Liberty Leading the People shows the uprising of July 1830, when Parisians overthrew King Charles X in three days. The bare-breasted woman with the flag is Liberty, an allegory of the cause, and the crowd behind her stands for Paris itself.
Delacroix finished it within months of the fighting and sent it to the Salon of 1831. He was painting what Paris had just done, not what it remembered.
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Liberty is the word to hold on to, because most guides call the woman Marianne, the face of the French Republic. Delacroix never did. In 1830 there was no Republic for her to stand for. When the fighting ended, a provisional government put another king on the throne, Louis-Philippe, and the revolution Delacroix painted ended in a constitutional monarchy.
The name Marianne already existed, but it only started to attach itself to the figure of Liberty around 1848 and 1851, and it became ordinary around 1875. The woman on the barricade received her famous name two generations after she was painted.
The people who saw her at the Salon of 1831 did not take her for an emblem either. A moderate daily called her a very common woman. A republican paper called her an ignoble courtesan. Delacroix had put a woman of the people where painters were used to putting a goddess. So who is she, if she is not Marianne?
Which revolution did Delacroix paint?
Not the one most visitors expect. The Bastille fell in 1789, but the barricade in this painting belongs to July 1830. On 25 July, King Charles X signed a set of ordinances, published in Le Moniteur the next morning, and Paris answered with the three days of street fighting known as the Trois Glorieuses. Charles X abdicated on 2 August.
Delacroix did not fight in them. In October 1830 he wrote to his brother: "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and if I did not win for the fatherland, at least I will paint for her." The sentence reads like an apology, and it explains the picture better than any theory.
He was no committed revolutionary but a painter hunting for a new kind of subject, and his work is usually described as apolitical. This canvas is the exception.
The uprising he painted did not give France a republic. The provisional government placed Louis-Philippe on the throne, and he agreed to rule as a constitutional monarch. A king had won. That is why the woman at the center of the canvas cannot be what the guidebooks say.
What You'll Discover
Who the woman really is.
Who follows her up the barricade.
What the critics called her in 1831.
What later republics made of her.