image banks
--l'assiette au beurre
--Les Quatre Saisons de la Kultur
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...(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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