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Dreux (Municipality, Eure-et-Loir, France)

Flags of Dreux - Images by Olivier Touzeau, 24 October 2020

Presentation of Dreux
Flag of Dreux

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Presentation of Dreux

Dreux (31,205 inhabitants in 2022; 2,427 ha) is a commune and subprefecture in the Eure-et-Loir department.

Dreux was known in ancient times as Durocassium, the capital of the Durocasses Celtic tribe.
In the Middle Ages, Dreux was the centre of the County of Dreux. The first count of Dreux was Robert, the son of French King Louis the Fat. The first large battle of the French Wars of Religion occurred at Dreux, on
19 December 1562, resulting in a hard-fought victory for the Catholic forces of the duc de Montmorency.

In 1775, the lands of the County of Dreux had been given to the Louis Jean Marie de Bourbon, duc de Penthièvre by his cousin Louis XVI. In 1783, the duke sold his domain of Rambouillet to Louis XVI. On 25 November of that year, in a long religious procession, Penthièvre transferred the nine caskets containing the remains of his parents, the Louis-Alexandre de Bourbon, comte de Toulouse and Marie Victoire de Noailles, comtesse de Toulouse, his wife, Marie Thérèse Félicité d'Este, Princess of Modène, and six of their seven children, from the small medieval village church next to the castle in Rambouillet, to the chapel of the Collégiale Saint-Étienne de Dreux. The duc de Penthièvre died in March 1793 and his body was laid to
rest in the crypt beside his parents. On 21 November of that same year, in the midst of the French Revolution, a mob desecrated the crypt and threw the ten bodies in a mass grave in the Chanoines cemetery of the Collégiale Saint-Étienne. In 1816, the duc de Penthièvre's daughter, Louise Marie Adélaïde de Bourbon, duchesse d'Orléans, had a new chapel built on the site of the mass grave of the Chanoines cemetery, as the final resting place for her family. In 1830, Louis-Philippe I, King of the French, son of the duchesse d'Orléans, embellished the chapel which was renamed Chapelle royale de Dreux, now the necropolis of the Orléans royal family.

Dreux had a long industrial tradition: stationery and printing (Firmin-Didot family), drapery in the 18th century, then metallurgy (Grosdemouge, Facel, Potez).
From the 1960s, because of a new generation of industries, relocated from the Paris region (radio technology, automobile, pharmaceuticals), companies used many immigrant workers (Maghreb, Portugal, sub-Saharan Africa). Housings grew in the old wheat fields. In total, the city's population doubled from 1945 to 1975. Migration policy was then seen as a factor of progress for the city. However, in the 1970s, certain elected municipal officials began to be alarmed. In October 1981, Françoise Gaspard, mayor (socialist party) of Dreux, declared that there were too many foreigners in Dreux and that she was trying to fight against immigration. In October 1983, the Front National united with the conservatives in the elections for the city council; the list won 55% of the vote in the second round, one of the first significant electoral victories for Front national. But the Front National was marginalized during the 1989 election, especially after the death in a car crash in 1988 of the local leader of National Front, Jean-Pierre Stirbois.

Olivier Touzeau, 24 October 2020

Flags of Dreux

The coat of arms of Dreux is blazonned Chequy Or and Azure.

The flags of Dreux have been reported on his website by Pascal Vagnat:
- a white flag with the coat of arms and the name of the city
- a vertically divided B/Y flag

Sources, located by Dominique Cureau:
video (TV Regional news - Centre region, France 3, January 15, 2002, 12:30 p.m.), photos (taken in Dreux during a championship by an athletics club from Marseille, 2009).

Olivier Touzeau, 24 October 2020

More recent picture of the bicolore flag: photo (2022).

Olivier Touzeau, 25 October 2025