Was listening to a brief blurb claiming that France changed their flag like a year ago. I guess they changed the blue color to a slightly darker blue color. Does anyone know if this is true and, if so, why they decided to do it? This is the first I’ve heard about it, so maybe this is old news.
A story on NPR said Macron just prefers navy blue to royal blue. Maybe it’s a “we don’t have kings anymore” thing.
It is still a “blue, white, and red” flag and has been so for a while, but that leaves the realization of those colors up to interpretation, and it is true that people like Giscard and Macron have tinkered with them.
Organizations like the Ministry of Defence have their own documents like NORMDEF 0001 with references to particular standards
I’m trying to imagine a US president deciding he liked a different shade of red or something and doing this. I guess the French President can just do this if they want to?
Anyway, thanks for the reality check. When I saw the story I was like ‘is that really true?’ and I haven’t had time to do a search on the story yet.
The Gruniad article asknott posted describes it pretty well. Basically they changed it in the 1970s to match the EU flag, as a pro-EU token (and to avoid clashing, subtly different, shades of blue on the tricolor and EU flag)
This just returns it to the original revolutionary era shade of blue.
Though actually the most interesting this was this:
The EU flag is Marian Blue, the tone declared the official colour for the Virgin Mary in the fifth century
Really the church and/or roman empire in the 400s decided the most important thing to do, between barbarian invasions and schisms over the nature of Jesus, was ensuring the Virgin Mary had an official color? I mean does she have an away strip too? 
I can imagine a Republican president demanding that the white be made whiter. 
Seems the original Marian Blue was made with ground up lapis lazuli, so the color was a sign of respect and devotion for the Virgin Mary.
Right, blue pigments from lapus lazali were the most expensive and difficult to obtain, so they were reserved for Mary as a mark of devotion.
One of my many interests is vexilology, that is, the study of flags. Therefore, this question is of great interest to me.
The short answer is that neither Giscard nor Macron changed anything about the French national flag across the board. All Macron recently did was to change the shade of blue to a darker, supposedly more traditional one (and maybe also the red to match, am not sure) at the presidential palace and maybe for other presidential use. I believe Giscard did much the same in 1976 and that his decision to fly the brighter shades only concerned flags/standards associated with the President.
From a purely legal standpoint (per the law of 1848 that reestablishes the flag in the form in which it was adopted in 1794 and as confirmed by the current French Constitution), the colors are blue at the hoist, white in the middle, and red at the fly. There is no mention of shades to be used and in practice these are not standardized among French flag makers. However, there are two main established customs: Either to use a very dark blue (basically navy, referred to as “flag blue”), typically with a sort of carmine red (though some flags seem to my eye to have bright red), or to have a brighter azure blue and bright red. As a rule, flags flown at sea have the dark blue. (They also don’t have the stripes at equal lengths but at a ratio of 30:33:37 respectively for blue, white and red. I’m not sure if the dark blue is legally mandatory at sea; I don’t recall seeing shades mentioned in the 1853 decree for flags flown at sea that defines, among other things, the aforesaid ratio of the stripes of the maritime ensign; I need to check again). On land, the shades vary. There was a time when the darker blue was ubiquitous (see for example the flag on the boy’s Paris school in the 1956 movie “The Red Balloon”) and where flags with the varying ratio of the stripes were common on land as well. I imagine it’s because makers worked from the maritime standard to determine production standards, and for reasons of practicality or expediency applied this to the flag on land as well. However, most flags flown on land in France now have the stripes at equal proportions, though I think there are exceptions.
But back to the issue of darker vs. lighter colors. The lighter version seems to have become very common following Giscard’s decision in 1976, but neither did the darker version disappear, nor did Giscard set an absolute precedent. In the 1971 film “Les Bidasses en folie”, about a group of incompetent rock musicians who are sent to do their military service, the flag seen outside the baracks (which IIRC was in real life a fire station) has a lighter blue (and red?) while the flags on the wall inside the Colonel’s office manifestly have the dark blue. In the film’s 1974 sequel, “Les Bidasses s’en vont en guerre”, the flag hoisted in front of the barracks has the light colors. Moreover, in 1970, the flag that draped Charles de Gaulle’s coffin at his funeral manifestly had the lighter blue (though an image I’ve googled of the armored vehicle that bore him at a museum has a different flag that seems to have the darker shade).
In general, there seems to be no one usage. I’ve seen both variants used in different images, and the two color schemes are interchangable. The very wordy military color standard of “NORMDEF 0001” linked by DPRK seems to regulate flags that are painted on e.g. vehicles, but I’m not sure if it also applies to real cloth flags and I have seen contemporary French flags flown by the military in both the lighter and the darker version (the former typically at French Foreign Legion headquarters/bases, the latter typically on caskets at military funerals).
I like the darker verson, which is very dignified and is traditional in that it was standard earlier in the 20th century. So I was happy to read the news that Macron had changed the flag at the presidential palace and hope it will cause that variant to become more common again. That said, I’m not sure whether the dark blue was already common at the time of the Revolution as claimed. For example, in Delacroix’ famous painting from 1830 “Liberty Leading the People”, the flag borne by Liberty has brighter shades similar to those favored by Giscard in 1976, so there may not have been a standard practice in earlier times. By the way, when the current flag was (first) adopted in 1794, it was mainly (or exclusively) a maritime flag (ensign). When the tricolor was borne on land (a practice that is attested from 1790 and that at the time was not apparently regulated by any laws), the stripes were at first typically arranged horizontally, exactly as on the Dutch flag, and in early examples (e.g. in paintings of the the 1790 Fête de la Fédération celebrating the one-year anniversary of the French Revolution, the flag is shown as an oriflamme or swallow-tailed banner (the one in the painting I have hyperlinked admittedly has a rather dark blue).
Wow, great answer. Thanks!
-XT