The French flag emoji is encoded with the regional-indicator letters F and R.
Unicode represents many country flags by pairing two regional indicator symbols. The letters correspond to the country’s two-letter ISO 3166-1 alpha-2 code, so France uses FR. When a platform supports the sequence, it displays the pair as one flag glyph rather than as two separate alphabetic symbols.
This mechanism differs from tag-sequence flags such as England, Scotland, and Wales. Those subdivisions use a black flag followed by tag characters and a cancel tag, while ordinary national flags generally use regional indicators.
The displayed artwork is not identical everywhere. Apple, Google, Microsoft, and other vendors choose their own proportions and shades, but the underlying encoded sequence remains the same. Regional indicators can also appear as ordinary letter-like symbols when software does not combine them into a flag.