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Liberty Leading the People
La Liberté guidant le peuple
Liberty climbs the barricade with the tricolour: Delacroix’s picture of the revolution of July 1830.
In three days of July 1830 Parisians rose against King Charles X and drove him from the throne. Delacroix, who had not fought, painted it that autumn: Liberty in a Phrygian cap strides over the dead with the flag in one hand and a musket in the other, a boy with two pistols and a man in a top hat beside her, and the towers of Notre-Dame far off in the smoke.
The state bought it in 1831 and then hid it away for years as too inflammatory. It has hung in the Louvre since 1874, and its figure of Liberty became Marianne, the face of the French Republic. A restoration in 2024 took off the yellowed varnish and brought back the blue, white and red of the flag. Stand before it in 3D ›
