The cockade of France is the national ornament of France, obtained by circularly pleating a blue, white and red ribbon. It is composed of the three colors of the French flag, with blue in the center, white immediately outside and red on the edge.
Officer of the gendarmerie nationale of the revolutionary era wearing a hat with a tricolor cockade
Detail of a presidential Citroën SM
A Dassault Rafale with a French tricolor cockade
The national flag of France is a tricolour featuring three vertical bands coloured blue, white, and red. It is known to English speakers as the Tricolour, although the flag of Ireland and others are also known as such. The design was adopted after the French Revolution, where the revolutionaries were influenced by the horizontally striped red-white-blue flag of the Netherlands. While not the first tricolour, it became one of the most influential flags in history. 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".
The Brandenburg Gate in Berlin was one of many world landmarks illuminated in the French flag colours after the November 2015 Paris attacks.
The white flag of the monarchy transformed into the Tricolore as a result of the July Revolution. Painting by Léon Cogniet (1830)
Lamartine, before the Hôtel de Ville, Paris, rejects the Red Flag, 25 February 1848. By Henri Felix Emmanuel Philippoteaux
The French soldiers started to use white crosses, during the Hundred Years' War, to distinguish themselves from the English soldiers wearing red crosses.