Battle For Liberty Essay

Eugène Delacroix was largely indifferent towards politics for the greater portion of his life. He admitted, forth willing, to be bored by politics. However, by July 1830, the political crisis in France became hard to ignore. Battles for liberty, which were left over from the Revolution, bloodied the streets of Paris.
After Louis XV’s execution in 1793, France struggled to form a functioning Government. In 1814 Louis XV’s brother, Louis XVIII, was summoned from exile in England to rule. The principles of modern liberty diminished and when Louis XV died, his older brother, Charles X, a fan of the old ways of medieval pageantry, succeeded him.
On July 25, 1830 Charles X signed an ordinance that abolished the freedom of press, dissolved the newly elected Chamber, and made changes to the electoral system, that removed the voting rights of merchants and rising industrialists. In a few days time, public outrage had ensued. This ordinance, which had affected the middle class, added to the existing deprivation, low wages and poor housing, of the working class. The streets of Paris morphed into a violent battlefield. Former soldiers of the Empire led workers, students, national guardsmen and even artists, in a revolt against Charles’ Monarchy. The battle began on Tuesday July 27th and among the soldiers were Alexandre Dumas and Honore
The complex foreground of this image dominates the distant depiction of the Seine’s right bank in old Paris wreathed in gun smoke. A careful inspection of the buildings to the right will reveal the structure of Notre Dame, a sign of the King’s power, which now triumphantly flies the tricolored flag. When the tricolor was hoisted up the north tower of the famed Cathedral on the morning of July the 28th, it roused the Parisians who had watched the white, royal flag fly for the preceding fifteen