LIBERTY LEADING THE PEOPLE
- Seda DOGAN DEMIREL
- Oct 6
- 7 min read
Date: 1830
Artist: Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863)
Art Movement/Period: Romanticism (French Romanticism)
Location: Musée du Louvre, Paris
The July Revolution of 1830
This masterpiece is one of Eugène Delacroix’s most influential works of French Romanticism and a key image of 19th-century political art. In the painting, the artist depicts the July Revolution of 1830, which led to the abdication of Charles X, the last king of the Bourbon dynasty, and the accession of Louis-Philippe. Delacroix finished the work in the same year as the events and it was first shown at the Paris Salon in 1831.
Iconography and Symbols
The work includes many symbols that still matter in France today: the Phrygian cap, the tricolour flag, and the female personification of Liberty. “Liberty” became part of the motto of the French Republic. With this personification, the figure also overlaps with the iconography of Marianne.
Delacroix challenges artistic convention by bringing together the barricade fighters—seen by some critics of the time as “ugly, dirty, messy, and desperate”—with a strong, partly sexualised allegory of Liberty, shown bare-chested. The pyramidal composition recalls the layout of an allegorical victory monument. The bodies of the defeated lie on the lower step, beneath the victors. A kneeling young man who looks up to the Goddess of Liberty forms the link between the dead and the living. As the multiple meanings unfold, new layers appear in each figure.
The painting also expresses the artist’s desire for artistic freedom and his wish to modernise history painting. This allegorical image of Liberty, combining traits of a woman of the people and a goddess, surrounded by dirty, unkempt barricade fighters, is understood to defy Classicism’s demand for beauty and idealisation.
The 1830 uprising was the historical prelude to the June Rebellion of 1832, later featured in Victor Hugo’s famous novel Les Misérables (1862). In the musical, the call to revolution is:
“Do you hear the people sing?Singing the song of angry men?It is the music of a peopleWho will not be slaves again.”
Some barricade fighters have been compared to heraldic animals found on the coats of arms of important figures in French history—as if they were possessed by the spirits of heroes, their spiritual ancestors. However, linking the figures to these heraldic animals is interpretive and debated. The Louvre’s standard texts do not provide an established reference for this reading.
Liberty
At first glance, Delacroix’s painting seems chaotic; yet a careful look reveals a clear compositional order. The first thing that strikes the viewer is the monumental, bare-to-the-waist female figure. Her yellow dress has slipped from her shoulders and is held together by a piece of red fabric. The earring in her left ear recalls those worn by Napoleonic soldiers. She holds a musket with bayonet in her left hand and raises the French tricolour with her right. The flag’s blue-white-red also appears in the clothes of the man looking up at her from the ground.
She steps upward by planting her left foot (the only foot we see) on the barricade. Sur le pied de guerre—literally “on the left foot”—means ready for battle. She glances back over her right shoulder as if checking that the people are following. Her head is shown in profile (like a ruler on a classical coin) and she wears a Phrygian cap. This cap is a classic symbol of freedom and is identified with the pileus—the cap given to freed slaves in ancient Rome to mark their new status.
Delacroix does not suggest that, during the July Revolution—also called the Three Glorious Days—a half-naked woman actually ran with a loaded gun and a flag. It is clear she is not a portrait of a specific person. Rather, the figure is an allegory of Liberty, a pictorial device used to make a moral or political idea visible.
Paris Street Boy (Right Foreground)
The boy to the right of Liberty, slightly ahead of her, leaps forward over the barricade. Although Delacroix painted two gamins (Paris street boys), this figure is usually called the gamin de Paris in the literature.
Both the boy and the goddess step on a plank. We see the boy’s right foot and Liberty’s left foot. On the boy’s foot is a pointed slipper that is several sizes too big. In French, doing something “in slippers” suggests doing it easily. The boy waves two cavalry pistols; his mouth is open, his teeth are visible, as if he is shouting. He wears a large beret made of black velvet and brown fur.
Some writers link this headgear to the faluche (a student cap), but this type of cap became a student symbol in France only in the late 19th century, as a sign of political neutrality. So a firm identification here is difficult.
The boy carries a Royal Guard cartridge pouch slung across his body like a hunting bag; it bears the Bourbon coat of arms. It looks as if the gamin de Paris picked up these items from the street and threw them over his shoulder.
Paris Street Boy (Left Foreground)
On the left side of the painting, behind the barricade, there is another gamin de Paris (Paris street boy). On his (voltigeur-style) cap, you can see a hunting horn emblem. This type of headgear is linked to the Napoleonic era and the National Guard tradition.
This cap was also worn by Napoleon’s soldiers and officers.
The top part of the boy’s cap is encircled with a ribbon and divided by vertical stripes. Delacroix seems to have painted it to suggest a crown. The boy holds a sword in one hand and grips a stone with the other. Only the upper part of his body is visible; the rest seems to disappear behind the frame of the painting. His dark shirt is half open, leaving his neck and chest exposed.
Wounded/Dying Young Man
The dying young man who looks up toward Liberty wears workman’s clothes (black trousers with grey patches, a white shirt, a blue jacket, and a wide red sash). According to Toussaint, these suggest he recently came to Paris from the provinces as a temporary construction worker.
His bandana covers his eyes; his face is pale and expressionless. He seems to crawl blindly and disoriented over the barricade. In the left foreground, he emerges from under the body lying stretched out on the ground.
The Man in the Top Hat (artisan / semi-bourgeois reading)
Just to the left of Liberty, a frightened man kneels on the barricade. He wears an old black top hat, an open-necked white shirt with a loose black neckcloth, a dark coat and waistcoat, and wide, light-coloured work trousers. He holds an old-style double-barrel hunting gun.
Toussaint identifies him as an artisan or foreman. Critics writing in 1831 sometimes described him as a worker, and sometimes as an “ambiguous” type—half worker, half bourgeois.
The hunting gun also suggests he could be a student or a member of the educated classes. While poor people—the “improvised heroes”—used improvised weapons, many students who fought on the barricades brought their own hunting rifles.
The barricade fighters seem almost unaware of Liberty’s presence. While Liberty looks back at those following her, two of the three men in the left foreground look not at her but toward the Paris street boy on Liberty’s right. The third—the boy at the far left—stares intently at the corpse in front of him. On the faces of these three men we see not excitement, aggression, or bloodlust, but fear, despair, and loneliness. It is even unclear whether the bold Paris street boy who leaps over the barricade will manage to rouse them. Delacroix depicts not a united band of determined fighters, but loners who fear losing their lives on the barricades.
In the right background, the church shrouded in mist is Notre-Dame. To the right of the cathedral, Delacroix paints long houses with many windows, high eaves, and chimneys. They resemble the houses in the poor eastern part of the city. Notre-Dame and the adjoining houses appear like ghostly forms through the smoke.
In front of these houses, Delacroix shows French or Swiss Royal Guards lined up in order. Two officers move forward on foot, followed by another officer on a rearing white horse.
If you look carefully at the lower right of the scene, you can see the painter’s signature in red paint:
Eug Delacroix.
In the painting, all the living figures wear a hat, cap, beret, or bandana, while all the dead are bareheaded. The reason may come from a famous anti-Bourbon song inspired by a well-known fairy tale that the French knew by heart. Now that the French have freed their country—and themselves—from Bourbon oppression, they have become “human” enough to wear hats. As a sign of humiliation, their dead enemies have lost theirs.
Form and Use of Colour
The work can be divided into triangles and rectangles. The figure of Liberty and the three figures walking with her represent the uprising and create a triangular composition, which keeps the painting balanced. The canvas is split horizontally into two rectangles: the dead bodies below and the active figures above.
As a Romantic painter, Delacroix uses colour to show atmospheric perspective. With the hazy sky and the city buildings, he applies very cool tones to create depth. He uses many different tints and shades of brown, red, blue, and black (by adding white or black to the hue). The brightest area is around the figure of Liberty. The darker areas sit around her outer edges, showing that she is the focal point of the work. Liberty stands out more than the other figures because she carries the flag with its bright red, blue, and white.
Restoration Process
Over the years, the painting received eight layers of varnish. As the varnish oxidised, the colours were almost lost under a dull yellow film. On 20 September 2023, the work was taken down from its usual place in the Louvre and replaced by Ary Scheffer’s Les Femmes souliotes. After a six-month treatment at the Louvre to remove decades of varnish and grime, the painting was returned to public view.
“The whites and the shadows—all of these had melted together under those yellowish layers. We are the first generation to rediscover the colour,” says Sébastien Allard, the museum’s director of paintings in Paris.
Referances:
Musee de Louvre
“On Asp and Cobra You Will Tread...:” Animals as Allegories of Transformation in Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People. Marijke Jonker
Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People by Dr. Bryan Zygmont
Visual Position and Juxtaposition: An Analytical Study of Liberty Leading the People ans Moon-Woman Cuts the Circle, Yashoda Chaulagain
Delacroix’s Liberty shows her true colours after Louvre restoration, The Guardian
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