Last modified: 2025-01-11 by olivier touzeau
Keywords: extra red stripe |
Links: FOTW homepage |
search |
disclaimer and copyright |
write us |
mirrors
See also:
![[Flag]](../images/f/fr!14j18.gif)
Wrong French flag with extra red stripe - Image by António Martins, 20 December 2023
July 14th is the main national holiday in France, and the Patrouille de France of the French Air Force usually offers a display of the Tricolore in the skies of Paris made with fighter jets streaking in formation while releasing colored smoke.
In 2018 one of the nine smoke tint containers was swicthed, causing the rightmost one to be red instead of the expected blue: photo (2018) (compare with 2022 for example].
António Martins, 20 December 2023
The mistake did not go unnoticed by spectators and even inspired some. On social networks, many Internet users gently mocked this error and imagined wearing these colors on the following Sunday evening, during the World Cup final between France and Croatia. See examples here [source: 20 minutes newspaper].
Olivier Touzeau, 7 December 2024
![[Flag]](../images/f/fr_.gif)
Incorrect, flopped version of the French national flag - Image by António Martins & Željko Heimer, 21 May 2024
The national flag of France is famously made of three vertical stripes, with a white one in the middle, separating a blue stripe on the hoist side from a red one at the fly side. Due to canonical representation of flags in two-dimensional static media as flat with the hoist at the left side and often lacking any reference to this orientation, vertically assymmetric flags such as national flag of France are often misdepicted when showing their fly side at the viewer’s right hand. This happens when a preset graphic is added onto a scene where the mast or other hoisting device happens to show at the right side of the flag. This seems to happen more often to this kind of “reversable” flags, as are most non-symmetrical vertical tricolors (incl. also Italy, Ghana, old Afghanistan, and many others), and less so to flags with a distinct element whose shape allows to tell hoist apart from fly (such as Tonga [to.html] or the U.S.A. even if that can also be flopped (cp. Zambia or the Vatican): the erroneous flopping (to vertically mirror) seems to depend not only on knowledge and attention, but also on design itself.
I have seen countless cases of flopped flags of France in significant
media. One such case is adult
animated television show South Park, in its episode
4th of season 12th (“Canada on Strike”, 171st overall, first aired on
2008.04.02), as a
tabletop flaglet used (along with other, also incorrect, national flags)
in a United Nations meeting scene (04′54″, 03′15″ and others) — but this
is not a South Park specific oddity.
This image (seen with its hoist at the right hand of the viewer) can also be used to show the reverse of the regular national flag of France.
António Martins, 21 May 2024
![[Variant flag]](../images/f/fr!b-.gif)
French flag with light blue stripe - Image byAntónio Martins, 5 November 2023
On this 1971 Brazilian stamp is the logo of the French Industrial, Technical and Scientific Exhibition França 71, organized by the French government in São Paulo [more info]. It unmistakenly shows the number "71" (smartly shaped as a northeast pointing arrow) filled with three vertical stripes of blue, white, and red — all on a dark blue background and, I presume for contrast, the shade of blue on half the "7" is clearly a light one.
António Martins, 5 November 2023
![[Flag]](../images/f/fr!hex.gif)
Wrong French flag with white hexagon - Image by António Martins, 25 October 2023
On a 2006 postage stamp issued by Monaco, showing “map flags” (with territory areas filled up with the pattern of each flag), the flag of France is inserted in its map: Instead of the usual _tricoloré_ partition with vertical lines, the white area here is instead an hexagon — indeed the French national polygon, famously inspired by its geographic shape (see [https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hexagone_(France)]).
The stamp itself (2.30 €; cat. Michel no. 2836 and Yvert no. 2581) commemorates the 30th anniversary of the European Academy of Philately: image, image.
This variant is unusual, but not original: I was reminded, while searching for something else, of old Air France company desk flags with added logos on the same basic arrangement.
António Martins, 25 October 2023 & 21 May 2024