Google tells me this flag is the shield of Napoleon Bonaparte:
Assuming this is not a random Napoleonic war buff very proud of his hand painted Grand Armee figurines (or some obscure sporting connection). What modern political affiliation would lead someone to display that flag in 21st century San Francisco? I mean traditionally being pro-Napoleon was associated with liberal (or at least small r republican) political views. But I’ve not heard of that in more recent times.
Displaying a flag doesn’t necessarily indicate allegiance or political affiliation; it can just demonstrate admiration, support or enthusiasm.
Napoleon, while he was Emperor of the French, didn’t use a personal standard. He used the flag of the Empire, which was the same tricolour that is nowadays used by the Republic. His personal guard, the Régiment de Chasseurs à Cheval de la Garde, did have a regimental banner, which showed a crowned eagle on a thunderbolt, displayed against a white background. This is sometimes said to have been his personal banner, but I don’t think that’s technically correct.
For a few months after his first abdication he was nominally sovereign of Elba, with the title of Emperor. The flag of Elba was a white banner, with a diagonal red stripe, on which appeared three golden bees. There are reports that during the few months that he ruled Elba Napoleon did use a personal standard, which was the flag of Elba, to which was added a crowned “N” in gold. So far as I know, no example survives, and we don’t know where the “N” was placed.
The “N” within a laurel wreath, sometimes surmounted by an eagle, was in the nature of a symbol or badge. It wasn’t used in flags or coats of arms, so far as I know, but turns up as a decorative motive, e.g. in architecture, furniture, fabrics, artworks.
The answer is that, while Napoleon was a monarch who overthrew a republic, and who established client monarchies in the territories he conquered, headed by various of his friends and relations, the model of government that he exported by force to much of Europe was a lot less reactionary than the models it supplanted. In particular it was a version of monarchy which rested on a conception of citizenship that was a lot closer to the republican notion of citizenship that to the ancien régime notion of subject and, once those ideas had taken root, it was hard to extirpate them. We can see him as laying the ground for the liberal constitutional monarchies that developed in Europe during the nineteenth century, that in due course largely gave way to republics or “crowned republics”.
From Wikipedia:
" In its classical meaning, a republic was any stable well-governed political community. Both Plato and Aristotle identified three forms of government: democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy. First Plato and Aristotle, and then Polybius and Cicero, held that the ideal republic is a mixture of these three forms of government. The writers of the Renaissance embraced this notion."
Never even knew old Nappy had a shield, but it’s pretty cool. Most like;ly the reaction it got in SF, the land of uber-coolness.
Napoleon a liberal? That’s a bit of a stretch, but he did shake up Europe politically, even though France was a totalitarian state in reality, and arguably the first one.
He absolutely was not a liberal (although some of his policies were pretty progressive by the standards of the day), but despite that he absolutely became a figurehead among what would now be called ‘liberals’ (though at the time were more likely to be called republicans). Even to the point of plots to rescue him from captivity.
Similarly showing a flag of Lenin of would make your opinions on organized labor and workers rights pretty clear, notwithstanding the fact Lenin himself banned independent labor unions and ordered some of the worst suppression of striking workers.
