Image · Public domain via Wikimedia Commons
Liberty Leading the People
Eugène Delacroix · 1830
About this masterpiece
Painted in the autumn of 1830, Delacroix’s allegorical canvas commemorates the July Revolution that toppled King Charles X. A bare-breasted personification of Liberty, wearing a Phrygian cap, advances over barricades and corpses, raising the tricolore flag in one hand and a bayoneted musket in the other. Beside her, citizens of every social class — a top-hatted bourgeois, a young street urchin, a worker — surge forward together.
Historical significance
The painting fuses Romantic passion with political journalism and has become the visual emblem of revolutionary France. Today it stands as a universal icon of the struggle for freedom, instantly recognizable from postage stamps to album covers. It has also served as a model for the imagery of Marianne, the personification of the French Republic.
