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Association du Souvenir de l'abbé Déret (France)

Presentation of the Association
The Association's flag collection

See also:

France

Presentation of the Association

"Association du Souvenir de l'abbé* Déret", based at Lapalisse (Department of Allier, center of France) aims at "preserving, keeping and promoting the memory of Priest Déret through a collection of world flags assembled by Priest Legros, parish priest of Doyet, and transferred to Count Gilbert de Chabannes**, who kindly supplied a room in his castle of La Palice to the association (yes, village of Lapalisse but castle of La Palice).
Déret is known for his collection of local religious art, kept at the Folklore Museum of Ygrande (Allier).

*abbé has two different meanings in French, "abbot", and, most commonly, like here, "parish priest" and synonym, more or less, of curé (abbé Legros, curé de Doyet).
**A descender of Monsieur de La Palice, the famous Marshal of France who died during the battle of Pavia in 1525.

Ivan Sache & Olivier Touzeau, 1 January 2009

The association flag's collection

The castle of La Palice is open to visitors from April to October, I guess that the flag collection is part of the visit.
The flag collection was assembled "earlier than the 1970s", "which may explain discrepancies with today's flags".

The website of the association shows photos of some of the flags of the collection, classified by geographic areas, with some oddities:
- Europe des 25: the flag of Spain has coat of arms centered while the flag labelled as of Latvia is more probably a faded flag of El Salvador;
- Europe: the flag labelled as of Alderney is indeed the Red Hand flag of Northern Ireland;
- Middle East: the flag of Lebanon is shown with the trunk of the cedar brown instead of green
- Central and South America: the flag labelled as of Bolivia, horizontally divided green-yellow-red with St. George trampling the dragon in the middle of the yellow stripe;

Erroneous Esperanto flag from the Legros collection - Image by Ivan Sache, 1 January 2009

- Rest of the collection: the flag labelled as of Esperanto has a rectangular canton and the star tilted.

Olivier Touzeau & Ivan Sache, 1 January 2009