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France was defeated in the Franco-Prussian war in 1870 and forced to cede territories to the German Empire, which would then form the “Imperial Land of Alsace-Lorraine” ( Reichsland Elsaß-Lothringen) until 1918. During this period of contested German sovereignty, inhabitants of the region increasingly displayed a red-and-white flag with horizontal stripes, which came to be known as the Rot un Wiss (“red and white,” in Alsatian dialect), a flag whose political significance was not well understoodd by the authorities. The institutional advances granted to Alsace-Lorraine at the beginning of the 20th century made it possible to initiate an institutional discussion about the flag’s official adoption, though that initiative ultimately failed. Studying the debates concerning the attribution of a flag for this territory and the analysis of its uses, perceptions and adoption by the local population allows us to understand the ambiguous role that a flag can play in the development of collective identities.