Netherlands and Luxembourg

Getting into some of the flag weirdness in Europe, I thought I'd start with the oldest tricolor in Europe and one that looks remarkably similar, and talk about them for a time.

The oldest flag with three bands of different color, a tricolor, belongs to the Netherlands:

I suppose this makes it the first of the world's red-white-and blue flag that's officially recognized as a national flag, but the United Kingdom of England and Scotland had those colors as well pretty early with their Union Jack. It wasn't always this way, but I'll get to that in a second.

The following flag is Luxembourg, a former duchy that somehow survived with its autonomy intact. They adopted a red-white-blue tricolor that was very similar to the Dutch; they use a lighter shade of red as well as a lighter shade of blue. Also, which for some reason isn't shown on this blog, the Luxembourg standard is longer than the Dutch's.

It's not surprising then that people regularly mistake it for the Dutch flag. The original Dutch design had the lighter blue, but, because of the powerful house of Orange---one of the old-school leading families of the Low Counties during their various struggles for independence---orange was used instead of red. Here's that flag, called the Prince's Flag:

Two things happened that lead them to darken up the blue and go with red. The first was that the lighter blue didn't stand out so well at sea, seen from a distance. The second, which is much more interesting I think, was that the orange dye was unstable and the yellow was bled out by the sun after only a few days, leaving the red pigment. Quickly they stopped fighting it, and flew an orange banner next to the flag when inside. Today, as dyes have changed since the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, an orange banner is usually flown along with the flag, showing allegiance with the house of Orange.

The orange-white-blue color scheme is still in use today by places that have a historical allegiance to the Netherlands, like the city of Albany, and, seen here, a flag I used to see all the time, the flag of the City of New York:

The people of Luxembourg, however many of them that there are, have been growing feisty to change up the flag. They're tired of having their banner always getting mixed up with the Netherlands, and are looking at their civil ensign as some kind of a savior. A civil ensign is a flag used by merchant ships that's recognized as coming from that particular country. They usually have some kind of incorporated design from the national flag, but not always. Gaining steam in tiny Luxembourg is the desire to adopt their civil ensign as the national flag, seeing as how the "red lion" is very popular with the kiddies:

At the Tour de France recently, supporters of and from Luxembourg were sporting the red lion, trying to bring awareness to the lawmakers back home who don't always agree, and aren't interested in the change.