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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