Almost everyone who looks at Eugene Delacroix’s Liberty Leading the People assumes it depicts the French Revolution of 1789. It does not. This episode explains how a 10-by-12-foot canvas about the July Revolution of 1830 became the universal shorthand for rebellion, why the Phrygian cap on Liberty’s head fuels the confusion, and how Delacroix engineered a triangular composition that pushes a barefoot, dirt-streaked goddess out of the frame and into the viewer’s space.

We follow the painting’s turbulent life: bought by King Louis-Philippe’s government in 1831 for the throne room, then returned to the artist and hidden in his aunt’s attic for being too revolutionary as the June Rebellion of 1832 approached. It later flew standing upright to Tokyo in an Airbus Beluga, was scrawled with a 9/11 conspiracy slogan in 2013, and underwent a 2023 to 2024 restoration that removed eight layers of varnish and revealed that Liberty’s dress was never yellow.

• The street kid, the top-hatted bourgeois, and the Polytechnique student who share the barricade
• Why the self-portrait legend is likely fiction and the letter that reveals Delacroix’s civic guilt
• How cured oil paint behaves like glass and why vibration made air transport so risky
• The discarded leather boot uncovered in the rubble after a century under dirt
• Its echoes in Les Miserables, the Statue of Liberty, a Coldplay album, John Wick, and the 2024 Paris Olympics