Region
The arms of Brittany are “ermine plain”, borne by the dukes of Brittany from 1316, when Jean III gave up the checky of Dreux. The modern flag, the Gwenn ha du (“white and black”), was designed by Morvan Marchal in the 1920s, with nine black and white bands and a canton of ermine; the black cross, the Kroaz du, is one of the oldest Breton flags.
Flag
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Coat of Arms
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| Region | Bretagne, first delimited on 28 November 1956; prefecture Rennes |
|---|---|
| Departments | Côtes-d’Armor, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine, Morbihan |
| Arms | Ermine plain, since 1316 (Jean III) |
| Before 1316 | The checky of Dreux with a canton of ermine (1213–1316) |
| Flag | Gwenn ha du, Morvan Marchal, 1920s; proportions 2:3 |
| Older flag | Kroaz du, the black cross, attested from the 15th century |
The coat of arms of Brittany.
D’hermine plain.
That is: ermine plain. These were the arms of the dukes of Brittany from 1316 to 1514, and they derive from the cadency mark of the arms of Pierre Mauclerc.
Pierre de Dreux, a younger son of his family, bore a cadency mark common among princes destined for the Church: a canton of ermine. In 1212 (1202 according to French Wikipedia’s article on the flag) King Philippe Auguste imposed him as husband on the duchess Alix, who had no arms of her own, so Pierre Mauclerc used his own arms as administrator of the duchy, and his successors did the same. For a century, from 1213 to 1316, the shields and banners of the Breton princes bore the checky of Dreux, gold and blue, with a canton of ermine, shown with or without a red border.
In 1316, four years after his accession, Jean III gave up the checky of Dreux for ermine plain, used until the 16th century. Michel Pastoureau, as reported by French Wikipedia, gave several reasons for this rare change: Jean III was in a lawsuit with his stepmother Yolande de Dreux, who bore the same arms; the arms of Dreux, with their border and canton, marked a younger branch and made Brittany a heraldic dependency of the small county of Dreux; the checky had lost its prestige once the lilies became the central element of the French royal arms; ermine had grown in value and was now seen as the fur of kings and judges; and above all ermine, a kind of semy of ermine spots, answered aesthetically and symbolically the semy of lilies of the kings of France. The motto of the house of Montfort was A ma Vie; a late 19th-century carving of the arms at Saint-Malo bears the Latin version of the Breton motto, Potius mori quam foedari, “rather death than defilement”.
In heraldry the ermine spot simply represents the black tail of the animal, sewn onto the white fur; in today’s imagination it stands for the animal itself, because of its shape. The number and shape of the spots vary with time, place and artist, without any meaning other than aesthetic. According to a legend reported by French Wikipedia, King Conan Mériadec saw an ermine hesitate to cross a muddy stream, unwilling to soil its white coat, and had an ermine embroidered on his banners with the motto “rather death than defilement”.
The Gwenn ha du, the flag of Brittany.
The flag of Brittany, the Gwenn ha du (“white and black” in Breton), has nine horizontal black and white bands of equal width and a white canton strewn with ermine spots; their number is not fixed, the most common version having eleven, in rows of four, three and four, and the proportions are 2:3. It was designed by Morvan Marchal: in 1923 according to English Wikipedia, between 1923 and 1925 according to French Wikipedia’s infobox, while its text dates the first Gwenn ha du to 1925. Taking a modernist approach, he sought to break with the ermine banner, felt to be too close to the French royalist flag, and took inspiration from the flag of the United States. Its first appearance was at the Exposition des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 1925, and the Parti autonomiste breton adopted it as the “Breton national flag” at its congress in Rosporden on 11 September 1927.
In 1937 Marchal explained that the white bands stood for the Breton-speaking pays, Léon, Trégor, Cornouaille and Vannetais, and the black bands for the Gallo pays, Rennais, Nantais, Dolois, Malouin and Penthièvre; the canton of ermine, French Wikipedia adds, was kept as a reference to the former duchy. French Wikipedia describes the nine bands as the nine historic provinces, often assimilated to the old dioceses, but notes that no single band can be assigned to a province, and that no linguistic correlation can be seen, since the limits of the Breton language followed neither the dioceses of the duchy nor those of the 20th century. English Wikipedia, by contrast, describes the stripes as the traditional dioceses of the duchy, the black ones French- or Gallo-speaking and the white ones Breton-speaking.
Associated with the autonomist and nationalist movements of the 1920s and 1930s, the flag was used by both resistance fighters and collaborators during the Second World War and was banned from time to time by the French authorities, who considered it seditious, until the end of the 1960s. It became popular again from the 1960s, and today, according to French Wikipedia, its political connotation has become incidental: it flies on most town halls and on many public buildings. In the 1930s the supporters of the “traditional” ermine flag criticised it as a recent invention copied from the arms of Rennes and from the American flag.
The black cross on white, the Kroaz du, is with the ducal banners one of the oldest known Breton flags. Some recent authors date it to the Third Crusade in 1188, without proof; it is attested only from the 15th century, in an illumination of the Combat of the Thirty of 1351, and as the mark of Breton fighters. From the 15th and 16th centuries the two emblems merged into a white flag with a black cross cantoned with ermine, the mark of the ducal fleet, and the admiralty of Brittany kept a black-cross flag from the 16th to the 18th century according to French Wikipedia’s article on the flag, though its article on the Kroaz du says there is no proof of that use.
The Bretagne region, made up of the departments of Côtes-d’Armor, Finistère, Ille-et-Vilaine and Morbihan, was first delimited by a ministerial order of 28 November 1956; its prefecture is Rennes. It uses the arms of ermine plain officially, and the gendarmerie units in Brittany wear an ermine plain badge. The sources disagree on the flag’s status: according to French Wikipedia no text regulates it and the Gwenn ha du has no official status in Brittany or in France, the region flying it beside a flag bearing its logo; English Wikipedia calls it the official banner of the region. On 13 October 2006 the regional council unanimously chose the Gwenn ha du as the regional mark on number plates. The flag is also flown in Loire-Atlantique, historically part of Brittany but attached to the Pays de la Loire region, where the departmental council has used it since 2004. The historic Breton pays, the bro, each have their own page in the Breizh historical atlas.
Pierre de Dreux bore a canton of ermine as a cadency mark, and the dukes kept it with the checky of Dreux from 1213; in 1316 Jean III adopted ermine plain alone, a change Michel Pastoureau explains among other things by a quarrel with his stepmother, who bore the same arms, and by the prestige of ermine, which answered the lilies of the kings of France.
Morvan Marchal, in the 1920s: English Wikipedia says 1923, French Wikipedia between 1923 and 1925. He took inspiration from the flag of the United States, and the flag first appeared at the Exposition des Arts décoratifs in Paris in 1925.
According to Marchal in 1937, the four white bands stand for the Breton-speaking pays and the five black bands for the Gallo pays. French Wikipedia notes that no band can be assigned to a particular province and that the language boundary did not follow the dioceses. English Wikipedia, by contrast, describes the stripes as the traditional dioceses of the duchy, the black ones French- or Gallo-speaking and the white ones Breton-speaking.
English Wikipedia calls it the official banner of the region; French Wikipedia says that no text regulates it and that it has no official status in Brittany or in France, although most Breton administrations use it and the region chose it for number plates in 2006.
A black cross on white, one of the oldest known Breton flags, attested from the 15th century as the mark of Breton fighters; a version cantoned with ermine was the flag of the ducal fleet.
Last reviewed by the Emblema Mundi editorial team on 27 October 2026.
Brittany is one of the six Celtic nations recognised by the Celtic League and the Celtic Congress — see the Gwenn ha du and the ermine beside the emblems of Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Cornwall and the Isle of Man.