For most of the last century Martinique had no flag of its own. The island flew the French tricolore because it is legally part of France, and the only other design in circulation was a colonial shipping ensign with four white snakes on it. That changed on 2 February 2023, when the Assembly of Martinique adopted a red, green and black flag that had spent fifty years as the banner of the independence movement.
The flag Martinique chose in 2023
The design is simple: a red triangle based on the hoist, and behind it two horizontal bands, green on top and black below. The colours are the pan-African red, green and black, and the flag was drawn in the 1960s inside Martinique's anticolonial movement, decades before any assembly voted on it. It is usually called the rouge-vert-noir.
Getting to that vote took two attempts and a certain amount of farce. The first was the Ipséité flag, unveiled in May 2019 by the president of the executive council of the Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique, a blue and green design with a lambi conch shell at the centre. In November 2021 the administrative court annulled it, not on aesthetic grounds but on jurisdictional ones: choosing symbols was a matter for the assembly, not for the president acting alone.
The second attempt went through a public consultation. Residents were invited to submit designs from November to December 2022, and about 26,600 people voted online across two rounds in January 2023, a process interrupted partway through by a cyberattack on the voting platform. A flag showing a blue-headed hummingbird, a bird found only on Martinique and Dominica, came out ahead. Then its designer withdrew it, after the hummingbird was found to match a stock image. The assembly voted for the rouge-vert-noir instead, with a single abstention.
The vote covered an anthem too, "Ansanm," and that half did not survive. In May 2024 the administrative court struck the anthem down, finding that the technical failures during the online consultation had compromised its regularity and that the collectivity had never published the vote counts for each entry. The flag was not challenged in the same way and remains in force.
What the assembly adopted is a flag for cultural and sporting events, not a replacement for the tricolore. France does not recognize official regional flags, and Martinique's status as an overseas department and region, unchanged since 1946, means the tricolore is still the flag of state.
Snakes, ships, and colonial origins
The older design begins not on land but at sea. An ordinance of 4 August 1766 set an ensign for vessels of French Martinique and Saint Lucia: the French flag of the day charged with snakes, one in each quarter. It was a shipping mark, a way of telling French Antillean vessels apart at a distance, rather than a statement about the island.
The flag itself is a blue field with a white cross running to all four edges, dividing it into four quarters, with a white fer-de-lance in each. The snakes are drawn in a right-angled, L-shaped pose, which is what gives the flag its odd rigid symmetry. All four are white, and the field behind all four is blue.
The snake is the fer-de-lance (Bothrops lanceolatus), a venomous pit viper endemic to the island. This is not an abstract heraldic lion or a mythical griffin. The fer-de-lance is real, dangerous, and woven into Martinican life. Sugarcane workers have feared it for centuries, and choosing it tied the flag to the physical, mortal reality of the landscape.
What is remarkable is what did not happen. The flag was never formally abolished when Martinique's political status changed. Nobody repealed it and nobody replaced it, so it drifted forward as a tourist emblem and an administrative habit, used on gendarmerie insignia and souvenirs far more than by Martinicans themselves.
Why the snake flag became untenable
The ordinance that created the snake flag was issued while Martinique was a slave colony, and the cross-and-snakes design was a mark of the shipping that ran the slave economy. That is the core of the objection to it, and it is not a recent one, though it only became a political fight in the 21st century as the flag's use spread.
In 2018 the deputy Jean-Philippe Nilor demanded its withdrawal from official use, arguing that it was bound up with the slave trade. In October that year the National Gendarmerie was ordered to stop using it. Defenders of the flag argued that its meaning had shifted with use and that it had become simply Martinican, but the argument had thinned by then: the flag had never had deep popular currency to appeal to.
The rouge-vert-noir carries the opposite history. It came out of the movements that opposed French rule, and its colours follow the Garveyite reading of red for blood shed for liberty, black for the people, and green for the land. Adopting it was a decision about which past the island wanted on its flagpoles, and not everyone welcomed it: the design still reads to some Martinicans as the property of one political current rather than of the island as a whole.
How the tricolore functions in Martinique
Walk past any gendarmerie, prefecture, or public school in Martinique and you will see the French tricolore. The EU flag hangs beside it, because the island is an outermost region of the European Union, one of very few Caribbean territories inside the EU's borders. During state ceremonies and any sporting event where Martinique competes as part of France, the tricolore is the flag of record.
When Martinique fields its own teams, as it does in CONCACAF football competitions and the Caribbean Games, the rouge-vert-noir appears instead. That is the use the 2023 vote was designed to cover, and it turned a flag that fans had been carrying anyway into the official one.
This dual-flag reality plays out at football matches, cultural festivals, and political rallies. Official protocol says one thing and popular sentiment says another: French on paper, Caribbean in practice.
The flag and the Creole question
Martinique's Creole identity runs deep. The island's language, Antillean Creole (Kréyòl), its music traditions like zouk and biguine, and its literary heritage, particularly the work of Édouard Glissant and the Créolité writers, all assert a cultural identity distinct from metropolitan France. The rouge-vert-noir is the flag that now stands for that distinctiveness. It turns up on bumper stickers, murals, T-shirts, and at Carnival, and in the large Martinican diaspora communities in Paris, Montreal, and New York, functioning less like a state flag and more like an identity marker.
The snake flag has not vanished. It still appears on souvenirs and in tourist marketing, and a minority of Martinicans defend it as a piece of the island's history that predates the argument about what it means. But it lost the official ground it held, and the 2023 vote made the loss formal.
The argument that produced the current flag is the point rather than a preamble to it. Scholars of Caribbean post-colonialism had long noted that Martinique's lack of a flag of its own was itself politically meaningful, mirroring an unresolved question about sovereignty. Choosing one did not resolve that question. It moved it onto a flagpole.
References
[1] Flags of the World (FOTW), "Martinique," fotw.info. Entry detailing the historical naval origins and current unofficial status of the snake flag.
[2] Smith, Whitney. Flag Lore of All Nations (2001, Millbrook Press). Historical context for colonial Caribbean naval flags and their evolution.
[3] Glissant, Édouard. Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays (1989, University Press of Virginia). Key theoretical framework for understanding Martinican cultural identity and post-colonial symbolism.
[4] Bernabé, Jean; Chamoiseau, Patrick; Confiant, Raphaël. Éloge de la Créolité (1989, Gallimard). Foundational text on Antillean Creole identity and the symbolic politics surrounding it.
[5] Collectivité Territoriale de Martinique, collectivitedemartinique.mq. Official site of the territorial collectivity formed after the 2015 merger.
[6] Préfecture de la Martinique, martinique.pref.gouv.fr. Official French government source for administrative and symbolic protocols in Martinique.
[7] CONCACAF Official Records, concacaf.com. Documentation of Martinique's participation as a separate footballing entity and associated flag usage.