During the French Revolution of 1830, insurgents raised some four thousand barricades. Afterward, lithographs of the street fighting flowed from the presses, creating the barricades first imagery. This book documents the changing political valence of the revolutionary ideals associated with the barricade in France from 1830 to 1852.

The Revolution Takes Form coordinates the political reality of the barricade with the divergent ways in which its image gave shape to the periods conceptions of class, revolution, and urban space. Engaging the instability of the barricade, art historian Jordan Marc Rose focuses on five politically charged works of art: Eugene Delacroixs La Liberte guidant le peuple, Honore Daumiers Rue Transnonain, le 15 avril 1834 and LEmeute, Auguste Preaults Tuerie, and Ernest Meissoniers Souvenir de guerre civile. The history of these artworks illuminates how such revolutionary insurrections were characterizedalong with the conceptions of the people they mobilized. Foregrounding a trajectory of disillusionment, growing class tensions, and ultimately open conflict between bourgeois liberals and the proletariat, Rose both explains why the barricade became a compelling subject for pictorial reflection and accounts for its emergence as the periods most poignant and meaningful symbol of revolution.

Original and convincing, this book will appeal to students and scholars of art history and, in particular, of the history of the French Revolution.