France considers sending Delacroix masterpiece to China

France's culture minister, Aurélie Filippetti, took an emphatically negative position yesterday in the growing controversy over whether Paris should lend Eugène Delacroix's 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People to Beijing.

The French foreign ministry had recommended that the painting be sent to the Chinese capital to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the establishment of diplomatic relations between Paris and Beijing on January 27th, 1964.

In the past, Filippetti noted in veiled criticism of former president Jacques Chirac, expert opinions were ignored. The Louvre, which owns the painting, first advised against its being moved in 1958. Chirac overruled the ban to send the masterpiece to Tokyo for "France-Japan year" in 1999.

"She was extremely damaged by previous journeys," Filippetti told France Inter radio. When the painting was sent to Detroit and New York in 1974, "she was taken off her frame and rolled up."

For the 1999 trip, the Louvre warned against variations in temperature. A 3.5m by 4.5m climate-controlled case was built for the painting. The case was then enclosed in a pressure-controlled, metallic container with built-in radiators, which was lifted by crane into the hold of an Airbus Beluga cargo aircraft.

Again despite the travel ban, Liberty was transported to the Louvre's satellite museum in Lens, northern France for the past year. In Lens, a mentally ill woman defaced the painting with graffiti, which was removed. "There was real political meaning in taking her to Lens," Filippetti said. "It was a gesture of the democratisation of access to culture."

But today, the minister continued, “The opinion of the curators is clear: this painting must not be moved again.”

The decision will be taken by President François Hollande, who is, as usual, torn between opposing cabinet members. Although the ministry of foreign affairs insists foreign minister Laurent Fabius has no stake in which paintings are lent to China, a spokesman told Le Monde that Liberty is one of the best-known paintings in China, where it appears in schoolbooks.

The reason, noted the Catholic daily La Croix, is that Liberty was hijacked by communist artists for propaganda. The 25m-high Soviet statue of Worker and Kolkhoz Woman, created for the 1937 world fair, replicated Liberty almost exactly, except the Soviet model brandished a sickle. Chinese paintings of The Red Army Capturing Luding Bridge (1951) and The Wuchang Uprising (1959) also resemble Delacroix's figure.

The painting commemorates not the 1789 revolution but the July 1830 rebellion that overthrew King Charles X. It is one of the most symbolically charged images in French history. When Hollande's former partner, Ségolène Royal, was asked to embody "courage in politics" for the cover of Le Parisien magazine in October, she dressed as Liberty, barefoot but not bare-breasted, in a blousy white dress and waving the tricolour. The photograph was widely parodied.

André Malraux, a distant predecessor of Filippetti, first exploited the diplomatic potential of art. In January 1963, Malraux braved criticism to dispatch the Mona Lisa in a first-class cabin on the ocean liner SS France to the US, where the painting was greeted by President John F Kennedy and viewed by nearly two million people in Washington and New York.

Surprisingly, in the country that claims to be the "cradle of human rights", no one seems to question why a painting that personifies liberty should be lent to a country that grants its citizens so little freedom. Prime minister Jean-Marc Ayrault returned this week from an official visit to China, where he vaunted Peugeot car factories, French nuclear reactors and French participation in the construction of the "sustainable" planned city of Wuhan.