Flag of the Netherlands The red-white-blue triband flag of the Netherlands as used in the 17th century is said to have influenced the Russian flag. With the revolution in the Netherlands in the last decade of the 18th century, and the conquest by the French, the name "Prince's Flag" was forbidden. The orange-white-blue was changed into red-white-blue (colours to which the French "liberators" were kindly disposed, analogous as they were to their own tricolour, chosen just a few months earlier) and in 1796 the red division of the flag was embellished with the figure of a Netherlands maiden, with a lion at her feet,
National flag of a political symbol. The flag of Germany, for instance, was a tricolour of black-white-red under the German Empire, inherited from the North German Confederation (1866). The Weimar Republic that followed adopted a black-red-gold tricolour. Nazi Germany went back to black-white-red in 1933, and black-red-gold was reinstituted by the two successor states, West Germany and East Germany following World War II. Similarly the flag of Libya introduced with the creation of the Kingdom of Libya in 1951 was abandoned in 1969 with the coup d'état led by Muammar Gaddafi. It was used again by National Transitional Council and by anti-Gaddafi