The Gamin de Paris in Nineteenth-Century Visual Culture

The revolutionary boy at the barricades was memorably envisioned in Eugène Delacroix’s painting Liberty Leading the People (1830) and Victor Hugo’s novel Les Misérables (1862). Over the course of the nineteenth century, images of the Paris urchin entered the collective social imaginary as cultural and psychic sites of memory, whether in avant-garde or more conventional visual culture. Visual and literary paradigms of the mythical gamin de Paris were born of recurring political revolutions (1830,