Liberty Leading the People. Eugene Delacroix, 1830. Oil on canvas, 260 x 325 cm. Musee du Louvre
Delacroix’s painting was created as a commemoration of the July revolution of 1830 in France. As the focal point, a barefoot/ bare-breasted woman (Liberty) wearing a Phrygian cap lifts the French flag with her right hand and holds a rifle with the left while guiding a crowd of energetic men towards the leading edge of the frame. Dead corpses lying in the foreground and the vestiges of a broken barricade form a kind of pedestal where liberty stands. At her feet, a man looks at her with hopeful devotion, at her left a young boy wearing working clothes raises a pistol, and to her right a bourgeois man stands in front of the rest of the angry crowd.
Delacroix was the leader of the French Romantic school, and a great source of inspiration for the impressionist and symbolist movement. From a very early age, his artistic qualities were quickly recognized and awarded. Delacroix's artistic career was anonymously supported in great part by Talleyrand, a friend of the family who claimed to be his real father, allowing him to preserve his authentic and exotic creative passions. While taking political stands, his vision was not mediated by patrons. In the case of his most influential painting, Liberty Leading People, the symbolic meaning of the piece goes beyond any nationalistic premise. Even though it has grounds on the actual historical moment, the painter’s interest was not the glorification of this event . The cultural value in this symbolic depiction has its very grounds on freedom. The decision to hide this piece by the French government is a clear sign of its power; for them Liberty Leading People was “too revolutionary”.
First, it is essential to notice the differences in the social class of the subjects depicted. The bourgeoisie is represented by the one man with a rifle on the right wearing a top hat and a black suit. He is self absorbed in worry and his eyes point to nowhere in the picture frame. Behind him, a man with working clothes raises a sword and his disposition seems far more energetic. The attitude and proximity of these two subjects in Marxist terms is a necessary condition for revolution and the liberation of all people, including the working class. Here, the crowd signifying the proletariat class is totally engaged and outraged. The emancipatory political message of this piece explains the disruption it caused inside of the French government when displayed at the museum’s palace for fear of setting a “bad example”.
It is also relevant to highlight the closest subject to Liberty crawling at her feet. The very first thing to notice is the use of color on the man’s clothes which depict the tricolor French flag in the exact same order. The red kerchief also represents the working class in relationship to the red Phrygian cap of Liberty which signifies freedom. His helplessness looks up to her with a hopeful attitude. The subject finds in the the only woman depicted the fierce strength and determination that takes to break a barricade towards freedom.
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Liberty, also known as Marianne, has a long story of praises and punishments as the National personification of the French Republic. Freedom, equality, fraternity, and reason are some of the qualities attributed to this honorable Goddess since the French Revolution. Coins, postal stamps, and even the official government currency depicted her. The history of Liberty is one of the great personifications of the unending struggles accounted by contemporary feminists still prevailing in our current time.
The very first depiction of Liberty goes back to Joan of Arc, a heroine/ martyr who helped the liberation of France from the English domination during the Hundred Years’ War. At the age of 19 on May 30, 1431, during the time of the inquisition, she was captured and burned alive by the hands of French betrayers allied with the English. In 1803 she was declared a National symbol by Napoleon Bonaparte and subsequently beatified and canonized.
The youthful Marianne as the goddess of Liberty, also as a representation of female strength, prevailed as the symbol of the new and liberated French People, and the defeat of the old monarchy ruled by kings until the third Republic. But the struggle against patriarchal dominance still prevails today.
In need of radical solutions, the revolutionaries replaced the neutral and conservative depiction of Marianne for a more rebellious, fierce and determined bare-breasted woman, recalling the Greek goddess Athena. This reaction is truly subversive from a feminist viewpoint. When thinking of the enormous volume of religious and ultra-conservative imagery of bourgeois women at the time, we can understand the emancipatory value of this depiction. But this image was not all praise. Even in modern times we could recall the 2012 campaign ‘Free the Nipple’ in New York, which raises awareness about gendered disparities in civil liberties and conventions regarding toplesness. Thinking about the relationship between the French Marianne and the Statue of Liberty in New York, it becomes relevant to ask: what is the liberating power of women?
Marianne’s breasts were covered on multiple occasions in search of a more conservative depiction. On multiple occasions, such representations, as the one from Delacroix, were qualified as “too revolutionary”. Later on in 1879, the image of the bare-breasted Marianne was uncovered again and reappropriated by workers as a representative of the social and democratic republic. Many other examples account for the inflammatory character of her powerful image in the eyes of male-driven governments. In fact, what once represented the abolition of corruption and shame in the image of Liberty, was now being shamed and denigrated.
The representation of Marianne, while still being a unifying symbol for the French people during the third republic, was subjected to all kinds of sabotages and misogynistic “ jokes” by counter-revolutionaries and German militants. Despite the signing of the Cordial Agreement in April 1904 between the United Kingdom and the French Republic being represented by depictions of Marianne and Britannia shaking hands as a sign of peace between both countries, many others sexualized and defamed her visage. John Bull, Wilhelm II, key figures in the event, were drawn alongside Marianne in German and British propaganda, being shown in vulgar scenarios filled with judgemental innuendo.
The right-wing counterpart of the revolution and the xenophobic over masculine power of German militarism both frequently portrayed Marianne as a hysterical, promiscuous woman, suggesting that she was a prostitute. Her image was used to depict the French government and its people as “weak” and “feminine”. The ridicule placed upon the image of this great female heroine mirrors the legacy of the macho culture still prevailing in modern times. Here, it is imperative to re-evaluate these phenomena of the degradation of her visage from the feminist perspective: This splitting of the female character into two oppositional parts, the saint “pure” woman and the prostitute, has been one of the main strategies of patriarchy to keep women away from support networks and imprisoned in restrictive constructs of idealized family units. The very nature of women and our need for unifying these questionable poles, including the one of the powerful and powerless, is expressed in the craving of the modern woman to consume sexualized products such as high heels, beauty products, and sensual clothing, while putting their bodies on display. So, is the fire from Liberty’s torch coming from the punishment and judgment placed by men around women’s public lives? I do not think so. Freud would cleverly attest that the only cause of hysteria was actually the lack of women’s sexual freedom. So, yes, as we probably have experienced, men can also be hysterical.
Liberating the woman’s breast carries deep political and symbolic importance in the feminist perspective. It is not random that the female nipple is still very censored in contemporary society, including social media. Even the milky Madonna, censured from the religious iconography, seems to be subversive, and people still take the sight of a breastfeeding mother as prompt to make derisive comments. This ignores the irony that all people of the world come from a woman’s womb and are nurtured by her breast. Is the double power of female nurturance and sexuality, in fact, what inspires the reactive fear of patriarchal institutions? There are answers for all human struggles for liberation found in the character of Liberty, as Delacroix and many others came to realize very cleverly. The young revolutionary woman with a nurturing breast, wildly free and determined to fight for her people, standing up from the ruins of men’s war and violence, is the answer to freedom. Maybe, in the romantic world of Delacroix Marianne, Britannia and Germannia not only just shake their hands, but embrace each other, honoring their strength to fight in this deadly world created by men.