Red
18th to 20th century

In the 18th century, red began to take on a new identity as the color of resistance and revolution. It was already associated with blood, and with danger; a red flag hoisted before a battle meant that no prisoners would be taken. In 1793-94, red became the color of the French Revolution. A red Phrygian cap, or "liberty cap", was part of the uniform of the sans-culottes, the most militant faction of the revolutionaries.

In the late 18th century, during a strike English dock workers carried red flags, and it thereafter became closely associated with the new labour movement, and later with the Labour Party in the United Kingdom, founded in 1900.

In Paris in 1832, a red flag was carried by working-class demonstrators in the failed June Rebellion, an event immortalised in Les Misérables), and later in the 1848 French Revolution. The red flag was proposed as the new national French flag during the 1848 revolution, but was rejected by at the urging of the poet and statesman Alphonse Lamartine in favour of the tricolor flag. It appeared again as the flag of the short-lived Paris Commune in 1871. It was then adopted by Karl Marx and the new European movements of socialism and communism. Soviet Russia adopted a red flag following the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917. The People's Republic of China adopted the red flag following the Chinese Communist Revolution. It was adopted by North Vietnam in 1954, and by all of Vietnam in 1975.
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