Revolution and Social Upheaval Eugène Delacroix
syllabus
 
units
--unit one
--unit two
--unit three
--unit four
--unit five


conclusions


image banks
--l'assiette au beurre
 --La Vision de Hugo
 --Zola au Pantheon

 --Les Quatre Saisons de la Kultur
 
 
 
 

 

...(The) most enduring of all the images of revolutionary exaltation: Eugène Delacroix’s Liberty leading the People. Standing on the rubble of a barricade, his bare-breasted Marianne of the People, wearing the red hat of the sans-culottes, urges workers and students towards the indeterminate destination of revolutionary arcadia. Notre Dame de la Liberté is framed against the background of Notre Dame de Paris, already conquered for Freedom, the tricolor flying from its towers.        Simon Schama: Citizens
 So enduring indeed is Delacroix’s monument to the Revolution of 1830 that it was “lifted” in 1948 by a brilliant cartoonist named Calvo as one of the climactic images of his two volume history of the Second World War as enacted by animals; the Nazis were wolves. They seem to win in volume one, but are ultimately defeated when “la bête est terrassée” (the beast is put down).  In this pastiche of Delacroix we see the victory of the French (rabbits) on the barricades. Note the substitution of the Sacré Cœur for Notre Dame, a meaningful allusion seen also (and first) in T-A Steinlen’s “Vision de Hugo,” elsewhere on this web-site. 
 
 


 

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