Liberty Leading the People is famous because Eugène Delacroix turned three days of street fighting in Paris into the lasting image of freedom. It shows the July Revolution of 1830, not the French Revolution of 1789.
In July 1830, after King Charles X issued decrees muzzling the press, Parisians built barricades and fought his troops for three days, from 27 to 29 July. Charles X soon gave up the throne. That October, Delacroix wrote to his brother: "I have taken on a modern subject, a barricade, and if I have not conquered for my country, at least I will paint for her."
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The lasting image of freedom was bought by a king. Louis-Philippe, a cousin of the deposed Charles X, took the throne in August 1830, put there by the same uprising. At the Salon of 1831, the big annual art show in Paris, the state bought Delacroix's canvas for a royal museum in the Luxembourg palace, on the Left Bank. The reported price was 3,000 francs.
The painting did not stay on that wall. It came down quickly, and the public lost sight of it for years. A government born of a revolt had paid for the picture of that revolt, and then hid it.
What did the critics call Liberty in 1831?
Vulgar, and worse. The reason is the woman at the center, who was never meant to be a real Parisian. The Louvre calls her an allegory of Liberty, with a bare chest, a perfect Greek profile and a draped antique dress.
On her head is the Phrygian cap, the soft cap that freed slaves wore in ancient Rome and that the French Revolution adopted as a sign of freedom. She holds the tricolor flag high above the smoke.
A goddess in the middle of a real street fight was an unusual choice, and in the spring of 1831 the quarrel in the newspapers was less about the barricade than about her.
Poetry had pictured her this way first. After the July fighting, the poet Auguste Barbier wrote a poem, "La Curée," in which Liberty is no noble countess but a strong woman with a hoarse voice and powerful breasts. Some historians link that poem to the painting.
On 17 May, La Tribune politique et littéraire called her a "vile courtesan." The poet Heinrich Heine, who wrote about that Salon for German readers, saw in her face "an impudent grief," a strange mixture of Phryne, a fishwife and the goddess of liberty.
Phryne was an ancient Greek courtesan famous for her beauty. A fishwife, in French a poissarde, was a loud market woman of the Paris streets. Neither comparison was a compliment.
Other papers attacked the whole canvas. On 8 May, the Journal des artistes wrote: "Truly, Mr. Delacroix has painted our beautiful revolution with mud."
The Journal des débats accused him of trying to be "more real than reality, truer than truth itself." A few critics defended him. On 4 June, Le Constitutionnel wrote: "The picture strikes us as beautiful. It is energetic, profound."
Around her, the people holding the guns were workmen.
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