Tricolour (flag) orange-white-blue design of the Prince's Flag ("Prinsenvlag", predecessor of the flags of the Netherlands and Luxembourg), used from 1579 by William I of Orange-Nassau in the Eighty Years' War, establishing the independence of the Dutch Republic from the Spanish Empire. Though not the first tricolour flag, one of the most famous, known as "Le Tricolore", is the blue, white and red (whence also called "Le Bleu-Blanc-Rouge") flag of France adopted in the French Revolution. With the formation of French client republics after 1795, the revolutionary tricolour was exported and adopted more widely in Europe, by the Republic of Alba 1796
Tricolour (flag) prevalently expressing the sentiment of nationalism or ethnic identity than anti-monarchism, the flag of Hungary (1848), the flag of Romania (1848), the Flag of Ireland (1848), the flag of Estonia (1880s), the flag of Lithuania (1905), and the flag of Armenia (1918). By contrast, the flag of Russia was adopted by the Tsardom of Russia in the late 17th century and while it may or may not have been inspired by the Dutch tricolour, it never had any republican implications. The political ideology of the unification of an ethnic nation state associated with tricolour flags since the 19th century has