Not 1789: The July Revolution Behind Delacroix's Liberty Leading the People

Liberty Leading the People shows the July Revolution of 1830, the uprising in Paris that toppled King Charles X, and not the famous French Revolution of 1789, as many people assume. Eugène Delacroix painted it in the autumn of that same year. In it, a woman who stands for Liberty, wearing a red Phrygian cap, strides over a barricade and the bodies of the fallen, raising the blue, white and red tricolour in one hand and a musket with a bayonet in the other, while armed Parisians follow her. It is one of the defining images of French history, and it hangs today in the Louvre in Paris.

What you see in the painting

At the top of a pyramid of figures stands Liberty. Delacroix made her both an allegorical goddess and a strong, ordinary "woman of the people", barefoot and bare-breasted, stepping forward as if she might walk out of the canvas and into our space. The heap of bodies and broken stones at the bottom works like a pedestal that lifts her up.

Around her are people from different classes. A young man in a top hat represents the middle-class bourgeoisie; a student from the elite École Polytechnique wears the traditional two-cornered hat; and a boy waving a pistol in each hand stands for the working people of the city. What unites them is the fierce determination in their eyes. If you look carefully into the smoky distance on the right, you can find a second, tiny tricolour flying from the towers of Notre-Dame.

Why 1830 and not 1789?

The confusion is easy to understand. The tricolour and the Phrygian cap both come from the first French Revolution of 1789, when the cap became a symbol of liberty. But the event in the painting happened four decades later. In July 1830, Parisians rose up against Charles X, and after these events the tricolour became France's national flag once again. The man who came to power as a result was Louis-Philippe, known as the "citizen-king". So the painting celebrates a revolution that its own viewers had just lived through. It was, as Delacroix said, a modern subject.

Who was Delacroix?

Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) was born near Paris and became the leader of the French Romantic school. Unlike his great rival Ingres, who prized perfect drawing and smooth classical forms, Delacroix took inspiration from Rubens and the Venetian painters and cared above all about colour and movement. He was a friend and admirer of Théodore Géricault, whose Raft of the Medusa pushed him to paint his first major work, The Barque of Dante, shown at the Paris Salon of 1822. The poet and critic Charles Baudelaire described him as "passionately in love with passion" yet coldly determined to express it as clearly as possible.

By 1830 Delacroix was already the recognised driving force of Romantic painting in France. He rejected the strict drawing of academic art and gave a new importance to freely brushed colour, and Liberty Leading the People shows that approach at full strength.

"If I haven't fought for my country..."

Delacroix did not fight on the barricades himself. On 21 October 1830 he wrote to his brother that hard work was chasing away his bad mood, that he had started a modern subject, a barricade, and that if he had not fought for his country, at least he would paint for her. The painting was first exhibited at the official Paris Salon of 1831.

People have long wondered whether the man in the top hat is Delacroix himself. Modern art historians reject the idea of a self-portrait. Other suggestions include the theatre director Étienne Arago and the future Louvre curator Frédéric Villot, but there is no agreement. Several figures were probably borrowed from a print by Nicolas Charlet, an illustrator Delacroix believed captured the special energy of Parisians better than anyone.

Too revolutionary to show

The French government bought the painting in 1831, planning to hang it in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg as a reminder to Louis-Philippe of the revolution that had brought him to power. That plan never happened. It hung briefly in the palace's museum and was then taken down because its political message seemed too inflammatory. After the June Rebellion of 1832 it was returned to the artist, and the writer Champfleury later said it had been "hidden in an attic for being too revolutionary". Delacroix sent it to his aunt for safekeeping. It reappeared briefly after the revolution of 1848 and again at the Salon of 1855, and the Third Republic finally acquired it for the Louvre in 1874.

How to look at it: details to notice

Start with the shape. The figures form a pyramid with Liberty and the flag at the top, so your eye climbs from the dead at the bottom to the raised tricolour. Then compare the faces of the fighters and notice how different their clothes are, from top hat to workman's shirt; the mix of classes is the point.

The painting looks different today than it did a few years ago. In September 2023 it was taken down for restoration, and conservators had to work in the museum because the canvas, about 2.99 by 3.62 metres, is so large. Under eight layers of varnish and dirt they found bright white clouds and smoke, discovered that Liberty's dress was originally light grey with touches of gold rather than yellow, and uncovered a boot in the bottom left corner that had blended into the paving stones. It returned to display in April 2024.

Where is it now, and what did it inspire?

The painting is in the Louvre in Paris. It has travelled a few times: in 1999 it was flown to Tokyo inside an Airbus Beluga cargo plane, standing upright in a special pressurised container, because it was too big for a Boeing 747. In 2013, while on show at the Louvre-Lens, a visitor wrote on it, but a restorer removed the writing in under two hours without harming the paint.

Its influence is enormous. Liberty may be the best-known early version of Marianne, the symbol of the French Republic. The pistol-waving boy is widely believed to have inspired Gavroche in Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables, and the painting inspired Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty in New York. Coldplay used it for the cover of their 2008 album Viva la Vida, and actors recreated it during the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. Nearly two hundred years later, it is still the picture people reach for when they want to say "freedom".

Learn with Liberty Leading the People: English phrases about change

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to rise up against	to rebel against a ruler or system	Parisians rose up against the king.
to lead the way	to go first and show others where to go	Liberty leads the way over the barricade.
to take a stand	to state or defend a strong opinion	The painter took a stand with his brush.
to be taken down	to be removed from where it hangs	The painting was taken down in 1832.
to stand for	to represent or symbolise	The woman stands for Liberty.

Try this: Write three English sentences about a symbol from your country, using "to stand for" and "to lead the way".