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Liberty Leading the People is the image of revolution that the world still uses. Delacroix painted it in the autumn of 1830, a few months after the three days of fighting - les Trois Glorieuses - that drove Charles X from the throne and put Louis-Philippe in his place. At the centre, a bare-breasted woman in a Phrygian cap strides over a barricade, holding the tricolour in one hand and a musket in the other. She is not a portrait of anyone: she is Liberty itself, and the first major allegorical figure in French painting to be given the body of a woman of the people.
Around her are the men who made the revolution: a bourgeois in a top hat and black coat, a factory worker with a sabre, a boy with two pistols who is usually said to have inspired Gavroche in Les Miserables. In the background the towers of Notre-Dame fly the tricolour. Delacroix, who was not a fighter, wrote to his brother that he had "undertaken a modern subject, a barricade", and that if he had not fought for his country he could at least paint for it.
The government bought the painting in 1831 but found it inflammatory and had it rolled up and stored within a year. It reappeared briefly under the Second Republic in 1848 and again in 1874, and it has hung in the Louvre since 1874. A major restoration completed in 2024 removed a century of varnish and revealed the original intensity of the reds and blues.
Eugene Delacroix (1798-1863) was the leading figure of French Romanticism and the great rival of Ingres. He was a prodigious draughtsman, a diarist of genius, and a painter of violence, movement and colour. His visit to Morocco in 1832 gave him a lifelong vocabulary of North African light and costume, and his use of broken colour directly influenced the Impressionists.
The July Revolution of 1830 ended the Bourbon Restoration and installed the "bourgeois king" Louis-Philippe. Delacroix’s painting was one of a wave of commemorative works, but it was also politically dangerous: it showed a republic, not a constitutional monarchy, and the new regime quietly withdrew it from view. Its later career - banned, unrolled, re-hung - tracks the whole political history of nineteenth-century France.
Denon Wing · Level 1 · Salle Mollien (Room 700)
The Louvre is divided into three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — reached from the hall beneath the glass pyramid.
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