The design was adopted after the French Revolution, whose revolutionaries were influenced by the horizontally striped red-white-blue flag of the Netherlands.

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".

Early in the French Revolution, the Paris militia, which played a prominent role in the storming of the Bastille, wore a cockade of blue and red,[4] the city's traditional colours.

[6] The colours and design of the cockade are the basis of the Tricolour flag, adopted in 1790,[7] originally with the red nearest to the flagpole and the blue farthest from it.

The royal white flag was used during the Bourbon Restoration from 1815 to 1830; the tricolour was brought back after the July Revolution and has been used since then, except for an interruption for a few days in 1848.

[9][10] Article 2 of the French constitution of 1958 states that "the national emblem is the tricolour flag, blue, white, red".

[9] On 13 July 2020, President Emmanuel Macron reverted,[9] 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.

[10] Currently, the flag is one and a half times wider than its height (i.e. in the proportion 2:3) and, except in the French Navy, has stripes of equal width.

The colours of the French flag may also represent the three main estates of the Ancien Régime (the clergy: white, the nobility: red and the bourgeoisie: blue).

The tricolour, which combines royalist white with republican red, came to be seen as a symbol of moderation and of a nationalism that transcended factionalism.

In the aftermath of the November 2015 Paris attacks, many famous landmarks and stadiums around the world were illuminated in the flag colours to honour the victims.

From this time on, the kings of France were represented in vignettes and manuscripts wearing a red gown under a blue coat decorated with gold fleurs-de-lis.

[23] From the accession of the Bourbons to the throne of France, the green ensign of the navy became a plain white flag, the symbol of purity and royal authority.

[28] A drapeau tricolore with vertical red, white and blue stripes was approved by the Constituent Assembly on 24 October 1790.

However, following the July Revolution of 1830, the "citizen-king", Louis-Philippe, restored the tricolore, and it has remained France's national flag since that time.

Following the overthrow of Napoleon III, voters elected a royalist majority to the National Assembly of the new Third Republic.

Plans to restore the monarchy were adjourned and ultimately dropped, and France has remained a republic, with the tricolour flag, ever since.

The Vichy régime, which dropped the word "republic" in favour of "the French state", maintained the use of the tricolore, but Philippe Pétain used as his personal standard a version of the flag with, in the white stripe, an axe made with a star-studded marshal's baton.