The Two Lives of Colour Red

In the summer of 1791 the city of Paris had a simple arrangement for crowd control. A red flag hoisted over a public square meant martial law: disperse, or the National Guard was entitled to shoot

On 17 July the flag went up over the Champ de Mars, and the Guard did definitely shoot, into a crowd of petitioners who had come to sign their names to a republican petition. What happened next is one of the strangest reversals in the whole history of colour.