French citizens are tearing down the EU flag from town halls and schools to reclaim their country from Brussels, according to a viral X post that is fuelling a long-running anti-EU narrative depicting the bloc as “tyrannical”.
The post shows a video next to a picture of European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen. In the video we see a man taking down an EU flag that had been flying alongside the French and Occitan flags.
A reverse image search of the video leads us to the X account of Christophe Barthès, the newly-elected mayor of Carcassonne and a member of the far-right National Rally party, who posted the clip to his profile on 29 March.
“Out with the European flags at the town hall, in with the French flags!” he said.
The Carcassonne mayor’s office did not respond to our request for comment as of the time of publishing.
Nevertheless, the video is authentic and reflects Barthès’s Eurosceptic views, which are typical of the National Rally in general. However, it’s misleading to suggest that an anti-EU flag wave has swept through France.
French Response, an X account run by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs tackling disinformation, responded to the viral post, saying, “1 out of 34874 municipalities is hardly ‘France’.”
Other newly-elected National Rally mayors have since done the same, such as Carla Muti in Canohès, near Perpignan.
Do town halls legally have to fly the European flag?
The story has also prompted misleading claims about whether flying European flags from public buildings in France is legally required.
Some social media users argue a 2019 law forces town halls in communes with more than 1,500 inhabitants to fly the French and European flags, as well as display France’s national motto (“liberté, égalité, fraternité”) and a portrait of the president.
However, there’s currently no French law requiring town halls to display the European flag. Those that have up until now have done so as a matter of custom rather than any legal obligation.
A bill to make it mandatory to fly the European flag was voted through by the French parliament’s National Assembly in 2023, but the Senate hasn’t followed suit, leaving it stuck.
In fact, the same bill would also force them to fly the French flag, as even this is not legally required at the moment.
As things stand, the famous French tricolour flag only needs to be flown during national ceremonies, when welcoming foreign heads of state or government, or when it needs to be hung at half-mast during times of official mourning, according to France’s Ministry of the Interior.
A government directive specifies that the French flag should take the “place of honour”, meaning the European should be on the right from the building’s perspective and appearing on the left to a viewer standing in the street.
Nevertheless, there is another government directive saying that the EU flag must be flown on Europe Day, 9 May, and a law that says schools have to fly both the European and French flags all the time.
The 2013 “Peillon law” says that the French motto, the France’s tricolour flag and the European flag must be displayed on the facades of public and private secondary schools and educational establishments.
The ‘EU flag’ is actually the flag of Europe as a whole
The removal of the European flag is often seen as a slight against the European Union, but the flag actually finds its origins in the separate Council of Europe.
The pan-European human rights organisation, which counts 46 members compared to the EU’s 27, adopted the blue flag with 12 stars as a symbol to represent the continent in 1955.
The European Communities, a precursor to the European Union, only took on the flag itself around 30 years later, following a vote by the European Parliament in 1983 and approval by the European Council in 1985. It was officially inaugurated in 1986.
As such, while the flag is most commonly associated with and used to represent the EU, it still technically covers a number of countries outside the bloc and the continent as a whole.