After the French Revolution and the collapse of Napoleon, the Bourbons returned to power under the symbol of the white flag, which would become the standard of restorationists and opposition to the popular revolt.
The Industrial Revolution, the Paris Commune and the growth of the organized urban masses, however, gave a new meaning to the color red, “the color of workers’ blood”, it was said, which would become the emblem of socialists, communists and anarchists.
This rise of red led to the fact that, at the end of the 19th century, both in France and Austria-Hungary, in monarchical and clerical circles, white began to be seen as the counterpoint to red, in defense of tradition against revolution, order against protest, privilege against equality.
After the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, the Bolsheviks’ Red Army faces the White Army, a heterogeneous coalition of monarchists, conservative liberals, nationalists and foreign forces. White, here, is the direct reuse of the symbology of imperial Russia and the European restorationist tradition.
In Finland, in 1918, the civil war pitted Red Guards against White Guards, the latter supported by the nationalist bourgeoisie and rural landowners. In Hungary, after Béla Kun’s Soviet Republic, Horthy’s counter-revolution is called White Terror.
Spanish monarchical sectors use white in their flags; the Polish Catholic right cultivates the idea of a “white Poland”, opposed to the Russian communist heritage. In Portugal, the “subversive” word “red”, during the fascism of the Estado Novo, is systematically replaced by “incarnado” by the zealous prior newspaper censorship services.
With the end of the Second World War and the advent of the Cold War, white began to symbolize Christian tradition, cultural identity and conservative morality, appearing in Catholic, anti-communist or anti-secularist manifestations.
In the 21st century, white reappears in Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, associated with pre-Soviet identity. In Belarus, the white flag with a red stripe becomes a symbol of the democratic opposition. In Ukraine, the use of white crosses in nationalist battalions expresses an anti-Russian statement. But, contradictorily, Putin’s Russia itself has recovered several “white” symbols from the tsarist era.
In the West, white people are today mobilized mainly by traditionalist Catholic movements or by sectors of the identitarian right that associate them with religious morality, the defense of Christian civilization and also against the left, immigrants and “wokism”. In Portugal, Spain, France or Italy, white people appear in religious marches, anti-Marxist rallies and “pro-life” demonstrations.
Over more than two centuries, red has always emerged as a transformative force and white has systematically resurfaced as its symbolic negation.
Whoever decided to place white roses instead of red carnations in front of the pulpit of the Portuguese Parliament, at the ceremony celebrating the 50th anniversary of the 25th of November, unmasked the reactionary nature of the event. The symbolism was historically anti-revolutionary in nature and, therefore, anti-25 April, it was a graphic declaration of the refusal of its transformations.
André Ventura, the right-wing extremist, decoded the message and explained the dichotomy when he arrived at the pulpit: “today is not the day of red carnations, today is the day of white roses”.
Journalist