Flag of Acadia

This article needs additional citations for verification. Please help improve this article by adding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed. Find sources: "Flag of Acadia" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (March 2023) (Learn how and when to remove this message)

You can help expand this article with text translated from the corresponding article in French. (September 2012) Click [show] for important translation instructions. View a machine-translated version of the French article. Machine translation, like DeepL or Google Translate, is a useful starting point for translations, but translators must revise errors as necessary and confirm that the translation is accurate, rather than simply copy-pasting machine-translated text into the English Wikipedia. Consider adding a topic to this template: there are already 1,587 articles in the main category, and specifying|topic= will aid in categorization. Do not translate text that appears unreliable or low-quality. If possible, verify the text with references provided in the foreign-language article. You must provide copyright attribution in the edit summary accompanying your translation by providing an interlanguage link to the source of your translation. A model attribution edit summary is Content in this edit is translated from the existing French Wikipedia article at [[:fr:Drapeau de l'Acadie]]; see its history for attribution. You may also add the template {{Translated|fr|Drapeau de l'Acadie}} to the talk page. For more guidance, see Wikipedia:Translation.

The flag of Acadia is a symbolic flag representing the Acadian community of Canada. It was adopted on 15 August 1884, at the Second Acadian National Convention held in Miscouche, Prince Edward Island, by nearly 5,000 Acadian delegates from across the Maritimes.

It was designed by Father Marcel-Francois Richard, a priest from Saint-Louis-de-Kent, New Brunswick. Richard's flag was a French tricolour, with a star in papal colours in the blue segment, representing devotion to the Virgin Mary – and successfully proposed that it become the Acadian national flag.^[1] At that conference Richard, using military metaphors stated "At the great 1881 convention held in Memramcook, we joined together in an orderly army set for battle, not to wage war on our brothers who share our religion, but to defend ourselves against any threat made to our nationhood." He continued in stating that this army needed a banner, "a national flag".^[2] The Musée Acadien at the Université de Moncton has the original flag presented by Father William to the 1884 Convention. It was sewn by Marie Babineau.^{[citation needed]}. Also at that second convention, some suggested La Marseillaise as the Acadian Anthem, but Richard along with Pascal Poirier were successful in declaring their choice of "Ave maris stella" as the Acadian national anthem in 1884.

Father Richard selected the French flag as the basis of the Acadian one to underline the adherence of the Acadians to the French civilization:

I wish that Acadia had a flag reminding not only that its children are French, but also that they are Acadians.

^{[citation needed]}

Father Richard saw the star in the blue band as "the distinctive emblem of our Acadian nationality", representing the star of the Blessed Virgin of the Assumption, patron of the Acadians. The star also represented the starfish that guides the sailor "through storms and reefs".^{[3][better source needed]} The gold colour of the star was chosen by Father Richard because it is the colour of the Pope, in order to show both the adherence of the Acadians to the Roman Catholic Church and the role of the Church in the history of Acadia. ^{[citation needed]}

The flag's creation was an important part of the Acadian Renaissance, and its final design reflects the political and religious considerations of that period.^{[4][better source needed]}

• Flag of France
• Flag of Acadiana

Media related to Flag of Acadia at Wikimedia Commons