Anarchy flag

Anarchy flag: a plain black flag with a large red circle-A, the letter A enclosed in a circle, in a rough spray-paint style.

Designer: Circle-A: Tomás Ibáñez (idea) and René Darras (drawing), Groupe Jeunes Libertaires, Paris. Black flag: no single designer · Black flag 1882-83; circle-A April 1964

A plain black field with a red circle-A. The black flag came first: it appeared in French labour protest in 1831 and Louise Michel called on anarchists to adopt it at a Paris Commune commemoration on 18 March 1882, saying she would raise it in mourning for the dead and for lost illusions. She carried one at an unemployed demonstration on 9 March 1883 and defended the act at her trial. The circle-A is much later. It was proposed in the April 1964 bulletin of the Paris Groupe Jeunes Libertaires, by Tomás Ibáñez, drawn by René Darras, specifically so the movement would have one sign that was fast to spray and paste. It went nowhere in France at first. Milan's Gioventù Libertaria used it from 1966 and systematically from 1968, and it spread internationally around 1972-73. The romantic claims that it dates to the Spanish Civil War or the 1868 International are not supported by the archives. No colour specification exists for this flag. Black is definitionally #000000; the red is simply the ink colour of the painted A and carries no separate doctrinal meaning here. Do not confuse it with the red-and-black diagonally split flag, which is the anarcho-syndicalist flag commissioned by the CNT for May Day 1931: there red stands for the syndicalist labour struggle and black for anarchism.

Colour codes: Anarchy flag
Stripe HEX RGB CMYK Pantone Meaning
Black field #000000 0,0,0 C:0 M:0 Y:0 K:100 n/a Negation of every nation-state and its flag, and mourning for the movement's dead

History

Two symbols, sixty years apart, sharing one flag. The black field is a nineteenth-century emblem and the circle-A is a piece of nineteen-sixties graphic design made for speed.

The black flag

Black flags were raised by road workers in Reims and by the Lyon silk workers in 1831, under the slogan live working or die fighting. Louise Michel argued for anarchists to take it as their own in 1882, setting it against the red flag of the socialists: black for mourning, for the dead of the Commune, and for the refusal of every national colour.

The circle-A was invented to be sprayed

Its origin is unusually well documented and unusually mundane. The Paris Groupe Jeunes Libertaires wanted a mark that could go up on a wall in one motion and be recognised anywhere. Tomás Ibáñez proposed it, René Darras drew it, and it appeared in the group's bulletin in April 1964. Italy picked it up before France did.

Not the anarcho-syndicalist flag

The diagonally split red-and-black flag is a different emblem with a different meaning, carried by the CNT-FAI through the Spanish Civil War. This one is the general anarchist flag.