, this resolution is the official starting point of the Italian tricolor.^[6]

Why green instead of blue? There is a curious story behind it. Some Italian newspapers, in their early reports on the French tricolor, had mistakenly rendered the blue as green, and Italian Jacobins simply embraced the “error.” They felt green was a better symbol of nature and natural rights—the inherent rights of man.^[6] Another interpretation holds that the militia uniforms in Milan were green. Either way, the result was not direct imitation but a creative variation.

The Cispadane Republic soon vanished, but its flag survived. Throughout the 19th century—the secret society of the Carbonari, the revolutions of 1848, Garibaldi’s Expedition of the Thousand—the same green-white-red appeared at every stage of the Italian unification movement, the Risorgimento. When the Kingdom of Italy was proclaimed on March 17, 1861, the new state adopted the same tricolor as its national flag, with the coat of arms of the House of Savoy placed on the white stripe.^[6] When the monarchy was abolished in 1946, the family arms came off, and today’s Italian flag was complete.

What matters most in the Italian case lies elsewhere. When a newly born nation-state designed its flag, it no longer had to start from a royal coat of arms. An era had opened in which a country could be expressed by an abstract combination of colors alone.

1848: The Year All of Europe Was Covered in Tricolors

The year 1848 is often called the “Springtime of the Peoples.” From Paris to Vienna, Berlin, Budapest, Prague, and Milan, revolutions broke out almost simultaneously in nearly every European city. What visually tied that spring together was the tricolor.

Germany’s Black-Red-Gold: Colors Born from a Volunteer Uniform

Germany’s black-red-gold begins with the Lützow Free Corps in 1813. Formed to fight Napoleon, the unit was not a regular army and lacked the funds to produce uniform clothing. The cheapest method was for each member to dye his own clothes black, then add red collars and brass (gold) buttons.^[7] What had been a practical choice quickly took on symbolic meaning: “From the darkness of slavery (black), through the blood of battle (red), to the golden light of freedom (gold).” The unit drew students and intellectuals from across Germany. The poet Theodor Körner, Friedrich Ludwig Jahn (the so-called father of gymnastics), and Friedrich Fröbel (founder of the kindergarten) all served in the same corps.^[7]

Even after the unit was disbanded, its members did not forget the colors they had worn. The student rally at Wartburg Castle on October 18, 1817, marking the fourth anniversary of the Battle of Leipzig, and the Hambach Festival of May 1832 with around 30,000 participants—at both events the black-red-gold flag appeared as a symbol of a unified, free Germany.^[7]

When the March Revolution broke out in 1848, the Frankfurt Parliament proclaimed black-red-gold the official colors of the German Confederation. They disappeared for a while after the revolution failed, but the Weimar Republic in 1919 and West Germany in 1949 again adopted the same colors. The economics of dyeing a uniform had hardened into the identity of a nation.

Pan-Slavic Colors: A Decision Reached in Prague

In June of that same year, 1848, the Slavic Congress was held in Prague. Delegates of Czechs, Slovaks, Poles, Ukrainians, Croats, and Slovenes within the Austrian Empire gathered to discuss Slavic solidarity. At this congress, red, white, and blue were adopted as the “Pan-Slavic colors.”^[8]

The reference point was the Russian flag. The same red-white-blue that Peter the Great had brought back from the Netherlands had returned, a century and a half later, as the colors of the entire Slavic world. Slovakia, Slovenia, Serbia (already in use since 1835), and Croatia all adopted the same three colors for their national flags, and traces of that choice remain to this day.^[8] The Czechs took a slightly different path and ended up using a variation of red-white-blue.

A curious paradox emerges here. A family color from the Netherlands turned, after political upheaval, into the color of a republic; that republic’s color became the naval ensign of a tsar; and the tsar’s color was, in turn, adopted as the color of Slavic nationalism. The same three colors made the journey from a monarch’s color to a people’s color twice over.

Ireland: A Tricolor Bearing a Message of Reconciliation

In that same year, 1848, another tricolor appeared. Activists of the Young Ireland movement visited France to support the Paris revolution, and they brought home a green-white-orange tricolor that French women had made for them.^[9]

Thomas Francis Meagher’s words upon first unveiling the flag in Dublin survive: “The white in the centre signifies a lasting truce between the ‘Orange’ and the ‘Green,’ and I trust that beneath its folds the hands of the Irish Catholic and the Irish Protestant may be clasped in heroic brotherhood.”^[9] Green stood for the Catholic majority, orange for the Protestant minority since William of Orange in the 17th century, and white expressed peace between the two communities.

The message was only partially realized more than a century later. Through the Easter Rising of 1916 and the establishment of the Irish Free State in 1922, the flag became the official national flag under the constitution of 1937, but the religious conflict in Northern Ireland continued into the late 20th century.^[9] The design itself, however, never changed. The reconciliation the flag promised has not yet been completed, but the promise still flutters on its cloth.

Why Did Everyone Choose the Tricolor?

From the mid-19th century onward, almost every newly emerging nation-state adopted the tricolor format. Romania (1848), Hungary (1848), Mexico (1821), Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador (designed in 1806 by the Venezuelan independence hero Miranda), Greece (1822, with multiple horizontal stripes and a cross)—the list is very long.^[10] Why did one design pattern become almost universal?

Three reasons seem to combine.

First, the political message is clear. A tricolor is not a royal coat of arms or a religious cross. Its meaning depends on who is holding it, but in any case it is not a “king’s flag.” This contrasts with the Union Jack of the same era, which combined the crosses of three saints to express the union of kingdoms. The new nation-states of the 19th century wanted to declare visually that they were not the estates of a monarch but communities of citizens, and the tricolor fit that message exactly.

Second, the tricolor is easy to identify and to make. A flag must be recognizable from a distance and producible by anyone. Three colors arranged in horizontal or vertical bands satisfy both conditions. Once the era arrived in which flags were no longer made in royal embroidery workshops but in the hands of citizens, the simplest design quickly became standard.

Third, the very route of influence was itself the tricolor. The French revolutionary armies unfurled tricolors wherever they went. The satellite republics that Napoleon set up—the Batavian Republic (Netherlands), the Helvetic Republic (Switzerland), the Parthenopean Republic (Naples), and the various sister republics across the Italian peninsula—all adopted tricolors. Even after those flags vanished, the visual memory remained, and the next generation of revolutionaries reached back for the same pattern.

Vertical vs. Horizontal, and the Colonial Sequel

Within the tricolor itself, two branches emerge: the Dutch-style horizontal tricolor and the French-style vertical tricolor.

Horizontal tricolors are concentrated mainly in places shaped by Dutch influence, and in regions touched by 19th-century Slavic and Arab nationalism: Russia, Germany, Hungary, Bulgaria, Egypt, Syria, Iraq, Yemen, and the former Yugoslav region including Serbia, Croatia, and Slovenia. Horizontal stripes suggest the stability of gravity, a sense of being rooted in the land.

Vertical tricolors follow the path of the French Revolution. Italy, Belgium, Ireland, Romania, Mexico, Chad, Côte d’Ivoire, Mali, Guinea, Senegal—the form is especially prominent in 19th-century Latin American independence movements and mid-20th-century African decolonization. Placing the first color at the hoist has the effect of keeping that color most stably visible when the flag is fluttering.

In particular, the new African independent states of the mid-20th century made an interesting choice. When Ghana adopted a horizontal red-gold-green tricolor with a single star at its center in 1957, this took root as the “Pan-African colors.” Cameroon, Senegal, Mali, Guinea, Benin, the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and many other African countries declared independence under red-gold-green or red-green-yellow tricolors.^[11] They borrowed the design format of their colonial metropole, France, and used it to overlay the memory of the colonial era.

Some cases stayed outside this current. In East Asia, the Taegukgi did not adopt the tricolor format when a new national flag had to be chosen in the late 19th century. Instead, it drew on the Eastern philosophy of yin-yang and the four trigrams. Japan’s Hinomaru and China’s Five-Star Red Flag did not follow the same path either. The impression that the tricolor is universal applies, strictly speaking, only within Europe and its sphere of influence.

From the Color of Monarchs to the Color of the People

Let us return to the scene of July 1789 with which this article began. The cockade into which Lafayette tucked a strip of white was a compromise. By tying the king’s color and the city’s color together in one ribbon, he was trying to send the message that revolution and monarchy could coexist. Yet four years later, in the same square, the same king was executed. Blue, white, and red were left in the place that the monarch had vacated, and white was no longer the color of the Bourbons but the color of the Republic.

Similar things happened elsewhere. The orange of the Netherlands turned into the red of the Republic; the red-white-blue of Russia became the colors of the Slavic nations; the black-red-gold of Germany moved from a volunteer uniform to the colors of liberalism—on the same cloth, the meaning kept shifting. The colors stayed the same, but the hands lifting them changed.

The weight of a flag, then, lies not in the cloth but in the hand that holds it. The reason the new nation-states of the 19th century all reached for the tricolor was that nothing—neither a family’s color nor a god’s cross, but simply three stripes—suited the new kind of political community quite so well. Its very abstractness was its strength.^[12] Because it was no one’s color, it could become everyone’s color.