Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) · 1830
The three days of street fighting that toppled Charles X in late July 1830 are compressed into one surge over a barricade. A bare-breasted allegorical figure of Liberty, wearing the red Phrygian cap of the Revolution, strides forward with the tricolour in her right hand and an infantry musket in her left. Beside her a boy brandishes two pistols, a top-hatted bourgeois grips a hunting gun, and a worker in a red sash crawls up from the dead. The towers of Notre-Dame rise through the smoke on the right, fixing the action in Paris.
Liberty is a goddess with dirty feet and hair under her arms, a real woman and a symbol at once, and that hybrid is exactly what makes the picture work. Delacroix organises everything as a pyramid rising from the corpses in the foreground, one of whom is stripped of his trousers, a detail taken from accounts of looted bodies. The tricolour is echoed across the canvas in small notes of blue, white and red, most obviously in the sash of the dying man looking up at her. Since the 2024 cleaning the sky reads much bluer and the smoke much greyer than earlier generations of visitors ever saw.
The new king Louis-Philippe bought the canvas in 1831 and then kept it out of sight for most of his reign, judging it too inflammatory for public display. It entered the Luxembourg in 1863 and the Louvre in 1874. Delacroix wrote to his brother that if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her. The picture appeared on the 100 franc banknote and remains the standard visual shorthand for revolution worldwide.
Did You Know? The painting spent years hidden in storage because Louis-Philippe considered his own revolutionary icon too dangerous to hang in public.
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