France – Italy; (almost) the same flag (Copy)

One is called the “Tricolore” in French. The other is called the “Tricolore” in Italian. 

Might there be anything in common in the history of these two flags? You bet there is. 

It all started at the time of the French revolution.  La Fayette (yes, the same Frenchman that was named general by George Washington during the American revolution) forced king Louis XVI (heading to the Paris city Hall after the French revolution started) to wear a cockade featuring the three colors: blue and red representing the city of Paris and white, representing the French monarchy. 

One year later, in 1790, the National Assembly made the “Tricolore” the official flag of the French navies. The 3-vertical-stripe layout was adopted (though the red one was the one close to the pole) as the Dutch navy had already been waving it for a century with the horizontal layout. 

In its current fashion it is finally adopted by the National Convention in February 1794. Even though it was suspended during the reestablished monarchy between 1814 and 1830 and it ran the risk to be replaced by a fully red one during the uprising of 1848, it has remained the same until today.

Going back to 1796, Napoleon Bonaparte undertook his Italian campaigns spreading the values of the French revolution and inspiring people in territories in Italy at that time mainly controlled by or part of the Austrian empire or the Papal States. The four provinces of Bologna, Ferrara, Modena and Reggio Emilia overthrew the incumbent powers and set up the Cispadana Republic in 1797 adopting the “Tricolore” as their flag while replacing the blue stripe with the green one. On the selection of green different theories have been articulated. Some report that it came from the fact that two days before the attack to the Bastille back in 1789 in Paris, the crowd, addressed by Camille Desmoulins (a revolutionary journalist), selected a green cockade as a symbol of the revolution even though the following day it was already replaced by the blue-white-red one. Others point to the fact that green, being the color of hope, was selected by Italian insurgents as a symbol of confidence in achieving independence of the incumbent authorities.

In any case, later on, other newly formed republics followed, all of them adopting the new flag as theirs, until Napoleon was finally defeated and the previous governments were reestablished.  

Nonetheless, later in the XIX century when the Kingdom of Sardinia in northwestern Italy led the independence campaign to unify all of the different territories under the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, the king adopted the Italian “Tricolore” as the national flag adding the dynastic coat of arms in the middle topped by a crown that were both dropped at the time of the creation of the Republic of Italy in 1946. 

And that’s how Italy ended up waving a flag inspired by the one of France.