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Hainaut (Province, Belgium)

Henegouwen

Banner of arms (unofficial flag)
Provincial colours (unofficial )
Provincial Governor's honorary flag
Rejected proposal of provincial flag

See also:

Banner of arms (unofficial flag)

from the Shipmate site, with permission

Only two Belgian provinces haven't adopted officially a flag: Hainaut and Liège.

Pascal Vagnat, 30 May 1999

The square (sometimes 2:3) banner of arms used as the (unofficial) flag of Hainaut is:

Quartered I and IV or a lion rampant sable armed and langued gules II and III or a lion rampant gules langued and armed azure

Quartered I and IV Flanders II and III Holland

Th thin black line dividing the four fields or quarters is clearly visible on real flags. See for instance in the Flemish weekly Knack #33 (13/19 August 2003, weekend supplement) a colour picture of various flags on the Drapers' Hall, Town Square, Tournai.

Filip van Laenen & Jan Mertens, 12 September 2003

Provincial colours

The colours were taken from the arms. These colours were not fixed. Various sources give different designs, but two main sets can be compiled.

A chart called Vlaggen der Belgische Provincies - Drapeaux des Provinces Belges (Flags of the Belgian Provinces). This is not dated, but to judge from the font face used, it is from the 1920s or 1930s.

by Mark Sensen

Some Dutch atlases and books about the provinces show another set, published by Rudi Koot in Vexilla Nostra [vxn] #185 (1993) p. 32-33

by Mark Sensen

Provincial Governor's honorary flag

by Mark Sensen

I have some xerox copies of sheets which seem to come from a book (bilingual Dutch and French) containing regulations (for the Navy maybe?). It contains a sheet with the honorary flags of the governors of the provinces, adopted by Order in Council of 28 October 1936.
It includes a construction sheet. The flags are 150 x 150 cm. Each stripe is 50 cm. The shields are 43.5 cm wide and 50 cm high excluding 3.75 cm for the point of the shield. The shields are in the center of the black stripe.

Mark Sensen, 27 January 2001

Rejected proposal of provincial flag

by Ivan Sache

Léon Nyssen, Editor of Vexillacta [vxl], designed a flag proposal for the province of Hainaut and send it to the Provincial authorities on 30 October 2001.

The proposal was described in Vexillacta #15 (March 2002) by Pascal Parent in a paper entitled Deux projets de drapeaux rejetés : Provinces de Hainaut et Liège (Two rejected proposals of flags: Provinces of Hainaut and Liege).

The flag proposal is a transposition of the provincial arms. It is 2:3, vertically divided, with three vertical stripes, yellow-black-red,and three horizontal stripes, yellow-red-blue.

On 6 December 2001, Governor Michel Tromont informed Léon Nyssen that the Permanent Deputation (the executive government) of the Provincial Council, during its meeting of 15 November 2001, had rejected the proposal and decided to keep the banner of arms as the unofficial flag of Hainaut.

Ivan Sache, 22 March 2002