#first republic

[fashionsfromhistory]

Reticule

c.1799

France

LACMA (Accession Number: M.83.281.2)

[winterhalters]

→ a short (and simplified) guide to 18th century France

[digitalfashionmuseum]

Oil Painting, ca. 1793, French.

By Jean-Louis Laneuville.

Portraying Marie-Jean Hérault de Séchelles in a blue and buff frock coat.

Musée Carnavalet.

Huile sur toile encadrée.

[awallofswords]

First sword delivery of 2023 has finally arrived. Not my first purchase this year but the first to reach me.

The top sword is a large and heavy French First Empire era cuirassier officers sabre with the ‘Garde de Bataille’ hilt. The blade is is marked with the Solingen Rose on the spine and retains a small amount of etching. Unfortunately it’s missing its’ scabbard and I will try and get a reproduction one made for it.  The second is a French light cavalry officers sabre with the ‘Cote de Melon’ style hilt. This one is likely from the First Republic era. It has a very stout blade that is proportional to one on a troopers’ sabre. Again the blade was made in Solingen and features the typical talismanic engraving typical of the late 18th Century. 

A comparison of the French light and heavy cavalry swords to their British contemporaries of the era. 

[memenewsdotcom]

First Republic Bank stock drops

View On WordPress

[indiohistorian]

Perhaps you have seen the “Evolution of the Philippine Flag” chart in your class room when you were young--how all these revolutionary flags are lined up, as if each one were chronologically ordered and have developed into the flag we know today. Nothing could be more wrong.

*The error propagated by charts such as this should be corrected. 

These flags were in fact used by different leaders within the Katipunan at the time when the revolution against Spain was being waged. Some of these were used and unfurled almost at the same time. There might be more revolutionary flags that may have been lost to history, but you get the drift. The elements in these flags may have been the inspiration of the elements in the Philippine flag, but to say that each of these flags evolved linearly and eventually became our flag, is flat out misconception.

The flag, as we know from primary sources, was designed by Emilio Aguinaldo during his exile in Hong Kong from 1897 to May 1898. He gave this design to three Filipina women in Hong Kong--Marcela Mariño de Agoncillo, Lorenza Agoncillo and Delfina Herbosa de Natividad (Jose Rizal’s niece) who made the effort to sew it. We could assume that the inspiration of the design, aside from the revolutionary flags, were a lot more complicated. The PCDSPO of the previous administration did an infographic on this, basing the flag’s elements largely on the prevailing zeitgeist drawn from masonic and liberal ideas of the late 19th century that had made itself manifest in the iconography of the Katipunan and other Spanish colonies seeking independence.

*PCDSPO 2010-2016 produced this informative infographic on the inspiration of the elements on our national flag.

But you’d be surprised to know that when Aguinaldo designed the flag, it was still far from the flag that we know today. Drawing from the rich material of visual history--using specific photographs from the early 20th century, this is my attempt to bridge this gap of flag evolution, until the elements (except for the exact shade of color) have been standardized in 1936.

The First Flag/s

There have been lots of debate on what the first Philippine flag really looked like. Accounts differ from one revolutionary hero to another. Aguinaldo himself stated in 11 June 1925 that he lost the flag. But if memory served him right, Aguinaldo was sure that this was how it looked like.

This particular flag, kept by the Aguinaldo-Suntay clan, was Aguinaldo’s favorite when he was in his twilight years, according to his secretary Felisa Diokno. The said flag was said to have been returned to Aguinaldo in 1930 by a revolutionary veteran. It featured a small anthropomorphic sun with large eight rays that spread out, and around it were three stars. On the flag was sewn the words “Libertad”, “Justicia,” and “Ygualdad” and on the other side was “Fuerzas Expedicionares del Norte de Luzon.”

This is slightly consistent with Fernando Amorsolo’s painting of Rafael Alunan in 1923. In the painting, Alunan, who was a distinguished government official who became a member of the Cabinet during the Commonwealth, stands beside a rendition of what was touted to be the original Philippine flag design. The painting is an invaluable reference since it depicts the color of the flag as well as the details of the anthropomorphic sun and its rays. One distinct feature though, different from the Aguinaldo-Suntay flag was the stars which are slightly bigger in Amorsolo’s rendition.

*Portrait of Rafael Alunan by Fernando Amorsolo (1923), courtesy of PCDSPO 2010-2016, Rafael Alunan III and Marot Fernandez.

Another person would challenge this claim of Aguinaldo in the 1980s. According to the daughter of Marcela Mariño de Agoncillo herself who was still living at this time, Marcela M. Agoncillo, in her visits to the president’s home during the time the ban on Philippine flag was lifted (1919), the first flag looked like this:

Of course, she never saw the actual flag while it was being made by her mother, since she wasn’t born yet, but Agoncillo depended on her mother’s stories, and her recollection of her visits to Aguinaldo’s home after 1919. The sun looked different--it was more similar to the Filipino anthropomorphic sun brooches made during the Philippine-American War, and the three stars also had faces. 

The thing about this though is that we may never really know the exact design of the first flag since photos of the flag at the time were rare, and unclear. We are only left with these two contesting versions.

The “Sunflower” Flag

In 1912, eleven years from the time that the First Philippine Republic capitulated with the American capture of President Aguinaldo, and seven years before the Philippine flag ban was lifted by American authorities in the country, the Philippine flag looked like this.

Upon closer look, it reveals the three stars seemingly closer to the sun than the previous flag versions, but this time the sun had radiating sunbursts so fine that it looked like a sunflower. The anthropomorphism of the sun symbol was also dropped.

It must be noted that the two versions of what could be the “first” flag, and the sunflower flag overlapped in chronology. This shows that, under the flag ban, inspired by nationalist fervor, Filipinos during the early years of the American occupation made their own versions of the flag to show their independence spirit and defiance. There might be other versions of this, but it is safe to say that the Filipino leaders in government, led by the rising political leader Manuel L. Quezon, had their Philippine flags like the one beside Quezon in the photo.

Early Commonwealth Flag

In 1919, the Philippine Legislature under the Americans officially lifted the ban on the Philippine flag by virtue of Act No. 2871. More versions of the flag may have proliferated but efforts at the design of the sun, and the measurements are long in coming. We could see this, even in the absence of legislation, on the Official Program of the 1935 Presidential Inaugural. The sun here remains small, but the rays, while still fine, are becoming more distinct and tiered. The stars are depicted larger, but their proximity to the sun is retained, probably drawn from the sunflower flag.

By 1936, President Manuel L. Quezon finally standarized the flag to be “strictly observed by all civil and military branches of the Government” through the issuance of Executive Order No. 23, with specific measurements on the length and width of the flag, the equilateral triangle, the stars, and the sun.

As is shown below in the photograph of the flag hanging on a wall in Malacañang, we could see that the three stars were put farther to the corner of the white triangle, with the sun having eight rays that are more defined--solid in detail, with each ray having three sunbeams. The sun however, if compared to the flag’s sun today seem to still look out of proportion as the circular pattern seem to be smaller, and the rays looked thinner and longer. The standardization features however, have already been consolidated thanks to its specs being specified and put into law.

*Admiral Harry F. Yarnell, captain of the U.S. Asiatic Fleet pays a courtesy call to President Manuel L. Quezon in Malacañan Palace (21 December 1936). 

Further design developments followed, that a year after, the sun had been enlarged significantly.

*Cover of the magazine Sabatino de la Vanguardia (25 August 1937) 

By 1939, this was what the flag looked like.

*President Quezon arrives at an airfield (26 November 1939)

As the only state flag in the world that could be flipped upside down to signify war, the Philippine flag was once again raised red-side-up during the Japanese invasion of the Philippines, when President Quezon signed Executive Order No. 386 on December 18, 1941. It read:

WHEREAS, it is a tradition of the Filipino people that in time of war, the flag shall be flown with the red stripe above and the blue stripe below in order to denote the valor, firmness and fortitude with which the Filipino people aim to prosecute such war to victory;

NOW, THEREFORE, I, MANUEL L. QUEZON, President of the Philippines, pursuant to the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the Philippines, do hereby order that for the duration of the existing emergency and until otherwise ordered, the Filipino Flag shall be flown with the red stripe above and the blue stripe below. The Filipino Flag shall otherwise remain as prescribed under existing laws.

*President Manuel L. Quezon, in Washington, D.C. (circa 1942).

Meanwhile, the Philippines under the Japanese from 1942 onwards reverted the Philippine flag to the “original” design in accordance with what was agreed upon by some of the living Filipino revolutionary veterans as advised by the new Japanese authorities. But this was only for a short while as the flag specifications in 1936 were reissued under the Second Philippine Republic under President Jose P. Laurel in 1943. 

After the war, the Sun and Stars in the flag became solid, and in time, became consistently propped up in state ceremonies. The evolution of the flag colors themselves muster a great debate in themselves, especially with the shade of blue, since there was a lack of primary sources on the original design. 

Today, the Philippine flag’s design, colors, materials, craftsmanship and flag protocol are regulated by the National Historical Commission of the Philippines, while the quality and guidelines in the manufacturing of the flag is managed by the Bureau of Product Standards under the Department of Trade and Industry, since the flag is technically the country’s brand to the world. 

*Filipinos wear the color of the Philippine flag during the Independence Day ceremonies on 4 July 1946, from the book, “A Republic is Born” (1946).

There is truly more to the story of our flag’s evolution when one digs deeper into the story of how our very own national banner came to be. It has evolved, reflecting the spirit and the values of generations of Filipinos since it was first unfurled after the Battle of Alapan in 28 May 1898, and presented formally to the people when Independence from Spain was proclaimed in 12 June 1898. It reminds us that amidst changing times, the spirit that animated the Philippine Revolution against Spain lives on.

On the occasion of the 120th anniversary of the Proclamation of Independence. 

Maligayang Araw ng Kalayaan! 

*All photos are from the Presidential Museum and Library 2010-2016 flickr. 

Credits also to my fellow researcher at the NHCP, Eufemio Agbayani, who wrote about the Aguinaldo-Suntay and Agoncillo flag debates. See his article HERE.

Another blogpost on the Philippine Flag: “What You Might Not Know about the Philippine Flag”

[tyrs-bottom-left-toe]

Our class is making a project

about our republic in 1920's and we needed swing music in the background but because it kept skipping to electroswing my classmates fixed it with this

[barbucomedie]

Captain’s Uniform and Sword of Line Infantry from First Republic dated to 1800 on display at the Musée de l'Armée in Paris, France

This dark blue tunic style was originally worn by the National Guard during the revolution but was extended ou to the regular army during the First Republic. Compared to the numerous and complex uniforms of the Ancien Régime these were more practical and easier to manufacture with the regiments distinguishing features being solely the buttons.

Photographs taken by myself 2017