The red flag didn?t always represent popular uprising. Earlier, it was a symbol of emergency, and was used to signal the need for martial law. When a crowd petitioned to depose King Louis XVI in 1791, the red flag was flown not by the revolutionaries but by the counterrevolutionaries. The writer and historian Thomas Carlyle described how the crowds let out a great ?howl of angry derision? at the sight of it. Similarly, when in A Tale of Two Cities Dickens describes how the crowds were ?tumultuous under a red flag and with their country declared in danger,? he?s describing the flag of the authorities.
In any case, the first Marxist regime to make red its official color was the Paris Commune, which ruled over Paris very briefly in 1871. (They flew the red flag rather than the French tricolor.) Soon Marx became known to his opponents as ?the Red Terror Doctor.? As fear of the red menace set in, Prussian police banned the use of the color ?on the first letters of banners in demonstrations.? The young townsmen of the Pyotr Lavrov?s ?Going to the People? movement in 1874 wore ?red shirts and baggy trousers? as they went to live with the peasants. By 1889 the colored banner was inspiring young socialists to break out in songs, like ?The Red Flag? by Irish socialist and journalist Jim Connell in 1889. The lyrics express the sanguinary symbolism of the flag: The people's flag is deepest red,/ It shrouded oft our martyr'd dead/ And ere their limbs grew stiff and cold,/ Their hearts' blood dyed its ev'ry fold.?
Source: http://feeds.slate.com/click.phdo?i=f3515953c4bd3df0d4bb78a427ccf9e0
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