The Flag, 2025
With this series, produced during a photography residency at the Musée de l’Armée, Guillaume Herbaut explores the flag as a polymorphous, shifting and changing object, but also as a symbol embodying the idea of nation and community.
“It is brandished at demonstrations, silently honored at ceremonies, hoisted to celebrate a victory or cheer on a team, flown at half-mast as a sign of mourning, kept as a trophy, trampled on or burned in acts of protest.“
From the reserves of the Musée de l’Armée (rich in nearly 5,000 emblems, each bearing traces of its own history and the history of France in the broadest sense), to the commemorations where an equally rich and diverse generation of young people is taking over from the veterans and carrying the colors today, Guillaume Herbaut has also visited the memorial sites of past wars, making the flag not only a place where history and the memory of bloodshed are intertwined, but also the cradle of a nation in perpetual construction, and a symbol that it is important for everyone not to allow to be confiscated.
The flag represents resistance, struggle, combat and hope and, as Benoît Hopqin wrote in M Le Monde, those who wear it “tell less of France’s past than of its future, say less of nostalgia than of hope. And this flag does not glorify the nation of yesterday, but that of tomorrow”.
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