France - National Guard Color 15th Battalion, 1870.
This French Battalion Color was formerly part of the collection of the M.H. de Young Museum. Founded in 1895 in San Francisco's Golden Gate Park, the de Young Museum was San Francisco's first museum. It gained immediate success from its opening and has been an integral part of the cultural fabric of the city and a cherished destination for millions of residents and visitors to the region for over 100 years.
Michael Henry de Young, 1849 -1925, was an American journalist and businessman who owned and published the San Francisco Chronicle. He used his wealth to further his eclectic tastes and accumulated a collection of immense variety, and such diverse objects such as sculptures, paintings, flags, polished tree slabs, paintings, objet d'art, jewelry, a door reputedly from Newgate Prison, birds' eggs, handcuffs and thumbscrews, and a collection of knives and forks.
As San Francisco's premier repository the de Young Museum came to house a number of flags.
The colors blue-white-red became popular during the French Revolution, first as a cockade and then for clothing and decoration. Flags of all kinds quickly followed. The navy added the three colors to its plain white flag in 1790 and adopted the Tricolor as its ensign four years later. In 1812 Napoleon established the Tricolor as the basic design for all military units, a practice consistently observed since 1830.
Its inscriptions and distinctive finial can identify this flag, from the De Young Museum. Following the defeat of the French Army in the 1870 war with Prussia and the creation of the radical Commune in Paris, the regular Army was replaced by a National Guard (the term 'National Guard' as used in France was not the equivalent of the US at that time which would have been properly labeled a 'militia'). This 15th Battalion color features the dates 1848 and 1870, honoring the victories in those years by republican forces. The imperial eagle has been replaced as a finial by a simple spearhead. This flag is very rare as the National Guard existed for only a few years and its colors were unofficial local issues.
The staff for this flag is ZFC1485 and both form part of ZFC's De Young Museum collection.
Provenance:
• Made in France for the 15th Battalion of Le Guard Nationale
• Used in Paris in 1870 by Paris Commune.
• Acquired personally by Michael Henry de Young in France.
• Conveyed to de Young Museum.
• Sold via Butterfield & Butterfield Auctions in San Francisco, CA, to the Zaricor Flag Collection through Auction held on August 25-26, 1997
Sources:
History of the de Young Museum, de Young, Fine Arts Museums of San Francisco, 16 November 2011:
http://deyoung.famsf.org/about/history-de-young-museum
The Paris National Guard, Jules Vallès 1871, 16 November 2011, from: http://www.marxists.org/history/france/paris-commune/valles/guard.htm
National Guard (la Garde nationale), Wikipedia, 16 November 2011, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Guard_%28France%29
Le Gouvernement de la Défense Nationale, Wikipedia, 16 November 2011, from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Government_of_National_Defense
Image Credits:
Zaricor Flag Collection
