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Natural Earth 1:10m · 18 regions
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French Regions Flags Quiz

The flags flown for France's regions on a flat map, overseas regions in insets — from the Breton Gwenn-ha-du and the Moor's head of Corsica to the volcano of Réunion. Grand Est and Hauts-de-France have only logos, so they stay on the map but out of the deck. Click a region or drag the flag onto it: three tries per flag, then the map shows the answer. One name, one hint and one skip are free for the round.

Drag the flag onto a region, or click the region. Name shows the region the flag belongs to, Hint opens all three facts about it; after three misses, or Skip, the map places it for you. Scroll or pinch to zoom in.

All 16 regions and their capitals, the flags explained, more maps ↓

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French Regions Flags Quiz

Drag the flags of France's regions, overseas regions included, onto a flat map of France, three tries each. No labels.

Old provinces on new regions: where these banners come from

France's regions are administrative creations; the present thirteen were drawn in 2016 by merging most of the old twenty-two. No region has a flag prescribed by law, so what they fly, beyond a logo, is the heraldry of the provinces folded into them. Île-de-France is simply the royal arms of France, three gold fleurs-de-lis on blue. Normandy is the two gold leopards of its medieval dukes on red; the English royal arms carry three. Occitanie is the cross of the counts of Toulouse, gold on red, hollow and tipped with twelve small balls. Grand Est and Hauts-de-France have adopted nothing beyond a logotype, so they stay on the map without a flag.

Quartered cloths for the merged regions

The regions created in 2016 solved the problem by quartering. Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes puts four provinces on one cloth: the red gonfanon of Auvergne on gold, the white cross of Savoy on red, the white lion of the Lyonnais and the blue dolphin of the Dauphiné on gold. Bourgogne-Franche-Comté combines the two Burgundies, fleurs-de-lis inside a red and white border and gold and blue diagonal bands inside a red one, with the gold lion of Franche-Comté on blue sprinkled with gold billets. Pays de la Loire joins Anjou's blue field strewn with fleurs-de-lis to the ermine of Brittany, for Nantes, and lays over the seam a red heart topped by a crown and a cross, the emblem of the Vendée. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur is the busiest cloth here: the red and gold stripes of the counts of Provence at the hoist, the dolphin again above, and the red eagle of Nice standing on waves below.

Brittany and Corsica: the two everyone knows

Brittany's Gwenn-ha-du, 'white and black' in Breton, was designed in 1923: nine stripes, five black for the old bishoprics of Gallo-speaking Upper Brittany and four white for those of Breton-speaking Lower Brittany, with a canton of eleven black ermine spots for the duchy. Corsica is a black Moor's head in profile on white, a white band knotted behind the head; the story usually told is that Pasquale Paoli, in his eighteenth-century Corsican republic, had the band lifted from the eyes to the forehead.

Sun, volcano and star: the overseas regions

The five overseas regions sit in insets; none of their flags replaces the tricolour, the only official one. Réunion's is a red triangle rising from the bottom edge, the volcano Piton de la Fournaise, with five yellow sunrays fanning from its summit across a blue sky. French Guiana is green above and yellow below, split on the diagonal, with a red star in the middle, for forest and gold, adopted in 2010. Martinique's is the newest in the deck, a red triangle at the hoist with green over black on the fly, adopted in 2023 to replace a colonial ensign of four white snakes on blue. Guadeloupe keeps three gold fleurs-de-lis on a blue band above a black field with a golden sun and a stalk of green sugar cane. Mayotte's is white with the department's arms: a white crescent on blue over two yellow ylang-ylang flowers on red, held by two seahorses.

Fleurs-de-lis, dolphins and lions: the pairs that get mixed up

Four flags carry fleurs-de-lis. Île-de-France has three on blue. Centre-Val de Loire has the same three under a white label of three points, the mark the dukes of Orléans added to the royal arms, inside a border of red and white squares from the arms of Touraine. Pays de la Loire has many small ones with ermine and the heart beside them, and Guadeloupe's three sit on a narrow band with the sun below. The dolphin appears twice, in Auvergne-Rhône-Alpes and Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur, because both took a slice of the old Dauphiné; the gonfanon marks the first, the yellow and red stripes the second. Ermine appears on Brittany and Pays de la Loire, but only Brittany has stripes. Four flags have a lion, and Nouvelle-Aquitaine's is the only red one: a lion rampant on white with three wavy blue lines at the hoist.

All 16 regions and their capitals

16 regions are on this map, listed in alphabetical order with their capitals — the same facts the Hint button draws on. Grand Est and Hauts-de-France are drawn too but take no flag.

  1. Auvergne-Rhône-AlpesLyon
  2. Bourgogne-Franche-ComtéDijon
  3. BrittanyRennes
  4. Centre-Val de LoireOrléans
  5. CorsicaAjaccio
  6. French GuianaCayenne
  7. Grand Est
  8. GuadeloupeBasse-Terre
  9. Hauts-de-France
  10. Île-de-FranceParis
  11. MartiniqueFort-de-France
  12. MayotteMamoudzou
  13. NormandyRouen
  14. Nouvelle-AquitaineBordeaux
  15. OccitanieToulouse
  16. Pays de la LoireNantes
  17. Provence-Alpes-Côte d'AzurMarseille
  18. RéunionSaint-Denis

Questions about these flags

Why do Grand Est and Hauts-de-France take no flag on this map?

Both regions came out of the 2016 merger and use only a logotype, so the deck has nothing to deal for them; they stay on the map as locked outlines. The old provinces inside them have flags, the red and white of Alsace and the three silver alerions of Lorraine among them, but none has been taken up for the region as a whole.

What do the stripes of the Breton flag stand for?

The Gwenn-ha-du has nine stripes: five black for the five old bishoprics of Upper Brittany, where Gallo was spoken, and four white for the four of Lower Brittany, where Breton was. The canton of ermine spots is the arms of the old duchy. Morvan Marchal designed it in 1923, and it is now in everyday use across the region.

Which flag on the map of France is the oldest, and which the newest?

The newest is Martinique's red, green and black, adopted in 2023. The oldest designs are the heraldic ones: the two leopards of Normandy and the fleurs-de-lis of Île-de-France go back to the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when the dukes of Normandy and the kings of France first bore them on shields. Brittany's, for all its medieval look, is from 1923.

More maps

Capitals on the same map: French regional capitals. Other maps: US states, Australian states, Ukrainian oblasts, UK counties, Spanish regions, Italian regions, Japanese prefectures, Brazilian states, Polish voivodeships, German states, Dutch provinces, Swedish counties, Canadian provinces, Mexican states, Argentine provinces, Swiss cantons. All 235 flags of the world with their capitals: Flags of the world · all modes.