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People
. His representation of the first major uprising in Europe since 1789 has now become an iconic image of revolution; indeed it is often mistaken for an image of its more famous predecessor. This is understandable, as the painting, in some respects, showed the 1830 revolution – which toppled the restored post-Napoleonic Bourbon monarchy – as a reprise of 1789. The bare-breasted female figure of Liberty, wearing a Phrygian cap and holding a
tricolore
and a bayonet, is a semi-allegorical figure, echoing the classical heroes of the late eighteenth century. The painting was also designed to show the alliance of bourgeois and the poor that had existed in 1789: Liberty leads a rag-bag of revolutionaries, from the top-hatted young bourgeois intellectual to the bare-chested workman and a street child, clambering over the dead bodies of the revolutionary martyrs.
    However, the painting also showed how views of revolution had changed since David’s day. The workers and the poor figure more prominently than the bourgeois, and unsurprisingly, given the prevalent fear of the poor, hostile critics complained that lawyers, doctors and merchants had been omitted in favour of ‘urchins and workers’. Moreover, the figure of Liberty was not entirely allegorical, but clearly a woman of the people; the
Journal des artistes
found her dirty, ugly and ‘ignoble’. 1 In 1832 the painting was hidden from view for many years, for fear that it would incite disorder, only to re-emerge from the attics during the revolutions of 1848. For Delacroix, at the heart of revolution were not the bourgeoisie in togas but the workers in rags.
    Delacroix’s painting strikingly illustrates how far the imagination ofrevolution had moved from David’s ordered and hieratic tableaux. Delacroix’s Liberty may have included the odd classical feature, but his canvas exulted in its high Romanticism. There is a wildness and an elemental energy to the figures, far removed from David’s classical restraint. However, Delacroix also inserted into his revolutionary ensemble a uniformed student from the École Polytechnique – the institution established by Carnot, Robespierre’s ‘techno-Jacobin’ rival. The Romanticism of revolution was tempered, even if only mildly, by respect for science.
    Delacroix, though, was only briefly enthused by the revolution of 1830. He was no political radical, and he soon became disillusioned. Indeed, many have seen in his famous painting a highly ambivalent attitude towards revolutionary violence: the figures closest to the viewer are corpses, and despite the title, it is not Liberty who leads the people but a pistol-brandishing child. Karl Marx, by contrast, did not oppose revolutionary violence, though like Delacroix he sought to apply the experience of 1789 to a newly powerful socialist politics. In the later 1830s and 1840s the German-born Marx was as obsessed with the legacy of 1789 as any French intellectual, and he even planned to write the revolution’s history. 2 And like Delacroix, Marx was updating the revolutionary tradition, ‘declassicizing’ it and placing workers at the fore-front of the
mise en scène
. The failure of the Jacobins, he insisted, arose precisely from their excessive admiration for the classical city-state. Their nostalgia for ancient Sparta and Rome had led them to oppose the
sans-culottes
. The
political
equality they espoused, giving all men full citizenship, was no longer enough; in a modern society true equality and harmony would be realized only with full
economic
equality, and without support from society, they had been forced to use violence. 3 Marx also made even greater efforts than Delacroix to temper his revolutionary Romanticism with an appreciation of science and economic modernity. The Jacobins, he argued, had exaggerated the power of morality and political will to transform society, underestimating the importance of economic forces.
    It is in this remoulding of the French