What French officials, amazingly inspired for once, chose to celebrate in 1880 was this brotherhood, this heavenly universal love people bore in their mind by that day ( a few days ) . Fête de la fédération, all united . At that point, unexperimented French masses thought it was for good ! Several description of the atmosphere can be read, and boy ! I would have liked to be there . Just to believe in paradise on earth for a day . Of course, like in Petrograd in 1917, it's always the rich who start massacres . In Paris, July 1791, an unarmed crowd bearing a petition to the King was shot dead by the until then bourgeois Garde Nationale . In the Champ-de-Mars, the place were is now the Eiffel Tower .
About the colours, there are a few theories, but the most probable is this : the king was in Versailles, and it was a huge threat because he could maneuver, ally to Austrians or Prussians, and smash the people in Paris . They had a luminous idea, without which the revolution would have failed . Led by some women, they went to Versailles and brought back the Royals into the ancient kings Palace, les Tuileries, by the Louvre . The King was then under Paris people control .
The colours of the city of Paris are the blue and red, since the early Middle Age . The King's colour was the white . In the French flag, the king is stuck between the people; by then Paris was for the people, nobles and kings were in Versailles . ( It's again from Versailles that the bourgeois government directed the slaughtering of the Commune of Paris in 1871 ) . People said " "les Versaillais" speaking of them .
The red flag for revolution didn't exist at that point . It comes from the very massacre I evocated, the "Massacre du Champ-de-Mars" jn 1791 . Before that time, on every battlefield, when an army showed the red flag it meant " No mercy, no prisoners" . They showed this flag before shooting on the crowd . What happened ? When the no more naive people of Paris assaulted the Tuileries Palace one year later to throw the Royals to jail, some genious had the idea of showing the same flag, in remembrance or vengeance . In 1830, they used it a little, and more in 1848, while revolutionaries of Central Europe paid a tribute to the first "people's" revolution by adopting this flag, and it became the colour of all revolutions .