Russian James wrote:Plain white flag? And no, I'm not being facetious...
Not only are you not being facetious, but you're quite on the money. To make it short and pithy, there was no such thing as a French national flag during the
Ancien Régime. No such flag was flown on the front of public buildings or carried by the king's retinue or household on those occasions when he took the field with the army.
However, white became associated with French royalty over time as it evoked purity. White crosses had been in use since the middle ages, but the practice became official in the late C16th with Henry IV, who adopted the white of the Huguenot faction. Henry's successors were not too thrilled with this protestant connotation, notably Louis XIII who placed the kingdom of France under the protection of the Virgin Mary and claimed white was her colour.
So white flags implicitly came to mark the presence of royal authority wherever they were flown - which is why the colonel's standard was white in both infantry and cavalry units as white suggested that the colonel proprietor derived his authority from the king himself. White sashes became the distinctive mark of French troops and white cockades began to appear during the reign of Louis XIII. After the battle of Fleurus in 1690, all French military flags (infantry colours and cavalry standards alike) received a white scarf which had to be affixed to the shaft just below the spearhead.
The various white flags shown above are all colonel's colours or cavalry standards.
Motorway : your Seneffe flag looks like a cavalry standard to me. The
Nihil Obstabit Eunti motto ('None shall oppose him as he goes') rules it out as a royal flag since Louis XIV's motto was
Nec pluribus impar. I'd have to hit the books to see if
Nihil Obstabit Eunti fits in with known descriptions of 1670's French flags, but I can't think of anything right now off the top of my head and it doesn't seem to tally with the recorded
Maison du Roi or
Gendarmerie standards, so it may well have been taken from a gentleman's regiment - i.e a regular line cavalry unit.
18th century guy : the white colonel's colour with golden fleur-de-lys would not necessarily be Swiss. Quite a few royal French regiments had them as well. The only distinguishing feature for white Swiss colours would have been stitched white wavy piles, which can't be seen in the picture. The small square flag on the ground is definitely a cavalry standard, though.
The gold fleurs-de-lys on an azure field below are the traditional arms of France, dating back to the 13th century : this heraldic device was still widely used during the
ancien régime, but it was the white flag which really came to symbolise both the royal authority and the identity of the kingdom of France. White flags with gold lilies were supposed to be flown in the presence of members of the royal family, and flags with a pure white background when the king himself was there, though once again these were not official national flags but rather symbols of royal power.
One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I'll never know.
