LARGE, COLORFUL PAINTINGS INTRODUCE ITS TRIUMPH...
...and modish girls whose coiffures require a maid help fashionable young combattants*
*For the real fighters, please click back.
- The panel at the entry shows ordinary people in the background, but well-dressed women implore a soldier in the foreground:
- In the outsize painting with which the exhibit begins, the important figures are Swiss guards or middle class. The two workers (in the white shirts) are secondary and we do not see their faces:
Taking the Louvre, July 29, 1830, Massacre of the Swiss Guards by Louis Bezard, 1832 / zoom
The dramatic painting with which the last page ends stays in the reserves. Replacements:
Spotless white trousers, curled hair, a corset that nips the waist, immense sleeves and in the background, frock coats and top hats.
Throwing things out of windows implies a popular rising, but the museum chooses a work where that is only inferred...
...instead of one where it is much more dramatic and where in that artisans' neighborhood, the role of the people could be taken for granted...
Combat on rue Saint-Antoine, anonymous, 1830 / zoom
..though this artist too shows the rebels a middle-class:
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About 200 students in uniform
and a few republican journalists and intellectuals
were the only such people
to join the street-fighting.
Women from wealthy families
might look at the royal troops' advance
from their windows,*
but that was their sole participation.
* Memoirs of Marie d'Agoult. Working women were usually absent as well, though the goddess in Liberty Leading the People is based on a real figure.
As for the revolts
that six months later became endemic,
the museum shows nothing.
* * *
Next,
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