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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 (website), 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).
Priest Legros, who accumulated the flags, sent a written request to all heads of states in the world, and very carefully filed the answers. In several cases, the flag was sent with a covering letter signed by the head of state. All this material has been carefully filed in folders.
The association and museum are named for Gabriel Déret (1910-1986), dean-priest of Lapalice from 1954 to 1986 (biography), also known locally 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 September 2010

The association flag's collection

The castle of La Palice is open to visitors from April to October; the flag collection (photo) is part of the visit.

The defunct website of the association shows photos of some of the flags of the collection, classified by geographic areas, with some oddities. Most mistaken labels were added by the maintainer of the defunct page and are not found in the museum itself:
- 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, surely an Ethiopian flag; - Rest of the collection: the flag labelled as of Esperanto has a rectangular canton and the star tilted.

Olivier Touzeau, António Martins & Ivan Sache, 1 January 2009