Why would a brand-new king buy a 10-foot painting celebrating the revolution that put him on the throne, only to lock it in an attic a few months later?
That is the absurd true story behind Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People (1830). Today it hangs as one of the proudest treasures in the Louvre. But when the French government first purchased the canvas in 1831, royal officials quickly realized they had made a terrible mistake. The painting didn’t look like noble patriotic propaganda. It looked like a instruction manual for a street riot.
Three Days in July 1830
In late July 1830, Paris erupted into three violent days of fighting known as Les Trois Glorieuses (The Three Glorious Days). Fed up with King Charles X trying to dissolve parliament and censor the press, workers, students, and shopkeepers tore up cobblestones, built street barricades, and forced the king to abdicate.
Delacroix was 32 years old at the time. He didn't pick up a musket during the uprising, preferring to watch from a safe distance. But in October 1830, he wrote to his brother Charles with a burst of creative urgency: "I have undertaken a modern subject, a barricade... and if I haven't fought for my country at least I'll paint for her."
By December, Delacroix had completed a massive oil painting print composition measuring 2.60 by 3.25 meters (over 8 by 10 feet). It was raw, energetic, and completely unlike the polished, heroic battle scenes traditional art academies favored.
Armpit Hair, Dirt, and Two Pistols
When the canvas debuted at the Paris Salon of 1831, classical art critics were horrified. Delacroix hadn't painted an idealized Greek goddess floating over a bloodless battlefield in traditional vintage wall art fashion. He painted a real, flesh-and-blood working woman leading a ragtag militia over dead bodies.
The central figure of Liberty (Marianne) wore a red Phrygian cap, the historic emblem of freed Roman slaves. But her bare feet were caked in mud, her skin was smudged with soot, and under her raised right arm holding the tricolor flag, critics noticed visible armpit hair. Art writer Étienne-Jean Delécluze sneered that she looked less like a symbol of freedom and more like a fishwife from the Paris markets.
Beside her stood a fierce young street urchin wearing a black velvet beret and firing twin pistols. That boy caught the imagination of a young writer named Victor Hugo, who later transformed the character into Gavroche in his 1862 masterpiece Les Misérables. To the left, a man in a black top hat clutched a hunting musket (a middle-class student standing shoulder-to-shoulder with factory workers). Through the thick gunpowder smoke in the background, you can just make out the twin towers of Notre-Dame Cathedral flying a tiny blue, white, and red flag.
The 3,000-Franc Regret
France's new "Citizen King," Louis-Philippe I, wanted to show he supported the constitutional movement that brought him to power. His Ministry of the Interior bought the painting from Delacroix in 1831 for 3,000 francs, a substantial sum at the time, planning to hang it in the Musée du Luxembourg.
Then reality set in. In June 1832, republican workers and students took to the streets of Paris again, erecting barricades to protest economic hardship and cholera outbreaks (the exact revolt documented in Les Misérables). As shots rang out across the city, royal officials panicked. Looking at Delacroix’s canvas, they didn't see a peaceful monument to past victory. They saw a dangerous visual weapon that made armed rebellion look thrilling.
Government workers quietly pulled Liberty Leading the People down from the wall. They rolled up the giant canvas and shipped it out of Paris for safekeeping, storing it in an attic at Delacroix’s aunt's house in Frépillon. For nearly two decades, the painting stayed hidden away in the dark.
From Storage to the Louvre
The painting was unrolled for public viewing only briefly during the Revolution of 1848, which finally ousted Louis-Philippe. But it wasn't until 1874, after the establishment of the Third French Republic, that Delacroix’s masterpiece entered the Louvre's permanent collection for good.
If you love powerful historical storytelling on your walls, exploring history wall art and dramatic canvas art is one of the best ways to bring iconic moments of human resilience into a modern home.
Delacroix set out to record three wild summer days in Paris. Instead, he painted an image so potent that the government that bought it spent 20 years praying nobody would look at it.
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