![[Flag of Groland]](../images/f/fr!grold.gif)
Last modified: 2023-12-09 by olivier touzeau
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Flag of Groland - Image by Ivan Sache, 22 April 2008
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The Principality (locally called "Présipality") of Groland is a
fictious state created by Jules-Édouard Moustic for the French TV
channel Canal+. The main Groland program is Bienvenue au Groland, to be seen every Saturday at 20:20. In French, gros means big, fat, heavy, coarse...
Initially conceived as a parodic news program ("dishonest, twisted,
subjective, funny"), and sometimes criticized for its very politically
uncorrect if not smutty humor, Bienvenue au Groland has generated
several sequels and a complete parallel universe, which can be seen as
a caricature of today's France (while Groland claims that France is a
caricature of Groland!). For the celebration of its 15th anniversary,
Bienvenue au Groland was able to gather 20,000 fans in the small sea
resort of Quend-Plage (Picardy), the famous place of the not least
famous Groland Film Festival.
The capital of Groland is the town of Gro, watered by river Gro, while the inhabitants of the Principality are the Grolandais. Groland releases
passports and very popular car stickers marked "GRD".
Every inhabitant can compete for the office of President every six
years but only the President can vote. The national motto is Groland,
je mourrirai pour toi (Groland, I will die for you), mourrirai
being a bastardized form of mourai. Several famous peoples have been
granted the Honour Citizenship of Groland, for instance the Finnish
movie maker Ari Kaurismäki, the Belgian pie-thrower Noêl Godin, the American activist Michael Moore and the humorists Coluche and Pierre
Desproges (posthumuously).
Sources:
Ivan Sache, 22 April 2008
The flag of Groland is officially described as bleu, blanc cassé, rouille ("blue, off-white, rust-coloured", here again a caricature of the French national flag) with the national emblem, a black amphora, in the middle. The flag is often nicknamed le drapeau à l'amphore (the amphora flag). The amphora handles are said to recall the big ears of President Christophe Salengro.
Commonly seen as an image, the flag of Groland does exist in real:
- A video posted on YouTube shows the flag of Groland waved in the stadium of Louvigny in March 2007, a small town, typically
Grolandesque, located near Caen (Normandy) whose football team managed
to be sponsored (in real, although everybody initially believed it was
another Grolandesque hoax!) by the Principality of Groland. The flag
has a very light blue stripe, as on the images, but a regular, not
rust-coloured red stripe.
- A photograph dated 22 September 2007 shows the flag hoisted over a house, during the celebration event in Quend-Plage mentioned above. The exact shade of the stripes is not easy to identify on the photography.
Ivan Sache, 22 April 2008
In 2020, the flag of Groland was hoisted on the city hall of Angoulême for the opening of the Francophone Film Festival, whose jury was chaired by members of the Groland team, Benoît Delépine and Gustave Kervern (photo, 2020).
Olivier Touzeau, 8 February 2022
