President François Hollande urges people to display tricolour when victims are commemorated as it makes a comeback from links to nationalism

As France prepares for a day of national mourning and remembrance for the 130 people killed in the Paris terrorist attacks, sales of the national tricolour flag are on the rise.

Shunned as a symbol of nationalism or the far-right for decades, the French flag has made a comeback as a symbol of peace and defiance after gunmen and suicide bombers attacked bars, restaurants, the Bataclan concert hall and the Stade de France stadium on 13 November.

François Hollande will lead a ceremony on Friday commemorating the victims of France’s worst-ever terror attacks. While relatives and survivors gather to hear his address at Les Invalides complex that houses a military museum and Napoleon’s tomb, the president has urged the rest of the country to hang flags from their windows in support.

Unlike in the US, displaying national flags at home is not common in France, but a government spokesman said the president wanted people to join in with the memorial service from home.

Sales have already more than doubled since the attacks; changing the nation’s relationship to the tricolour. Although it has always been raised on official buildings, the red, white and blue flag was rarely seen in homes except at key football moments such as the 1998 world cup.

A poll last week suggested that almost two-thirds of French people now see it as a positive thing to fly a flag outside a home or in a garden. The leading flag-maker Doublet said it had sold “between two and three times as many French flags as usual” since the attacks.

Herve Burg, director of flag-maker Paris Drapeaux, told Associated Press: “It’s incredible. There have only been two other times in French history that the flag has been popular on this scale. One was the World Cup in 1998. The other was the end of the second world war.”

Burg said he had received so many orders that the factory ink machine had run out.

In 2007, when the then Socialist presidential candidate Ségolène Royal suggested re-appropriating the French flag, she was ridiculed for trying to use a symbol seen as a sign of belligerent nationalism or more associated with the far-right. During Nicolas Sarkozy’s failed presidential campaign in 2012 – when national identity was a key theme for the right – his party reportedly spent a total of €42,964 (£30,150) in one week on 65,000 French flags for spectators to wave.

Some relatives of the victims have said they will not attend the official commemoration ceremony, saying the government did not do enough to prevent the attacks. Emma Prevost, whose brother Francois-Xavier Prevost was killed, called for a boycott in a Facebook post. She criticised the authorities for failing to act decisively after the January attacks on the magazine Charlie Hebdo and a kosher supermarket left 17 people dead. She said: “Ten months later, the same people are able to restart and this time, cause 10 times more deaths.”

Matthieu Mauduit, whose brother Cedric was killed in the Bataclan concert hall, also said on Facebook that he would not be attending the commemoration ceremony, although he did not call for a boycott. “I don’t want to be a political ‘trophy’ exhibited by a government that did nothing for months, for years,” he said.