A tricolour is about as simple as a flag gets: three colors, three bands, nothing else. Simple doesn’t mean uninteresting, though. The design traces back to the French Revolution, when blue, white, and red were adopted to represent liberty, equality, and fraternity, and the idea spread from there faster than almost any other flag concept in history. Newly independent nations across Europe, Africa, and the Americas reached for the same basic template, sometimes copying France directly, sometimes arriving at three stripes independently and just landing on similar colors by coincidence.
The design splits two ways: vertical bands, the format France itself uses, and horizontal bands, the older layout that predates the Revolution. Below, both versions, along with the countries that fly them.
Vertical Tricolours
France’s own layout, copied stripe for stripe from Italy to Mali to Romania.
Horizontal Tricolours
The older format, still carried by Germany, the Netherlands, and dozens of others.