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Spain: First Republic (1873-1874)

Flag of the First Spanish Republic - Image by Luis Miguel Arias, 1 July 1999

National flag
Army flags
Unofficial Republican flags

See also:

Spain

National flag

Unlike the Second Republic, the First Republic kept in use the flag adopted in 1785, but without the crown surmounting the coat of arms. Actually the law prescribed a piece of material to be stitched over the crown in the existing flags, so the coat of arms left was not centred vertically but slightly offset to the bottom of the middle stripe..

Santiago Dotor, 1 July 1999

Army flags

The First Republic's Navy flag was without arms. The Army flags were with arms but without crown (Quarterly, 1. and 4. Castile, 2. and 3. León, grafted in base Granada; but without the escutcheon of dynastic arms). Behind the coat of arms the Burgundian saltire.

Luis Miguel Arias, 5 January 2007

Unofficial Republican flags

Unofficial Republican flags, two patterns - Images by Eugene Ipavec, 25 January 2009

When the first Republic came into being in 1873 flags with the purple colour appeared in several parts of Spain, mainly in the South and South-East, and many a ship of the Navy in Cadíz and Cartagena unofficially hoisted tricoloured flags of red, yellow and purple horizontal bands, sometimes also in red, white and purple. The first Republic however never did adopt that colour, the national flag remained yellow and red as before - only the royal crown was removed from the coats of arms on the flags, being re-established in 1875. There is correspondence in the Archives of the Naval Museum of Madrid about that period, where you can read that the Navy High Command ordered the captains of several men of war in the Naval base of Cadíz to remove the tricoloured flags.

Emil Dreyer, 21 January 2001