Over 27–29 July 1830, the 'Three Glorious Days,' Parisians built barricades against Charles X's decrees stiffening the monarchical restoration. Delacroix did not fight — in a letter to his brother he wrote, 'if I have not fought for my country, at least I will paint for it.' The picture was finished within a few months and shown at the Paris Salon of 1831.

At the centre of the composition rises a woman with her chest bared; she carries the French tricolour in one hand and a musket in the other. The Phrygian cap (a revolutionary symbol) and the pose recalling classical goddesses lift her out of being merely a woman and into an allegory of Liberty herself. This is the founding moment of the Marianne figure in modern France's visual memory.

But the picture is not only allegory. Around Marianne stand figures from real social classes: a bourgeois in a top hat (often read as Delacroix's self-portrait), a street boy with two pistols (said to have inspired Gavroche in Hugo's *Les Misérables*), a worker, a soldier with his shako fallen, a young man in a factory apron. Beneath them lie the barricade, the rubble, and the bloody corpses — the wall of revolution is not poetry but a body count. The central move of Romanticism is visible here: ideal and real are pressed into the same canvas.

The July Monarchy of Louis-Philippe briefly acquired and exhibited the painting, then judged it politically unsafe and put it in storage. It only entered the Louvre permanently after the Revolution of 1848. Since then it has stood at the centre of the Republic's visual identity, reappearing on passports, postage stamps, banknotes, and at the opening ceremony of the 2024 Paris Olympics. A 2024 restoration removed 130 years of varnish and revealed that the original is far brighter and more saturated than the dimmed version we had come to know.