The Tricolor Of France

Some seventy or eighty years bef ore France was involved in the .flatnes oí the revolution - that is, at the epoch oí the war of the succession, when she was in close alliance with Spain and Bavaria - it was thought desirable, says All the Year Round, to distingnish the allied soldiers by a cockade, which combined the colors of the three nations - the white of France, the red of Spain and the blco of Bavaria. To none of these incidents, however, would it be wise to attribute the orisfin of the historie tricolor and cockade adopted by revohitionary France. At the outset there seemed a likelihood that green - which Camille Desmoulins had popularized at the Palais Hoy al - would have beeome the national color; butmen remembered in time that it was that of the livery of Comte d" Artois, the most impopular of the Bourbon princee, and it was thereupon disearded. A proposition was then made to assume the colors of the city of Paris - blue and red, as Humas reminds us in his "Six Ans Apris." To these was added the white of so many glorious memories, because it had been selected by the national guard - always faithful to the throne and its traditions. Not until sorae months after the capture of the Bastile was ' the tricolor deflnitely adopted, when Iïailly and Lafayette presented it to Louis XVI. in the great hall of the Hotel do Ville, and the convention issued a deeree in which it was described as consisting of three colors - "disposees en trois j does egales, de maniere que Ie bleu soit attaché a la garde du pavilion, Ie blanc au millue, et Ie rouge flottant dans les airs'? - that is, in equal verI tical sections, with the bine inward, the i red ontward and the white between. I TUis is the historie flag whieh Napoleon's legions, in conjunction with their eagles, boro viotoriously from the Seine to the Elbe. the Tagus, the Borodino and the Danube; which they planted victoriously on the walls of almost every European capital.