Drag to pan · scroll to zoom · click a country to open it
About
France, officially the French Republic, is a country primarily located in Western Europe. Its overseas regions and territories include French Guiana in South America, Saint Pierre and Miquelon in the North Atlantic, the French West Indies, and many islands in Oceania and the Indian Ocean. Metropolitan France shares borders with Belgium and Luxembourg to the north; Germany to the northeast; Switzerland to the east; Italy and Monaco to the southeast; Andorra and Spain to the south; and a maritime border with the United Kingdom to the northwest. Its metropolitan area extends from the Rhine to the Atlantic Ocean and from the Mediterranean Sea to the English Channel and the North Sea. Its 18 integral regions—five of which are overseas—span a combined area of 632,702 km2 (244,288 sq mi), with a total population estimated at over 69.1 million in 2026. Its capital, largest city and main cultural and economic centre is Paris.
Read more on Wikipedia →The Flag
History
The national flag of France is a tricolour featuring three vertical bands coloured blue, white, and red. The design was adopted during the French Revolution and has remained the national flag since then, with only minor variations in shade and proportion. While not the first tricolour, it became one of the most influential flags in history. The tricolour scheme was later adopted by many other nations in Europe and elsewhere, and, according to the Encyclopædia Britannica, has historically stood "in symbolic opposition to the autocratic and clericalist royal standards of the past".
Design & symbolism
Article 2 of the French constitution of 1958 states that "the national emblem is the tricolour flag, blue, white, red". No law has specified the shades of these official colours. In English blazon, the flag is described as tierced in pale azure, argent and gules. The blue stripe has usually been a dark navy blue; a lighter blue (and lighter red) version was introduced in 1974 by President Valéry Giscard d'Estaing. Both versions were used from then; town halls, public buildings and barracks usually fly the darker version of the flag, but the lighter version was sometimes used even on official State buildings. On 13 July 2020, President Emmanuel Macron reverted, without any statement and with no orders for other institutions to use a specific version, to the darker hue for the presidential Élysée Palace, as a symbol of the French Revolution. The move was met with comments both in favour of and against the change, but it was noted that both the darker and lighter flags have been in use for decades. Currently, the flag is one and a half times as wide as its height (i.e. in the proportion 2:3) and, except in the French Navy, has stripes of equal width. Initially, the three stripes…
Text from Wikipedia, licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0.
Photos
