Liberty Leading the People

Not 1789

The subject is three days in July 1830

Delacroix did not paint the great French Revolution of 1789, though it is often mistaken for it. His subject is the uprising of 27-29 July 1830, later nicknamed "the Three Glorious Days" (Les Trois Glorieuses). On 25 July, Charles X signed the Ordinances of Saint-Cloud, suppressing press freedom, dissolving a newly elected Chamber of Deputies, and stripping much of the bourgeoisie of the vote. Paris built barricades within a day, and after three days of street fighting the Bourbon line was replaced by the July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe, the self-styled "Citizen King."

The picture's full title, "28 July 1830: Liberty Leading the People," anchors the scene to one specific date rather than to revolution in general. Delacroix, then 32, watched the fighting from near his studio by the Seine, and in an October 1830 letter to his brother Charles-Henri he explained: "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade, and although I may not have fought for my country, at least I shall have painted for her." He worked on the canvas — oil on canvas, 260 by 325 centimetres — from September to December, while the event was still news rather than settled history, and showed it at the Salon in May 1831. Charles X abdicated on 2 August 1830 and sailed into exile in England; the throne passed to a distant Orléans cousin favoured by bankers and the propertied classes over a full republic, so the painting and the new monarchy were born almost in the same breath.

A goddess with dirty feet

Allegory walks on a real street

The central woman holds a musket in one hand and, in the other, a tricolour that was itself illegal under the Restoration: from 1815 the official flag was the white Bourbon banner, so raising blue-white-red was already an act of rebellion. Her Phrygian cap had carried revolutionary meaning since antiquity, when it marked freed slaves, and again since the 1790s, when Parisian sans-culottes adopted it; by 1830 it read unambiguously as a badge of the insurgent poor.

The Louvre describes the figure as fusing "ideal beauty" with "physical reality": her profile and stance recall classical victory goddesses such as the Winged Victory of Samothrace, yet her bare breast, loose hair, muscular bare feet and soiled hem belong to a living woman off the street. She does not float above the fight like an allegory on a ceiling — she strides forward over the dead at the same level as the fighters, so liberty here reads as physical exertion rather than abstract idea. The 2023-2024 restoration also corrected a detail of the composition: the pistol-wielding boy stands directly in front of Liberty, not beside her as curators had long assumed, which makes her stride read as leading him rather than merely accompanying him. The iconographic type she established later fed into Marianne, the French Republic's official emblem on coins, stamps and town halls, even though Delacroix's contemporaries called the figure simply "Liberty" or "the Republic," not Marianne.

Many Parises in one crowd

The uprising gets several social faces

On the left, a man in a top hat carrying a rifle is usually read as a bourgeois or an intellectual; candidates proposed over the years include the theatre director Étienne Arago, the Louvre curator Frédéric Villot, and even Delacroix himself, though no identification is settled. Beside him stands a student of the École Polytechnique in a bicorne hat — dozens of actual polytechnicians left their barracks to join the fighting in July 1830, for which the school was briefly disbanded, and their presence turns the revolt into a cause shared by educated youth as well as workers from the faubourgs.

The boy brandishing two pistols on the right has long been nicknamed Gavroche, but Victor Hugo's novel Les Misérables did not appear until 1862, thirty-two years later — it is more likely that Delacroix's street urchin helped shape Hugo's character than the reverse. Through the smoke behind the crowd, the towers of Notre-Dame are just visible, the one detail that fixes the scene in Paris, though Delacroix never documents a specific, identifiable barricade.

In the foreground lie the dead, including a half-stripped royal guardsman whom Liberty literally strides over. The 2023-2024 cleaning uncovered a worn boot in the lower left corner, long hidden under dirt and varnish, which may belong to that fallen soldier. The pyramidal grouping of the living and the dead echoes Théodore Géricault's The Raft of the Medusa (1818-1819), a painting for which the young Delacroix himself once posed as one of the figures.

Bought by the state, then hidden

A political image proved too dangerous to display

The public saw the canvas at the 1831 Salon, and the state soon bought it from Delacroix for 3,000 francs — a respectable sum but no fortune for a work of this scale. It was meant to hang in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg, seat of the Chamber of Peers, but by 1832-1834 it had been removed from view: the new July Monarchy was glad to claim the symbolic victory of the "Three Glorious Days" but had no wish to keep reminding its subjects that the people could take up arms against their own rulers.

In 1839 the painting was returned to Delacroix's own keeping. The revolutionary year 1848, which toppled the July Monarchy in turn, made the subject topical again and the work was briefly shown, only to be put away once more after Louis-Napoleon's 1851 coup. It resurfaced at the 1855 Exposition Universelle, and only entered the Louvre's permanent collection under the Third Republic, in 1874-1875 — more than four decades after it was painted. Throughout the decades it spent out of sight, the canvas remained state property; officials simply kept deciding the moment was wrong to show it, a pattern that repeated with almost every change of regime.

Later travels included a 1999 trip to Tokyo, transported in a pressurised container aboard a cargo Airbus Beluga, and a move in 2012 to the new Louvre-Lens in northern France, where it served as the inaugural centrepiece. In 2013 a visitor there defaced it with the inscription "AE911," a reference to a conspiracy theory about the 11 September attacks; the damage was removed within two hours, leaving no lasting mark on the paint layer.

The yellow dress was grey

Restoration recovered a stricter palette

The 2023-2024 restoration, carried out by Louvre conservators Bénédicte Trémolières and Laurence Mugniot, took roughly seven months. The canvas came off the wall in September 2023, was examined under X-ray, ultraviolet and infrared imaging, and returned to the Mollien room on 2 May 2024. Beneath eight layers of yellowed varnish and decades of grime lay a noticeably different palette from the one generations of visitors had come to know.

The central discovery concerned Liberty's dress: Delacroix had originally painted the tunic light grey with touches of gold, laying thick yellow pigment only near the chest and thinning it to near transparency toward the legs. Later varnish, and retouching likely dating to the mid-twentieth century, flattened that subtle gradation into one uniform yellow patch, which became the "canonical" version reproduced in textbooks and posters for generations. Cleaning also restored brightness to the white clouds and gunpowder smoke and revealed the hidden boot in the lower left corner, previously indistinguishable under grime and varnish.

The cleaning confirmed Delacroix's broader colour strategy: he largely excluded green, orange and violet, building the space from coloured greys, black and white, so that the flag's blue, white and red would dominate without competition. The image's influence long ago outgrew the canvas: it inspired Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty in New York harbour, appeared on the French 100-franc banknote from 1978 to 1995, was adapted for the cover of Coldplay's 2008 album Viva la Vida, and was re-enacted by performers at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics near the Conciergerie. Today the painting hangs in the Mollien room of the Denon wing, beside Géricault's Raft of the Medusa and the grand history paintings of David — a room where school groups and tourists read nineteenth-century French history almost as a continuous story, moving from one canvas to the next.