Liberty Leading the People

A barefoot woman in a Phrygian cap strides over a barricade with the tricolour raised high, a boy with two pistols running at her side. Delacroix painted the July Revolution of 1830 so powerfully that the government soon hid the canvas away.

The story behind the painting

In July 1830 a revolution in Paris toppled King Charles X. That autumn Delacroix, already the acknowledged leader of the Romantic school, painted his answer. On 21 October he wrote to his brother that his bad mood was vanishing thanks to hard work: he had taken up a modern subject, a barricade, and if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her. The canvas was first exhibited at the Paris Salon of 1831. It is sometimes wrongly thought to show the French Revolution of 1789. Wikidata gives its size as 260 by 325 cm, while Wikipedia gives about 2.99 by 3.62 metres.

What to look for

Liberty is both an allegorical goddess and a robust woman of the people. A mound of bodies and wreckage forms a kind of pedestal from which she steps, barefoot and bare-breasted, out toward the viewer, the tricolour in one hand and a bayonetted musket in the other. Her Phrygian cap had symbolised liberty since 1789. Around her are fighters from many classes: a bourgeois in a top hat, a student of the École Polytechnique in a bicorne, and a boy with a pistol in each hand. Look into the distance and you can find a tiny second tricolour flying from the towers of Notre-Dame.

Meaning and intent

What unites the fighters is the fierce determination in their eyes. The painting has been seen as marking the end of the Age of Enlightenment and the arrival of Romanticism, with Delacroix favouring freely brushed colour over precise academic drawing. The identity of the man in the top hat is debated: modern historians reject the idea that he is Delacroix, and suggestions include the theatre director Étienne Arago and the future Louvre curator Frédéric Villot, without consensus. Several figures were probably borrowed from a print by Nicolas Charlet, whom Delacroix believed captured the energy of Parisians better than anyone.

Legacy

The French state bought the painting in 1831 to remind the citizen king Louis-Philippe of the revolution that brought him to power, but after the June Rebellion of 1832 it was judged too inflammatory and returned to the artist; Champfleury wrote in 1848 that it had been hidden in an attic for being too revolutionary. It entered the Louvre in 1874. Liberty became perhaps the best-known early image of Marianne, may have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo's Les Misérables, and inspired Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty. A restoration finished in April 2024 removed layers of yellowed varnish, revealing white clouds, a grey and gold dress and a hidden boot.