Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix

Liberty Leading the People by Eugène Delacroix

Over the barricade

Liberty strides forward over rubble and bodies, the red, white and blue flag held high in her right hand and a bayoneted musket in her left. She is barefoot, her dress slipping from her shoulders, a red Phrygian cap on her head. Around her come the insurgents: a man in a top hat with a gun, a worker with a sabre, a boy with a pistol in each hand. The dead lie across the foreground, and through the smoke at the right stand the towers of Notre-Dame.

Painting the July Revolution

The picture records the three days of street fighting in Paris in July 1830 that brought down Charles X. Delacroix painted it that autumn and showed it at the Salon of 1831. The new government bought it, then soon took it down as too inflammatory; it entered the Louvre in 1874. Liberty is at once an allegory and a woman of the streets, and she has since become an emblem of the French Republic.

Where it hangs

It hangs in the Musée du Louvre, Paris, and measures 260 by 325 centimetres. A restoration completed in 2024 removed layers of yellowed varnish, and the photograph used here was taken afterwards.

About this print

Made from a 9,000-pixel photograph of the original, enough to print sharply at up to about 60 inches on its longest side.

Sources: Musée du Louvre, Paris · Wikidata Q29530 · Wikimedia Commons