AHC: Non-Tricolor Bonapartist Flag

But appropriating the legacy of the Revolution was a brilliant stroke on Napoleon's part; it helped keep the great mass of French people behind him. I don't see how he profits by distancing himself from it.
 
But appropriating the legacy of the Revolution was a brilliant stroke on Napoleon's part; it helped keep the great mass of French people behind him. I don't see how he profits by distancing himself from it.
Ja. How the HECK he managed to make himself Emperor AND keep (most of) thrust of the Republican revolution and revolutionaries, I'm sure I don't know. But he did. His position would be very much weaker if he cut himself off from that support, which dropping the Tricolour would imply.
 
A golden imperial eagle in a blue field would do fine, if Napoleon wanted to distance himself from the Revolution and lose much of the support he had among the people.
 
What about something like this battle standard:

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Maybe a coat of arms instead of the text in the center?
 
Blue and red are Paris's colours. And Napoléon would have to be pretty damn foolish to try something like this. Someone did want to go back to the with flag with fleur-de-lys: the count of Chambord at the beginning of the Third Republic. He was all set to become king of France but that position was one step too far. Napoléon, as had been sai, very cleverly mixed Revolutionary innovations with Ancien Régime traditions but there are some lines even he wouldn't have dared cross.
 
...ah. I was thinking, red being the color of revolution and bloodshed, zee Bonapartes would not want to risk an overthrow.

Colors can stand for a lot of different things. Many countries' flags have red in them. The Dutch and Russians adopted blue-white-red (or white-blue-red) tricolors before France did, and neither has any particular revolutionary meaning.
 
Colors can stand for a lot of different things. Many countries' flags have red in them. The Dutch and Russians adopted blue-white-red (or white-blue-red) tricolors before France did, and neither has any particular revolutionary meaning.
Wasn't the Dutch tricolour still employing orange, not red, at this time?

Also, as you said, red can mean many things, and the red on the French tricolour tended to be associated with blood during the time of Revolutionary zeal.
 
Wasn't the Dutch tricolour still employing orange, not red, at this time?

Also, as you said, red can mean many things, and the red on the French tricolour tended to be associated with blood during the time of Revolutionary zeal.

The Dutch switched to red before this. Orange didn't show up very well at sea, apparently.

The French tricolor as a whole certainly had revolutionary connotations, because it was adopted by the National Convention. But I think that would have been true regardless of the colors used. I'm not sure, back then, that there was as strong a specific association between red and revolution as we think of now. I think that is more a legacy of the 1848 revolutions.

Blue and red were traditionally associated with Paris, apparently because blue represented Saint Martin and red Saint Denis. The color white did have a political association; it had been used by the Bourbons going back to Henri IV. So the flag actually originally was intended to be symbolic of constitutional monarchy. I would think that if any of the three colors would be dropped by Napoleon, it would be white.
 
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Ja. How the HECK he managed to make himself Emperor AND keep (most of) thrust of the Republican revolution and revolutionaries, I'm sure I don't know. But he did. His position would be very much weaker if he cut himself off from that support, which dropping the Tricolour would imply.

If you understand the revolutions views of rome (they dressed their senators i togas for peepsake), it is not that hard, Napoleon made himself Ceasar more than a new traditional monarch.
 
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