LARGE, COLORFUL PAINTINGS INTRODUCE THE CAPITALIST TRIUMPH...
...and girls dressed in the height of fashion whose coiffures require maids help elegant young combattants*
*For the real fighters, please click back
- The panel at the entry shows ordinary people in the background, but in the foreground well-dressed women implore a soldier:
- 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
- Then comes the museum's view of the revolutionaries:
Spotless white trousers, curled hair, a corset that nips the waist, immense sleeves and in the background, frock coats and top hats
Attacking troops by throwing things out of windows implies a popular adversary, but in the work chosen that is only inferred:*
*For a much more explicit image, please click and scroll down.
The much more dramatic painting the last page shows stays in the reserves: Please click and scroll down.
About 200 students in uniform
and a few republican journalists and intellectuals
were the only middle-class 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. Underclass 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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