By Theresa Rézeau
At the centre of the barricade stands a woman carrying a flag.
Smoke rises behind her. Bodies lie at her feet. Around her, workers, students and armed citizens move forward through the chaos. She is barefoot, her dress has fallen from her shoulders, and in one hand she carries a musket while the other raises the French tricolour above the crowd.
She has no crown, no uniform and no office, yet everyone is following her.
In Liberty Leading the People (1830), French Romantic painter Eugène Delacroix (1798–1863) painted revolution without placing a politician at its head. The work commemorates the July Revolution of 27–29 July 1830, when Parisians rose against King Charles X after measures restricting political and press freedoms. Delacroix placed something larger than any individual participant at the centre of the uprising: Liberty herself.
The leader of the nation is not a king, a general or a president. It is an idea.
That distinction matters because nations rarely follow individuals alone. They follow what those individuals appear to represent: freedom, security, justice, prosperity, belonging, revenge or renewal. A leader may stand at the front, but behind every leader is an idea powerful enough to persuade others to follow.
Delacroix makes that act of following look dangerous. Liberty does not advance across a ceremonial floor. She climbs across a barricade and over the bodies of the dead. Smoke obscures Paris behind her. Guns are raised. A boy beside her carries pistols. The crowd surges forward, but the painting does not show us clearly where they are going.
This is not the orderly architecture of power but the uncertainty of movement, and it raises a more difficult question about leadership than the familiar one of who deserves authority: what makes people follow?
We often imagine leadership as command, the ability to make decisions, issue instructions and exercise authority. Yet history repeatedly demonstrates that possessing power and leading people are not the same thing. Many have occupied palaces, presidential residences and government offices. Far fewer have persuaded people that the direction in which they were being led was worth the journey.
Trust can transform authority into leadership, but trust carries dangers of its own.
Look beneath Liberty's feet. The crowd behind her believes in something larger than itself, and that belief gives it courage, but Delacroix refuses to conceal the price. There are dead men beneath the ideal. Liberty is illuminated against the smoke, vigorous and almost sculptural, while the human consequences of revolution occupy the same ground.
An idea can liberate a nation and still ask people to die for it.
The tension between those two realities sits at the heart of leadership. The question is never simply whether someone can move people. It is where they are being moved, what they are being asked to sacrifice and whether the destination can justify the cost.
Few modern political figures confronted that responsibility as dramatically as Nelson Mandela (1918–2013).
Mandela spent twenty-seven years imprisoned during South Africa's struggle against apartheid. When he was released on 11 February 1990, he emerged into a country carrying decades of institutionalised racial injustice, anger and fear. Four years later, he became South Africa's first democratically elected president.
He could have understood leadership as vindication. Instead, he recognised that winning power was not the same as building a nation.
His commitment to reconciliation did not erase the crimes of apartheid, nor could it remove their consequences. The significance lay in the direction he attempted to establish for the country. South Africans had to confront a brutal past without allowing that past to determine every possibility of their future. The Truth and Reconciliation Commission, established during his presidency, became one of the instruments through which the country attempted that extraordinarily difficult negotiation between truth, accountability and coexistence.
Delacroix's Liberty is moving forward too, but look carefully at her head. Her body advances while her face turns towards the people behind her. She does not simply charge into the distance. She appears aware of those following.
Mandela's great challenge was similarly not merely to move forward, but to consider who could be brought into that future. Reconciliation demanded restraint at precisely the moment when history might have made vengeance comprehensible. Leadership, in such circumstances, was not demonstrated simply by defeating an old order but by refusing to reproduce its logic once power changed hands.
The crowd in Delacroix's painting also reminds us that authority does not always begin in office. The men around Liberty do not follow her because an institution has instructed them to do so. Her authority comes from what she represents.
Václav Havel (1936–2011) understood that form of authority.
For years, the Czech playwright, essayist and dissident confronted communist rule in Czechoslovakia without commanding an army or occupying political office. His writing challenged a system that demanded outward conformity while suppressing individual freedom, and his political activities led to surveillance and imprisonment.
The state possessed the institutions of power. Havel possessed something it found more difficult to manufacture: credibility.
When the Velvet Revolution brought communist rule in Czechoslovakia to an end in 1989, the dissident became president. His journey exposed an uncomfortable truth about political authority. Office can grant power, but it cannot manufacture the willingness of others to believe you.
Delacroix gives Liberty no insignia of office. There is no throne behind her and no institution protecting her. Even her clothing resists the visual language of formal authority. Her authority exists because the people around her recognise something in what she represents and choose to move with her.
But the painting also contains a warning against romanticising that choice. The weapons remain visible. So do the bodies.
Belief is powerful precisely because it can move people beyond ordinary caution. The same human capacity that allows populations to resist tyranny can also make them vulnerable to leaders who understand how to turn grievance, fear or identity into obedience. The moral quality of leadership cannot therefore be measured simply by the intensity of its following.
Sometimes leadership must do something less dramatic than revolution. It must build.
When the United Arab Emirates was established on 2 December 1971, Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan (1918–2004), ruler of Abu Dhabi, became the federation's first president. His role in bringing the emirates together earned him the enduring description of Father of the Nation. Creating the federation required negotiation among rulers whose territories possessed distinct histories, interests and identities.
Here Delacroix's barricade offers an interesting contrast.
A barricade is temporary. A nation cannot be.
The crowd can surge forward in a moment of collective purpose, but eventually the smoke clears. The flag must come down from the barricade and enter the slower world of institutions, schools, hospitals, roads, laws and public administration. The excitement of foundation must become the ordinary machinery through which people actually live.
Sheikh Zayed's leadership became closely associated with that transition from political union towards state building, with national resources directed into infrastructure, education, healthcare and development. The work is less visually dramatic than revolution, but nations survive through what is constructed after the founding moment has passed.
Mandela, Havel and Sheikh Zayed therefore represent very different encounters with the problem Delacroix placed on his barricade. One confronted the question of what should follow injustice. Another demonstrated how authority can exist before office. The third faced the challenge of turning political union into institutions capable of enduring.
None needs to become a model of perfect leadership for the comparison to matter. Political leaders are human beings operating within history, carrying contradictions, limitations and consequences alongside their achievements. Historical reputations change as archives open, generations reconsider inherited narratives and societies become more willing to examine what earlier commemorations ignored.
Delacroix avoids that difficulty by refusing to place an identifiable ruler at the centre of his painting.
Liberty is an ideal rather than a biography.
That difference becomes increasingly important when societies begin confusing a leader with the value that leader claims to represent. Loyalty to a person can become easier than loyalty to a principle. Criticism begins to resemble betrayal. Institutions become obstacles. Doubt becomes disobedience. Eventually the leader no longer needs to serve the ideal because the leader has persuaded enough people that he or she embodies it.
Delacroix denies Liberty that possibility because Liberty cannot demand personal loyalty. She represents something against which the actions of actual leaders can be measured.
The distinction can be seen in the crowd itself. Liberty occupies the centre of the composition, but she does not occupy it alone. Delacroix brings different social types into the same dangerous space: the armed bourgeois figure in his top hat, working-class insurgents, the young boy brandishing pistols and bodies whose identities have already been swallowed by the violence around them. The nation appears not as a single obedient mass but as a gathering of people who have converged upon the same moment.
Power likes portraits of individuals. History is usually made by crowds.
The leader may articulate an aspiration, give language to fear or persuade people that another future is possible. But no leader creates a nation alone. Citizens, institutions, workers, teachers, families, soldiers, dissidents, civil servants and generations not yet born determine whether a political vision survives its author.
This is why the willingness to relinquish power matters as much as the ability to acquire it. Mandela served a single presidential term and stepped down in 1999. The gesture matters because a functioning nation cannot remain permanently dependent upon the virtue, charisma or intelligence of one individual. If everything collapses when the leader disappears, what was built may have been loyalty rather than stability.
Look again at Delacroix's crowd.
Without them, Liberty would simply be a woman walking across a barricade carrying a flag.
Their presence gives her movement political meaning, but it also gives them responsibility. Followers are not merely the recipients of leadership. They participate in creating its power. Every crowd that places its trust in someone therefore carries an obligation that can be more difficult than loyalty: it must continue to judge the person it has chosen to follow.
The question becomes particularly urgent when fear enters public life. Crisis can make populations hungry for certainty, and certainty is one of the easiest performances for political power to provide. The leader who admits complexity may appear weaker than the leader who promises absolute answers. The leader who respects institutional limits may appear less decisive than the one willing to break them.
Yet the strength of a nation cannot be measured solely by the forcefulness of the person at its head. Sometimes the greater achievement is creating institutions strong enough to withstand that person's departure.
Delacroix painted Liberty Leading the People almost two centuries ago, but the painting has never become merely historical because the relationship it depicts remains unresolved. Every generation eventually encounters people who ask to be trusted with power. Some strengthen the societies placed in their care. Others discover how easily fear, loyalty, grievance and hope can be converted into authority.
The crowd must therefore do something harder than follow. It must judge what it is following.
At the centre of Delacroix's barricade stands a woman carrying the flag of a nation. Beneath her are the consequences of struggle. Behind her are the people willing to continue. Ahead lies a future the painting does not allow us to see.
