In This Sign, Conquer

What the vexillologists won't tell you

1. Étienne

In November of 1356, Étienne Marcel had a decision to make. Given the gravity of the circumstances he faced, it was a minor decision, but it would reverberate far beyond anything else he did. And though he did not realize it at the time, this moment was the culmination of his entire life story.

Étienne was one of those to whom much was given. He was the top layer of the upper crust of the Parisian nobility; his ancestors were Parisian, his wife was Parisian, his business and his friends were Parisian, his heart was Parisian. He took the not inconsiderable fortune given him by his parents and turned it into a considerable fortune by way of the cloth trade, running a fantastic import-export business in fabrics. The royal family and all the court were frequent customers of his. Business was so good that in 1355 Étienne was elected provost of the merchants, an acknowledgement by the Parisian business community that, if you needed a guy to represent the merchants to the king, you couldn’t do better than Étienne.

And oh boy did they want some representation, because in 1355 things were not looking good for anybody in Paris not named Étienne Marcel. The Black Death had only recently finished its dash across Eurasia and was still popping up now and again to destroy another village. France and England were a few decades into a suicide pact that would eventually be called the Hundred Years’ War, and when the armies (though “armies” implies a non-existent level of cohesion) weren’t fighting each other they were busy terrifying the villagers that had managed to avoid death by plague.

It was this war which would lead to Étienne’s choice. The year after he was elected provost, an English prince led an army across France in a raid whose only purpose seemed to be to get angry young men in England to go pillage in France instead of England. So the king of France gathered up his own angry young men, made a series of increasingly poor decisions, and found himself alone on the battlefield, surrounded by French corpses. He was taken to England in chains.

His father now a captive, the French regency fell onto his eighteen year old son Charles. Charles “the Wise” had not yet earned that moniker and was completely unprepared to handle the situation. The English could name their terms to Charles and so they demanded a huge amount of money in exchange for his father. With the country’s population cut in half by the plague, Charles would need to raise taxes quite a lot, and he knew that you can’t just raise taxes as your first official act without some sort of consent of the governed. So Charles called the Estates General to acquiesce to the new taxes, which is when some ambitious men saw an opportunity to Exact Some Concessions. If Charles wanted the wealthy men of France to finance his father’s release from prison, there was going to be reform.

Étienne Marcel was almost certainly not one of the instigators of this movement¹. He’d done quite well under the system; he had a good relationship with the royal family. But the provost of the merchants can’t ignore the rest of the merchants. It was either lead the Third Estate against the king or lose all influence. The revolt wasn’t seeking to abolish the monarchy - that would not be thinkable for a few hundred years - but to put some constraints on its powers. First the merchants and leading nobles asked politely for the king to agree to some broad reforms. Charles said no, so they turned to that old standby of power struggles: the mob.

The Parisian mob wasn’t yet the force that it would later become, but it was powerful enough to give pause to Charles and the royal family. With the regular French army shattered by the English and the rest of France dealing with the roving bands of mercenary companies that dotted the countryside during the wars, there was no one willing to defend Charles if the people of Paris wanted to make their wishes known by force. The stage was now set for Étienne to lead the Parisians against the king.

Here in the 21st century, we’re fairly used to stories about Parisians marching against the king, so it’s important to remember that Étienne did not have a grand history to draw from. It’s one thing to march to the palace with a few nobles who all know each other, and quite another to organize a mob. A mob needs purpose. A mob needs direction. Most importantly, a mob needs a banner, and a symbol to identify itself with. And who better to come up with a banner than a guy whose business is the import and export of cloth?

This was Étienne’s big decision: what colors to use for the revolt?

One of the colors was obvious. Any anti-monarchical revolt worth its salt needs to pretend to be on the side of the monarchy - a sort of “we’re saving the kingdom from the king”. So one of the mob’s colors needed to be the color of the royal family: blue. Blue was the color of the French monarchy dating all the way back to Clovis, the great uniter of the Frankish tribes who transformed them from a confederation of Germans in a swamp to the successors of Rome. Clovis’s blue came straight from the Virgin Mary herself, who told him to make for his banner three lilies on a blue field.²

But the other color, or colors, were less clear. Étienne could have gone in any number of directions - medieval Europe was not lacking for heraldry that he could’ve appropriated. He looked around his workshop, while visions of the upcoming march on the palace paraded through his mind. He prayed to whoever would listen. He waited for a response. Then he decided.

“The Provost of the Merchants Étienne Marcel and the Dauphin Charles”, a 19th century painting by Lucien Melingue. Some liberties were taken.

He chose red.

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Here are the consequences of Étienne’s decision, in a map:

All the countries in red are those countries whose flag contains a red that can trace itself back to Étienne Marcel’s choice of a color to lead a mob in Paris in 1356. All together, this map represents around a third of the population of the world.

Before we move on, some explanation seems necessary. While the revolt succeeded and Charles did sign on to a Great Reform project, none of it was actually implemented. Charles managed to retake control and the reform agenda was crushed. But Étienne hung around Paris for a while, helping to fortify the city against marauding bands of angry Englishmen. Part of this effort involved directing construction of a fortress that was named the Bastille. In a preview of every French revolution yet to come, Étienne was later murdered by the mob. But the memory of the revolt lived on, and Étienne became a sort of symbol for the merchant class in Paris - the man who had stood up to the king and asserted the rights of Parisians. The merchant guilds adopted Étienne’s red-and-blue as their official colors, and they became the colors of the city of Paris.

Let’s stay in Paris and jump forward a few hundred years, where another merchant class was leading another movement for reform against another king who had recently bankrupted the country in another war against England. That king also resisted the reforms, so another liberal led another mob to storm Étienne’s fortress. And this mob also needed an identifier. There were a couple of good options here - green had a long association as the color of liberty, and blue was favored by those looking for a connection to the recently broken-away United States. But this was a Parisian mob, so the choice was made to adopt the colors of Paris as the colors of the revolt. Blue-and-red cockades were pinned to hats, the fortress fell, and the Atlantic world began to cast off the old regimes.

France added the white of the Bourbon dynasty to the blue-and-red to signal that same “we’re saving the monarchy, not destroying it”. They cut off the king’s head anyway but kept his color. Italian patriots wanted to use the same colors as the French, but somebody misheard something while crossing the Alps and they ended up with red, white, and green. Chilean, Paraguayan, and Costa Rican patriots consciously chose the same colors as the French to show solidarity in their own independence movements, and José de San Martín liked the Chilean flag so much that he modeled the Peruvian flag off of it. After Haiti declared independence from France and murdered all the French people left on the island, the Haitians cut the white out of the red-white-blue tricolor - white having quite a different meaning in Haiti than in mainland France - and kept the red and blue. And when the Dominicans gained independence from Haiti, they added a white cross to the red-and-blue Haitian flag. Then they put an open Bible in the center of that cross, just in case anybody didn’t get the point.³ When Romanian patriots revolted against the Ottomans, they took the French revolutionary motto (liberty, equality, fraternity) and replaced “equality” with “justice”. They then took the French tricolor and swapped out the middle white for a yellow, in keeping with the theme. Moldova took the Romanian flag and added an eagle.

For all these groups, the French tricolor represented liberty, equality, and fraternity, and that’s what they wanted. But quite a few people within revolutionary France wanted more than that. They wanted to do away with all vestiges of the old order. The tricolor represented compromise with the monarchy, the church, and the old feudal society, all of which the radicals rejected. The French army had a long tradition of flying a solid red flag whenever martial law was in effect. After the National Guard flew this red flag to try and suppress a radical uprising in 1791, the radical Jacobin club had a great idea. They took the tricolor and stripped it of its white and blue - the symbols of the current and former royal dynasties - and declared that the red flag meant not the suppression of revolution under martial law but the continuation of the revolution. France would not be truly free until red took over the whole flag. This is a powerful image, and it stayed in the collective consciousness long after the Jacobins had been suppressed. It came back in force during the French Revolution of 1848, where the nascent socialists took up the cause of the Jacobins and adopted the solid red flag as their own. The Bolsheviks followed the French socialists in using red as their primary color, and so red became the symbol of world communism. Nearly every country that had a communist or socialist revolution amended their flag or replaced it altogether to include the communist red. We still see this in the flags of Belarus, China, North Korea, Vietnam, Bangladesh, Angola, and Zimbabwe.⁴

There are a few other categories of flag containing Étienne’s red. While forcing the Ottomans out of the Middle East during the First World War, the French and British were competing for influence in the newly conquered territories, and French flags were flying all over. A British diplomat wanted to counter the French by associating a British presence with Arab nationalism, and for that they needed an Arab flag. That diplomat, a guy named Mark Sykes⁵, noticed that two of the three colors on the French flag were associated with two Islamic dynasties: white for the Umayyads - the leaders of the early caliphate that conquered the known world - and red for the Hashemites who were joining the British in the war. He replaced the French blue with the black of the Abbasid Caliphate (the successor to the Umayyads), and there was formed a tricolor to challenge the French - not British but Arab.

Sykes and the Hashemites workshopped the flag - red, white, and black were the colors of the German Empire, and that wouldn’t do, so they added a green stripe to represent Islam as a whole. And at the insistence of the Hashemites, they moved the red to a triangle on the left, as a sign that the Hashemites would eventually unify the whole Islamic world⁶:

The Pan-Arab flag, flying in 2006.

Variations of this flag are now used by Syria, Jordan, Iraq, Kuwait, the UAE, Yemen, Palestine, Egypt, Sudan, Libya, and Western Sahara.

And then there’s the African flags. The pan-African colors are red, black, and green, and many African nations just take the red and green, then add yellow as an homage to the flag of Ethiopia - the one African nation that successfully resisted European colonization in the 19th century. Senegal, Guinea-Bissau, Guinea, Mali, Burkina Faso, Ghana, Togo, Benin, Chad, Cameroon, the Central African Republic, the Republic of the Congo, South Sudan, Kenya, Malawi, and Mauritius all use these colors in their flags, and one of the Caribbean islands also uses the pan-African imagery.

While Ethiopia’s colors are ancient and have nothing to do with Étienne’s red, the red-black-green of pan-Africanism dates back to 1920 in the Americas. This was a time when being incredibly racist was the national American pastime, and so one of the most popular songs was about an imagined black man wishing for a flag for his race that included a chicken, a pork chop, and some razor blades⁷. Understandably, some black leaders weren’t on board with this and decided that they should have a real pan-African flag. Marcus Garvey took the colors of the two most well-known popular uprisings of the time and added a black stripe to represent all black peoples, both in the old world and the new. Those two uprisings were the Irish rebellion against the British and the communist revolutions in Eastern Europe - green and red, respectively. Garvey’s pan-African ideas were very popular among the leaders of newly independent African nations in the latter half of the 20th century, so pan-African colors became the order of the day in African flags. And so we can trace the red directly back to Étienne.

There are a couple countries on our map that haven’t been mentioned yet, and these are just countries that used to be under French occupation. They threw off the French yoke but kept the colors. And there we have it - a third of the world, directly or indirectly, pledging allegiance to Étienne’s red⁸.

2. Denis

Why did Étienne choose red?

There’s no contemporary record of a grand speech, a mob consensus, or even a diary entry that gives us a hint. But in the years following, a story did emerge for the meaning of the red. Before I discuss the most likely explanation, let’s dispense with a few alternative hypotheses.

One possible explanation is that he just had a lot of red cloth lying around that he couldn’t move. Red was the color of the ruling house of England and the ruling house of Navarre, both of whom were at war with France⁹. It’s certainly possible that red was simply out of favor, Étienne saw an opportunity to move his red cloth, and so he chose red as the mob’s second color. While this is certainly the most fun explanation, there’s no evidence at all to support it. (But if you want to claim that the banners of the People’s Liberation Army were inspired purely by a 14th century business decision, I won’t stop you.)

Another reason is the most obvious one: red is the color of blood. If you want to evoke the fear of violence then red is not a bad choice. But Étienne wasn’t trying to evoke the fear of violence, he was trying to convince the king that this mob only wanted the best. So that’s probably not it.

He could have intended it as a statement about the church. Red was the traditional papal color, representing the martyrdom of Jesus and the attachment that the church leadership had to said martyrdom - the cardinals had been wearing red on official papal business for over a hundred years prior to the rebellion. So this could have been a religious statement, claiming the power that the pope has for the people. But the reforms that Charles was forced to agree to said nothing about the church, Étienne didn’t seem to have any problems with the church, and anyway that kind of open anti-Catholicism was still a hundred years or so from exploding in France.

Okay, so if those weren’t the inspirations, then what was? Well, the story soon became that the red of the Parisian revolt was directly by inspired by, and pointing to, the patron saint of Paris, Saint Denis. And this makes all the sense in the world. Étienne was Parisian and Catholic before he was anything else; it’s natural that he would have kept a dialogue with Saint Denis. It’s quite likely that, if the saint was indeed his inspiration, he would have mentioned it to his compatriots. The fact that the red because associated with Saint Denis after the insurrection supports this.

Lacking a better explanation, I see no reason to quibble with historical consensus. Étienne was inspired by Saint Denis to choose red. So if Étienne’s red is in fact Denis’s red, it’s worth asking who the guy was.

Who was Saint Denis? At first, this seems like a pretty simple question. Denis was a missionary to Paris way back in the third century, in the heady days of official Roman persecution of Christians. These persecutions were heavily localized, and in Denis’s time Paris was one of the more anti-Christian centers. Denis arrived to Paris, got to preaching, and convinced enough locals to join his church that the government had to intervene. They arrested Denis and chopped his head off, whereupon he picked his head back up and walked back into town while preaching a sermon on repentance. All in all, pretty standard stuff for a third-century saint¹⁰. Denis’s popularity grew throughout the centuries so that by Étienne’s time he was the most popular saint in Paris. Definitely the kind of guy who you’d ask for advice when planning to lead a mob.

Painting by an anonymous Parisian miniaturist who was active a few decades after Étienne. Wearing red and blue, don’t you know?

But there’s a problem. The man that Étienne thought he was praying to was not Saint Denis of Paris.

Stick with me here. “Denis” is the French form of the Greek name “Dionysius”. And if we take that Bible in the center of the Dominican flag and turn to Acts chapter 17, we read about Paul preaching to the Athenians:

Now when they heard of the resurrection of the dead, some mocked. But others said, “We will hear you again about this.” So Paul went out from their midst. But some men joined him and believed, among whom also were Dionysius the Areopagite and a woman named Damaris and others with them. After this Paul left Athens.

Church tradition has is that this Dionysius guy became the leader of the church in Athens. And that makes a lot of sense - of course he was a leader of the Athenian church, why else would the author of Acts include the name of a random Athenian¹¹? We don't have anything other source that mentions Dionysius, either in Acts or in contemporary sources. He led the church in Athens faithfully, and died.

And then a few hundred years later, his writings were discovered. And it turned out that he had a lot to say! He had four lengthy works and a handful of letters, all of which fit very nicely within a brand of sixth-century Syrian Christianity that was heavily influenced by Neoplatonism. In one of the many contentious Christological debates of the time, the side that eventually won pointed to Dionysius as proof that their position was correct, and so Dionysius’s writings became part of the canon in the east. Jump forward a few hundred years, and Dionysius was a revered scholar in the east and almost completely unknown in the west. At some point in the ninth century, a French king got a copy of Dionysius’s works from Constantinople and gifted it to the abbey of Saint Denis in Paris.

So the monks set about translating Dionysius’s works from Greek to French. And more importantly, they set about telling everybody who would listen that the monastery of Saint Denis in Paris was in possession of the writings of Saint Denis, who was the bishop of Athens and who had guided the church through some of its fiercest debates and who was basically a doctor of the church all the way over there in New Rome. And if anybody then took that to mean that Saint Denis the Athenian had somehow made his way to Paris and been martyred there, the monks weren’t going to dissuade them. So when Étienne Marcel (and everybody else in Paris) was thinking about and praying to Saint Denis, he was actually thinking about and praying to a first-century Athenian philosopher, not a third-century French martyr. “Saint Denis the Areopagite” was a very common invocation in 14th century France.

Okay, so Denis was actually Greek. So what?

Well as I’m sure you’ve noticed by now, all those 6th-century Syrian works were not in fact written by the first-century bishop of Athens. The question of who they actually were written by has divided scholarship since the first time somebody questioned the authorship. Opinions on the real identity of “pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite” are incredibly varied. He has been identified as Greek, Syrian, Egyptian, and Arabic. He has been called a pagan, a Platonist, a Neoplatonist, an Orthodox Christian, and a member of every heretical Christian sect you can think of. Some earlier authors thought he was Jewish, just to add to the confusion.

But two facts are certain. The first is that his writings were perfectly placed to gain wide acceptance in the 6th century church. At a time when accusations of heresy were rampant and truly dangerous, Dionysius managed to thread the needle well enough that both sides could point to him as an example of Good Orthodox Christianity. I mentioned earlier that one side in a Christological debate used Dionysius as an authority figure. Well, the other side used him too! At no point did anybody try to throw him out.

The second fact is that he really wanted the name Dionysius the Areopagite to be associated with this group of texts. Sprinkled through the letters are references to 1st-century events well known in church history that Dionysius claims to have witnessed, many of which would make far more sense for a Judean than an Athenian. Yet “Dionysius the Areopagite” was the name that the author chose.

To recap so far: in the 5th century, as Greek paganism is in its final throes, a group of texts appears from an unknown source. These texts are philosophically dense, clearly the work of a genius, expertly weaving together orthodox Christianity and Greek Neoplatonism. Both interesting enough to be spread rapidly, yet clever enough to avoid censorship by a trigger-happy regime. Through them, the notoriety of Dionysius the Areopagite spreads throughout the Christian world and takes over the identity of not one but two saints, until a man named Étienne Marcel finds himself praying to Saint Dionysius the Areopagite when in need of a banner to confront a king. He puts the red of Dionysius on the poor Dauphin. And the wheel of history turns and turns, until Dionysius finds himself representing a third of the world.

So who was Dionysius really?

3. Dionysus

What is an Areopagite?

In Paul’s day, an Areopagite was somebody who worked for the Supreme Court in Athens, which was called the Areopagus. St Dionysius, the first bishop of Athens, was originally a member of this most prestigious court. Demosthenes says of the court:

This is the only tribunal which no despot, no oligarchy, no democracy, has ever dared to deprive of its jurisdiction in cases of murder, all men agreeing that in such cases no jurisprudence of their own devising could be more effective than that which has been devised in this court. In addition to these great merits, here, and here alone, no convicted defendant and no defeated prosecutor has ever made good any complaint against the justice of the verdict given.

So it tracks that a member of this court would become a leader in the Athenian church. But by the time that our mystery Areopagite was writing, the Areopagus had ceased to exist. So how can an Areopagite exist without an Areopagus? Is an Areopagite really just a member of a court? Wait, what does Areopagite mean? That’s not the Greek word for ‘lawyer’.

What is an Areopagite?

“Areopagus” is an Anglicization of an amalgamation of “Ἄρειος” and “Πάγος”. “Πάγος” is the Greek word for “hill”, and “Ἄρειος” is the god Ares. The hill of Ares is a hill in Athens where the court met, and it’s called that for a very particular reason. Euripides explains for us in one of his plays:

For there is a holy tribunal there, which Zeus once established for Ares, when his hands were stained with blood-pollution.

Back to Demosthenes to explain more:

in this court alone the gods condescended both to render and to demand satisfaction for homicide, and to sit in judgement upon contending litigants,—Poseidon, according to the legend, deigning to demand justice from Ares on behalf of his son Halirrothius, and the twelve gods to adjudicate between the Eumenides and Orestes.

So the court was established to try Ares for murdering Poseidon’s son. Why would he do that? Apollodorus¹² in his Library gives us a little more:

Agraulus had a daughter Alcippe by Ares. In attempting to violate Alcippe, Halirrhothius, son of Poseidon and a nymph Euryte, was detected and killed by Ares. Impeached by Poseidon, Ares was tried in the Areopagus before the twelve gods, and was acquitted.

Ah. It’s because Poseidon’s son tried to rape his daughter. Ares found him and killed him. Poseidon demanded that Ares answer for the murder, so the gods put Ares on trial.

And their verdict was innocent. The gods did not judge that Ares didn’t do the crime - he readily admitted to it - but they judged that the crime was justified by the horror of the act which preceded it.

Who judged Ares? Demosthenes and Apollodorus agree that it was the “twelve gods” - that is, Zeus, Poseidon, Hera, Demeter, Aphrodite, Athena, Artemis, Apollo, Ares¹³, Hephaestus, Hermes…and Dionysus.

Who is Dionysius the Areopagite? He is the god Dionysus¹⁴, acting in his capacity as a judge on the Hill of Ares. Dionysus the Areopagite set the precedent that some injustices by the powerful are so heinous that they demand blood in response. It would not do for Ares to sit by while his daughter suffered at the hands of Poseidon’s son. The god of war had to act. And Dionysus approved. He is still approving.

Who but a god would be capable of writing such philosophy, blending the Greek and Christian traditions so expertly that nobody questioned where they came from? The bishop of Athens was long dead by the time that “Dionysus the Areopagite” was making his name known, but the god was very much alive. Worship of the Greek gods had been proscribed by the emperors, but worship of the saints was just fine, and when Dionysus saw an opportunity he took it. Everywhere Dionysius the Areopagite was invoked, Dionysus the Areopagite responded, still judging on the Hill of Ares. When Étienne prayed to Dionysius the Areopagite and asked Shall we fight? And under what sign?, Dionysus responded Yes. You must fight. Justice demands it. And you will fight under the sign of Ares.

From the streets of Paris to the sugar fields of Saint Domingue, from the Andes to the Carpathians. To the peoples of the Middle East, of Africa, and of the Americas, all rising up and throwing out the exploitative imperialists. To the workers of Minsk and to the peasants of Hunan, uniting under the red flag and claiming what’s theirs by right. Dionysus’s banner led the charge, pleading the cause of the god of war:

You must follow the path of Ares. A great injustice has been done, and there is no one who will defend the righteous. Only one path remains. You must take up the sword. You must shed blood. The gods will judge you innocent.

And what is the color of Ares?

1. The main instigator was probably a guy named Robert le Coq, which yes is French for “Chicken Bob”

2. The lilies were a replacement for the three frogs previously on the Frankish banner. Funnily enough, Revelation speaks of three demons in the form of frogs, which has led to some interesting interpretations on the eschatological role of France.

3. The Dominican constitution actually has a chapter-and-verse that the Bible is supposed to be open to (John 8:32), but nobody actually making Dominican flags is going to sew text onto the tiny Bible, which I think makes it impossible to follow the Dominican constitution. Unclear if any Dominicans have used this argument to throw out the whole constitution, but they should.

4. Cuba did not change their flag after the revolution, and as far as I can tell the red on it has no connection to France.

5. He of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, which divided up the Middle East between Britain and France. He was also quite instrumental in the Balfour declaration. So yeah, the Palestinian flag was designed by the guy who was maybe the most influential in ensuring that there would be no Palestinian state.

6. Which hasn’t happened yet, but they’ve still got time.

7. Don’t ask.

8. I assume I’ve made some mistakes here, but hopefully the omissions and the errors cancel each other out. You could quibble with the Pan-Arab connection, but it’s too good not to be true.

9. And led by “the black prince” and “Charles the Bad” respectively, in case you were wondering what to think about them.

10. Which is easier? To say “your sins are forgiven”, or to say “rise, take up your head and walk”?

11. Depending on who you ask, Damaris was either another leader in the church, Dionysius’s wife, or a prostitute.

12. Probably not actually Apollodorus. Let’s call him pseudo-Apollodorus. There’s a theme here.

13. Presumably Poseidon and Ares recused themselves, though I’m not up to date on divine jurisprudence.

14. “Dionysius” is of course just an evolved form of “Dionysus”.