Liberty Leading the People depicts Marianne
Purchase and exhibition
The French government bought the painting in 1831 for 3,000 francs with the intention of displaying it in the throne room of the Palais du Luxembourg as a reminder to the "citizen-king" Louis-Philippe of the July Revolution, through which he had come to power. This plan did not come to fruition and the canvas hung in the palace's museum gallery for a few months, before being removed due to its inflammatory political message. After the June Rebellion of 1832, it was returned to the artist. According to Albert Boime,Champfleury wrote in August 1848 that it had been "hidden in an attic for being too revolutionary." Although Louis-Philippe's Ministry of the Interior initially acquired it as a gesture to the Left, after the uprising at the funeral of Lamarque in June 1832 it was never again openly displayed for fear of setting a bad example. Delacroix was permitted to send the painting to his aunt Félicité for safekeeping. After the Second Republic was established following the revolution of 1848 it was exhibited briefly in that year, and then during the Second Empire in the Salon of 1855. The recently established Third Republic finally acquired the painting in 1874 for the collection of the Musée du Louvre in Paris.
In 1974–75, the painting was the featured work in an exhibition organized by the French government, the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York and the Detroit Institute of Arts as a Bicentennial gift to the people of the United States. The exhibition, entitled French Painting 1774–1830: The Age of Revolution, marked a rare display of the Delacroix painting, and many of the other 148 works, outside France.  The exhibition was first shown at the Grand Palais from 16 November 1974 to 3 February 1975. It moved to Detroit from 5 March to 4 May 1975, then New York from 12 June to 7 September 1975.In 1999, it was flown on board an Airbus Beluga from Paris to Tokyo via Bahrain and Calcutta in about 20 hours. The large canvas, measuring 2.99 metres (9.8 feet) high by 3.62 metres (11.9 feet) long, was too large to fit into a Boeing 747. It was transported in the vertical position inside a special pressurised container provided with isothermal protection and an anti-vibration device.In 2012, it was moved to the new Louvre-Lens museum in Lens, Pas-de-Calais, as the starring work in the first tranche of paintings from the Louvre's collection to be installed. On 7 February 2013, the painting was vandalized by a visitor in Lens. An unidentified 28-year-old woman allegedly wrote an inscription ("AE911") on the painting. The woman was immediately arrested by a security guard and a visitor. A short time after the incident, the management of the Louvre and its Pas-de-Calais branch published a press release indicating that "at first glance, the inscription is superficial and should be easily removed". Louvre officials announced the next day that the writing had been removed in less than two hours by a restorer without damaging the original paint, and the piece returned to display that morning.
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