50 Euros Liberty Leading the People

Issued as part of Monnaie de Paris's ongoing "Masterpieces of French Museums" program, this piece reproduces Delacroix's 1830 canvas, which hangs in the Louvre and was painted in the months immediately following the July Revolution that deposed Charles X. Delacroix himself did not participate in the fighting — he was not a political radical — but was moved enough by the street violence in Paris to document it. The French state purchased the painting in 1831, then promptly hid it from public display for years, nervous about what it still implied.