Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People has become one of the most iconic symbols of the French Revolution. Ironically, it does not depict the French Revolution itself, but instead portrays the July Revolution of 1830, which was less exciting in that it ended up swapping one monarch for another. It would take eighteen years and another revolution for the Second Republic to be instituted. Lady Liberty must be a fickle woman and a cruel master. One cannot help looking at this painting and wonder what Lady Liberty stands for. Against what is she fighting? We cannot see. What behind her and her army is she defending? We cannot see. What is beneath her? The bodies and blood we are told are her cost. But for what are we paying this cost? We cannot see.
The painting, like the revolutionary spirit, cannot provide answers to the basic questions about its own existence. Surely there is a better way.
Consider the example of a very different painting: The Intervention of the Sabine Women by Jacques-Louis David. Here we see a woman who is not leading a battle, but intervening in one by casting herself between the two champions. What compels her to do this? What is she fighting for? We see clearly: her children. The driving force in this painting is not an abstraction that no one can see. It is love manifest in the darkest of circumstances. Where Lady Liberty told us the highest value is an abstraction that she may change at her every whim, the Sabines show us that the highest value is love. Specifically, love of real people. Where Lady Liberty glides over the bodies of those who have died for her, the Sabine mothers cast themselves in front of the children who still live.
In these two paintings are all the difference in the revolutionary spirit and the classical spirit. The one demands we sacrifice for uncertain things we cannot know. In the other sacrifice is willingly given for those things we know and love. The age of Chivalry may have been swept away by the revolutionary spirit, but the unbought grace of life remains to provide us the things that are still worthy of sacrifice.
