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France: Flags in cartoons and caricatures

The Blue Wave flag
Flag lacking the central white stripe

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France

The Blue Wave flag

Glez' Blue Wave flag - Image by Ivan Sache, 29 November 2002

In France, the blue colour is traditionally associated with the conservative parties. The big success obtained by these parties during the spring 2002 legislative election was nicknamed the "blue wave" (vague bleue).
Courrier International #610 (28 November 2002) shows a cartoon by Glez, originally published in Le Journal du Jeudi (Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso), on which the French Prime Minister Jean-Pierre Raffarin is represented waving a Tricolor flag with stripes "reflecting" the current political situation.
Of course, the colours of the French national flag do not have any specific political meaning. In the French national flag, blue never symbolized conservatism and red never symbolized communism.

Ivan Sache, 29 November 2002

Flag lacking the central white stripe

Flag lacking the central white stripe - (left) Image by António Martins-Tuválkin, 3 October 2025
(right) original artwork from The Economist

A synthetic surrealist image of the national flag of France lacking the central white stripe, with the fly-side blue stripe nonetheless flying unperturbed, likely alluding to a percieved polarization of the French society to political extremes, to illustrate the cover| title “The centre cannot hold” (or, in the U.S. edition, “France’s centre cannot hold”) in the online edition of The Economist on 2024.06.29: photo, photo, photo, photo.

António Martins-Tuválkin, 15 December 2024