Symbolism and Flags. What Does the Flag Mean in 2021 to the Inhabitants of Brest?

Since the spring of 2021, we have been speaking with local residents on the rue de Guelmer in Brest, asking this question: "For you, what is a flag?" The flag then becomes an object of speech. A discourse on life as it unfolds through the choice of certain moments in a trajectory that have been associated with flags. A discourse on the different forms of attachment to the nation, understood more or less through what is supposed to be its symmetrical civic community. A kind of discourse on the various forms of loyalty to what the flag is, above all from its national perspective: an "institution of rest" whose prominence allows both stated indifference and circumstantial attachment. Companionship with the nation seems to best describe the relationship that individuals can have with a political order whose elision or resistance in a globalized world is postulated: this is ultimately what emerges from an ethnographic attempt at understanding what the flag reveals, a social space that exists just as much thanks to individual positions as to what situations do to people