The year of the Symphonie fantastique—1830—was marked at the end of July by a three-day revolution, Les Trois Glorieuses, that altered lingering eighteenth-century governmental procedures and pointed the country in a new direction. The political battles that pitted radicals against reactionaries and that resulted in the modest compromise of Louis-Philippe and the July Monarchy had their counterparts in the arts. Most notable among them was, of course, the bataille d’Hernani, the controversy that surrounded the opening of Victor Hugo’s tragedy, at the Théâtre-Français (what we more commonly call the Comédie-Française), on February 25, 1830, and its proclamation, in the preface, of “freedom in art, freedom in society: this is the double goal which all just and reasonable individuals must work to achieve.” Those who objected to Hugo’s novel techniques (of poetry inflected by drama, of stage action, of set design, and more), were likened to the partisans of the Ancien Régime; those who applauded their virtues were likened to the new champions of Liberté, Égalité, and Fraternité.
But a play—a spoken performance, a work of literature—is not readily transformed into an immediately graspable symbol of struggle. That honor was bestowed upon the most notable painting of the year, and subsequently one of the most famous paintings of the canon,
La Liberté guidant le peuple, subtitled “le 28 juillet,” by Eugène Delacroix. This work, executed in the autumn of 1830 and now, after a checkered history, hanging proudly in the Louvre, adorned the announcement, in 1841, of the socialist Louis Blanc’s history of the eighteen-thirties, just as it did the posters announcing the socialist Francois Mitterrand’s election to the French presidency one hundred forty years later, in 1981. For the cover of the catalogue of an important international exhibition of French painting in the age of revolution, the editors chose Delacroix’s
Liberté. The painting itself, now widely considered a
chef-d’œuvre of bold design, vivid figuration, and powerful color, is for art historians simply unthinkable apart from the circumstances of its creation: it is a work that succeeds “in joining the world of modern historical fact and traditional allegory,” as the art historian Robert Rosenblum has put it, “in a turbulent, explosive vision that elevates the street fighting of Paris to a hymn to the universal ideal of liberty.”
1 Rosenblum, “Painting During the Bourbon Restoration,” in French Painting 1774–1830, 239. Reproduced in the history manuals for generations of French school children, it is in some ways a visual symbol of France itself.
It is not my intention here to sing the praises of Delacroix’s early masterpiece. It is rather to note, in the context of a musicological essay, that this literally revolutionary painting was produced by an artist whose public career up to 1830 was intrinsically linked to French “officialdom.” La Barque de Dante, exhibited at the Salon of 1822, was purchased by Louis XVIII; La Scène des massacres de Scio, exhibited at the Salon of 1824, was purchased at the instigation of Charles X; Justinien dictant les Instituts was commissioned in 1827 by Charles’s Conseil d’État. Though scandalized by the overt sensuality of La Mort de Sardanapale (1827), the government’s Director of Fine Arts, Vicomte Sosthène de La Rochefoucauld, commissioned the artist (in 1828) to paint La Mort de Charles le Téméraire, which was offered by Charles X to the city of Nancy. Meanwhile, having established a relationship with the other branch of the royal family, Delacroix painted La Messe du Cardinal de Richelieu, in 1829, on commission from the Duc d’Orléans, the future King Louis-Philippe. La Liberté itself, purchased by Louis-Philippe, was originally destined to hang in the Salle du Trône at the Tuileries Palace. It is thus fair to say that Delacroix’s artistic well-being—and he was of course not alone—depended heavily upon governmental good will, governmental commission, governmental exhibition, and governmental purchase.
Delacroix’s
La Mort de Sardanapale, among other paintings, has been convincingly interpreted as an attack on the absolutist pretensions of Charles X.
2 Lambertson, “Delacroix’s Sardanapalus,” 81. But not all critics equated artistic daring with political ideology. Furthermore, in 1830, Delacroix’s
Liberté was read in some quarters as a glorification of revolution, and in others as a condemnation of such turbulence, presumably because of the graphic reality of certain details.
3 Hadjinicolaou, “La Liberté guidant le people,” 3–6. The man himself was apparently something of a dandy who enjoyed regular social intercourse with the aristocratic world of Paris. From the documents preserved—his famous
Journal leaps from 1824 to 1847, but letters from the intervening period do exist—it appears clear that Delacroix recognized the abuses of the régime of Charles X, that he had confidence in Louis-Philippe, and that he was pleased by the rapid return to public order after the three-day revolution.
4 Johnson, “Eugène Delacroix and Charles de Verniac,” 517. More generally it can be said that Delacroix stood with those who championed the cause of “liberty” even well before his explicit tribute painted after the revolution in 1830. The Greek War of Independence against the Turks, the latter viewed as barbarians, had for a decade been supported by the activists of the Romantic generation in France. Delacroix would celebrate the Greek combat with several important works, including
La Grèce sur les ruines de Missolonghi (begun in 1821) and
La Scène des massacres de Scio, his first monumental tableau. Some of the sketches and drafts for these two works were later to play a direct role in the composition of
La Liberté guidant de peuple.
5 Toussaint, La Liberté guidant le peuple. This painting, in sum, has been viewed by certain modern critics as simply representative of historical fact. By others it has been seen as “saturated” with ideology.
6 Gaudibert, “Eugène Delacroix et le romantisme révolutionnaire,” 18. Delacroix himself is viewed variously as close to the political imbroglios of his generation or as far from the revolutionary crowd. One thing is certain: the artist’s life and the artist’s work can be justly interpreted only in the light of the political history of his day. Even for such an apparently innocuous matter as the interpretation of the “peuple” of the title, Delacroix’s work must be considered in terms of reference beyond those of painting alone. Did he mean “la classe ouvrière” (“the working class”)? Or did he mean “tout le monde” (“everyone”)? We shall hear more of Delacroix in chapter 7.