Liberty Leading the People
Delacroix’s blazing allegory of revolution — a bare-breasted Liberty carrying the tricolour over the barricades.
Eugène Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People (La Liberté guidant le peuple) in 1830, in the immediate aftermath of the July Revolution that toppled King Charles X. The vast canvas — 2.6 by 3.25 metres — is a founding image of French Romanticism.
At its centre strides the allegorical figure of Liberty, a bare-breasted Marianne raising the tricolour in one hand and a bayonetted musket in the other, leading a cross-section of the Parisian people — a top-hatted bourgeois, a street urchin, a workman — across a barricade strewn with the fallen.
The painting has become a universal symbol of freedom and popular uprising, reproduced on stamps, banknotes and protest posters the world over. It hangs in the Denon wing, a short walk from the Mona Lisa.
- 🖼️TypeOil on canvas · 260 × 325 cm
- 🎨ArtistEugène Delacroix
- 📅Date1830
- 🏛️RoomDenon wing · Galerie Mollien
- 📍LocationMusée du Louvre, 75001 Paris
About the Louvre
The Louvre is the world’s largest and most-visited art museum. Once the fortress and royal palace of the kings of France, it opened as a public museum in 1793 and today holds some 35,000 works spanning antiquity to the mid-19th century — from Egyptian antiquities and Greek marbles to the French Crown Jewels.
Since 1989, visitors enter beneath the glass Pyramid designed by architect I. M. Pei, which opens onto the museum’s three wings — Denon, Sully and Richelieu — arranged around the Cour Napoléon. The Louvre stands in the 1st arrondissement along the Rue de Rivoli, beside the Tuileries Gardens and the Seine.
The museum is open every day except Tuesday, from 9 am to 6 pm (with a late evening on Fridays). Timed tickets are strongly recommended and can be booked on the official site, louvre.fr; under-18s enter free, as do EU residents under 26. Nearest métro: Palais-Royal–Musée du Louvre (lines 1 and 7).
Where to see it — the Louvre and around
The Louvre (pulsing marker) at the centre. Toggle the filters to explore the heritage, gardens, restaurants and activities of the 1st arrondissement — and the hotels around it.