ONE Copyright 2012. Yale University Press. All rights reserved. May not be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except fair uses permitted under U.S. or applicable copyright law. The Idea This story begins, as many French stories do, around a dinner table. It was early summer of 1865, the locale a charming village just southwest of Paris. The French legal scholar Edouard de Laboulaye had gathered an intimate group of like-minded liberals at his well-appointed country residence in Glatigny. The group included Oscar de Lafayette, grandson of George Washington’s comrade in arms; Count Charles de Rémusat, whose wife was another of Lafayette’s grandchildren; Hippolyte de Tocqueville, brother of the deceased author of Democracy in America; and a young up-and-coming sculptor named Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, future architect of the Statue of Liberty. By any measure, this was a distinguished circle of men. Their liberalism must be understood in its nineteenth-century sense. Laboulaye and his guests occupied a sliver of centrist political ground, with conservative Catholics, monarchists, and supporters of Napoleon III, the current ruler, on their right, and progressive republicans, democrats, and socialists on their left. In terms of social standing, Laboulaye and his guests resembled much of the right, but they shared with the left a distaste for Napoleon III’s authoritarian government and a desire for the individual liberties he had suppressed. Laboulaye stood out as France’s leading authority on the United States, and although constraints on free speech discouraged him from saying so directly, he preferred the American political system to recent and prevailing ones in France. The Frenchman liked America’s strong tradition of individual liberty, the checks and balances that limited the size and reach of government, and its optimistic belief in individual advancement through schooling, civic involvement, and membership in voluntary associations. Laboulaye had published many books, some more polemical than scholarly, and he taught a popular course at the prestigious Collège de France. His best-known work was a three-volume History of the United States (1862–66). The professor’s polemical writing appeared mainly in the Journal des Débats, a politically moderate newspaper in which he gently advocated individual rights vis-à-vis the state. He even published two novels, one of which, Paris in America (1864), made fun of French political habits by comparing them to American ones.1 The ostensible reason for his dinner party was to celebrate the North’s victory in the American Civil War and to mourn the death of Abraham Lincoln, whom members of the group, like so many of their French compatriots, had idolized.2 Lincoln was Laboulaye’s hero, not only for saving the Union, but for allowing the Frenchman to preserve his attachment to the United States and its institutions. As a principled liberal, the professor hated slavery and served as the head of France’s antislavery society. A great many of his American friends and correspondents—Laboulaye never traveled to North America—had distinguished themselves as abolitionist leaders. And Laboulaye’s antislavery views had played a major role in turning him against his own government. Napoleon III sided with the South in the Civil War in the belief that a divided America would be too weak to thwart his imperial designs on Mexico, to which the French emperor sent an invasion army in 1862. With U.S. slavery abolished and the Union restored, Laboulaye could maintain intact his rosy view of the United States. After dinner, the professor and his guests discussed ways they could show the North’s victorious leaders that not everyone in France had joined their government in opposing them. Laboulaye wanted to combine that effort with a gesture designed to highlight the superiority of the American political system over France’s authoritarian one. It was risky to criticize the Bonapartist government openly, but opponents could attack it indirectly by extolling the merits of another, better place. We don’t know exactly what Laboulaye’s liberals decided that evening, since no one said anything about it until twenty years later. Only then, in a short fund-raising pamphlet, did Bartholdi explicitly trace the origin of the Statue of Liberty to the dinner of 1865 chez Laboulaye.3 Most readers took the sculptor’s comments to mean that the professor and his guests had decided at that event to create a statue as a gift from France to an American republic soon to celebrate its hundredth birthday. What Laboulaye actually said, according to Bartholdi, was both more tentative and less EBSCO Publishing : eBook Collection (EBSCOhost) - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV AN: 451980 ; Berenson, Edward.; The Statue of Liberty : A Transatlantic Story Account: shapiro.main.eds 13 unilateral: “If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations.”4 The monument was not to be a gift from France to the U.S., but a common effort of two peoples equally devoted to liberty; the Frenchman acknowledged ruefully that only America enjoyed this freedom. The idea of a statue of liberty in connection with Lincoln and the United States had in fact surfaced in France in 1865, but not at Laboulaye’s summer home. Shortly after news of the president’s assassination reached the other side of the Atlantic, a provincial paper, Le Phare de la Loire (the Loire Lighthouse) took up a collection for a gold medal dedicated to Mary Todd Lincoln. Bartholdi, along with other prominent French artists and intellectuals, helped publicize the fund-raising campaign, which Napoleon III’s government tried unsuccessfully to suppress.5 Money poured in from around the country, and the finished medallion bore the inscription “Dedicated [to] Lincoln, the honest man, who abolished slavery, restored the union, and saved the Republic without veiling the statue of liberty.”6 Did Bartholdi amalgamate these different elements—the medallion campaign and the dinner party—perhaps without realizing it, twenty years after the fact? Since no gift emerged from Laboulaye’s group, and Bartholdi didn’t mention a sculptural project for the United States until 1870, it’s likely that the idea took some years to germinate in the artist’s mind. The delay can’t be attributed to a lack of models. Goddesses of liberty, first represented in ancient Rome, resurfaced in profusion during the French Revolution and paraded throughout France from one end of the nineteenth century to the other.7 Perhaps the most famous of these female “liberties” stands at the center of Eugène Delacroix’s 1830 painting Liberty Leading the People to the Barricades. The canvas refers to France’s Revolution of 1830 and portrays an allegorical “liberty,” or “Marianne,” as she came to be known in France, waving the flag of revolution amid a battle scene that features bourgeois and plebeian men united in the cause of freedom. Leading the charge, Marianne towers over the male fighters, her breasts bared and arm aloft sweeping the light of liberty into a halo that illuminates her entire form. This image became an icon of revolution, a collection of symbols whose Phrygian cap, ardent motion, and partial nudity conveyed a message of radicalism. The Phrygian cap, borrowed from ancient Rome, represented the liberation of the enslaved and oppressed, while motion and nudity stood for the ferocious phases of the French Revolution. After the overthrow and execution of the king in 1792–93, goddesses of liberty came to symbolize the new republic that emerged. But the juxtaposition of terror and the reaction against it produced two kinds of republicanism, one radical and one moderate. The radical version, which Delacroix placed at the center of his painting, made the goddess of liberty a vehement, headstrong figure bristling with mobile energy, just like revolutionaries on the street. Her breasts spilled out from a loose-fitting garment, signaling a natural, Eden-like freedom not without overtones of Eros. Competing with this radical goddess was her far more moderate cousin, a sedate figure who represented the temperate face of French republicanism. This alternative “liberty” stood or sat in one place with a placid expression on her face and her body fully and chastely clothed.8 EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 14 Eugène Delacroix, Liberty Leading the People, 1830. Bartholdi, like Laboulaye, rejected the radical version of French republicanism; his statue would resemble the staid goddesses of liberty that appeared after the Terror of 1793–94, and especially after the Revolution of 1848. These emblems of moderation were designed to calm political passions and steer the country toward a centrist path. One such image, a painting by Ange-Louis Janet-Lange prominently displayed in an artistic competition of 1848, depicted a fully dressed young woman seated and holding a lit torch above her head. Bartholdi must have been familiar with this painting, because he later adapted its title, La France éclarant le monde (France Illuminating[or Enlightening] the World), for his Statue of Liberty, which he originally called “Liberty Enlightening the World.” Janet-Lange’s canvas anticipates the Statue of Liberty’s form, as does another image from 1848, this one by Eugène-Andreé Oudiné, which looks even more like the monument Bartholdi would create.9 Even if Laboulaye and Bartholdi didn’t discuss at the 1865 dinner a monumental gift to the United States, much less a statue of liberty, the sculptor would have had female images of liberty in his head. Such images, as Bartholdi knew, had been familiar to Laboulaye as well. In a pro-Union polemic of 1862, the scholar urged his readers “to range ourselves round [Lincoln and the North], and to hold aloft with a firm hand that old French banner, on which is inscribed, Liberty.”10 In the early and mid-1860s, with liberty stifled in France and threatened in the United States, Bartholdi likely added the goddess of liberty to his artistic and intellectual repertoire. It was a repertoire shaped not by the elite Ecole des beaux-arts, where most talented young artists wanted to study, but by private tutoring and direct access to the leading sculptural ateliers in France. He was admitted thanks to the wealth and connections his family enjoyed. The Bartholdis (originally Barthold and later Latinized) came from the German Rhineland, where they stood as pillars of the Lutheran church and prospered in business, commerce, and the professions. The family moved across the Rhine to the province of Alsace not long after the territory had passed from German to French hands. They ultimately settled in Colmar, where the Bartholdi mansion still stands as a private museum dedicated to the sculptor’s life and work. Auguste Bartholdi’s father, Jean-Charles, was a successful civil servant whose land and real estate holdings made him a wealthy man. After his early death in 1836 (Auguste was born in 1834), his widow, Charlotte, capably managed the family fortune, earning enough to shield her son from all financial concerns.11 Auguste could pursue his work without having to seek commissions from either private individuals or the state. But his professional autonomy came at a cost. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 15 Throughout his life, he remained financially and emotionally dependent on his strong-willed, domineering mother, to whom he wrote faithfully and frequently until her death in 1891. Ange-Louis Janet, called Janet-Lange, La République, 1848. (The Image Works, Inc.) EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 16 Eugène-Andreé Oudiné, “Medal of the Republic,” 1848. These letters tell us much of what we know about the conception and planning of the Statue of Liberty, its various fund-raising campaigns, Bartholdi’s friends and relations, and his thoughts about his work. 12 They also reveal how much he depended on his mother’s approval and the intensity of his attachment to her. He didn’t marry until his early forties, and in his letters home he described his new wife, Emilie Jeanne Baheux, as anything but an object of romantic attention or sexual desire. Jeanne, Auguste wrote, resembled a “cousin,” who shows “the challenges of her life and her age.” Bartholdi apparently wanted his mother to believe that Jeanne could bear children, presenting her as thirty-six when she was actually forty-seven, but he made it abundantly clear that his wife couldn’t possibly outshine or overshadow her. Jeanne “has nothing brilliant about her, and she possesses neither fortune, beauty, musical talent, nor worldly éclat.” 13 If this description wasn’t enough to reassure his mother, Auguste reported that Jeanne’s “only concern is to have your affection.”14 Bartholdi’s well-documented attachment to his mother has led biographers and historians to believe that the sculptor imprinted Charlotte’s facial features on the Statue of Liberty, but it’s doubtful he did.15 His letters do not suggest that Charlotte was the model for Liberty, which, had it been true, would have greatly pleased the grande dame. Still, there is something of the strong mother in the Statue of Liberty, especially as a highly dependent son might imagine her. She’s powerful though unthreatening, asexual but still womanly, at once protective and welcoming. Auguste’s friend, the French senator Jules François Bozérian, grasped a fundamental truth in maintaining that the New York monument stood as a “work of filial piety.”16 In any case, the strong mother imagery quickly took hold. Already in 1883, Emma Lazarus’s poem, “The New Colossus,” later to be indelibly associated with the Statue of Liberty, described the monument as a “mighty woman” and “mother of exiles.” Lazarus’s poem made explicit the sculptural lineage to which the Statue of Liberty belonged: the colossi first erected in ancient Egypt and Rome and revived during the Renaissance, thanks in part to the Medicis’ desire to symbolize their wealth and power. In the early nineteenth century, artists turned once again to the colossal in the form of Napoleonic grandeur and outsized icons of a new German nationalism. 17 One of Bartholdi’s mentors, Antoine Etex, had sculpted two of the giant bas-reliefs that adorn Napoleon’s monumental Arc de Triomphe, which ranked as the world’s highest triumphal arch (160 feet) until 1982, when North Korea built a slightly taller one for Kim Il-Sung’s seventieth birthday. It’s possible that Bartholdi first associated colossal sculpture with reverence for America while under the tutelage of Etex, who idolized the United States and would have familiarized his pupil with the real and mythical colossi of the ancient and Renaissance worlds. Particularly significant was the legendary Colossus of Rhodes, famously depicted in an engraving of 1725 by Fischer von Erlach. Here, a huge male figure stands astride the entrance to the harbor of Rhodes. He holds a smoking torch aloft and wears a crown of spokes not unlike the Statue of Liberty’s diadem. Bartholdi called this ancient figure “the most celebrated colossal statue of antiquity.”18 Beyond this classical image, Bartholdi, like all art students of his age, would have known Michelangelo’s huge, if not colossal, David, and the French sculptor later photographed G. B. Crespi’s St. Charles Borromeo, a seventeenth-century statue that took nearly a century to build and that rises seventy-five feet atop a pedestal of another forty feet. Finally, Bartholdi acknowledged the influence of two monuments to German glory and the nineteenth-century project of national unification: Ludwig Schwanthaler’s ninety-foot Bavaria (1848) and Ernst von Bandel’s Arminius (1875), a gigantic 172-foot monument commemorating the Barbarian hero who annihilated the advancing Roman army in AD 9 and attempted to unite the main Germanic tribes. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 17 Fischer von Erlach, Colossus of Rhodes, 1725. Discussing the merits of colossal statuary, Bartholdi’s friend and collaborator E. Lesbazeilles wrote, “That a statue of great size must offer wider meaning, and partake in character of the ideal, is so well understood by the sculptors of our own day that they have almost always reserved the form either for the portrayal of symbols, or for the depiction of personages who belong as much to legend as to history, and are destined to become symbols themselves.”19 Bartholdi’s artistic milieu and historical era had primed him for the creation of such symbols, which helps explain the genesis of the Statue of Liberty and why, for the French sculptor, only a colossus could represent the Franco-American connection he hoped to both deepen and commemorate. Bartholdi’s first professional foray into colossal statuary came in 1855, when he unveiled a huge bronze statue of the Napoleonic general Jean Rapp. The piece stood so high—nearly twenty-five feet—that it couldn’t fit inside the exhibition hall. The Salon jury decided to show it outside, making Bartholdi a famous man. The following year he took a long, arduous trip up the Nile, where he marveled over the Colossi of Thebes (Luxor today), the two stone statues of Middle Kingdom pharaohs built more than three thousand years ago. Describing these sixty-foot-tall towers of rock, Bartholdi wrote, “We are filled with profound emotion in the presence of these colossal witnesses, centuries old, of a past that to us is almost infinite. . . . These granite beings, in their imperturbable majesty, seem to be still listening to the most remote antiquity. Their kindly and impassible glance seems to ignore the present and to be fixed upon an unlimited future.” 20 EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 18 Ludwig Schwanthaler, Bavaria, 1848. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 19 Ernst von Bandel, Arminius, 1875. Bartholdi wanted to chisel colossi of his own, and, like the great sculptors of ancient times, he chose Egypt as his site. In 1869 Khedive Ismail, Egypt’s westernizing ruler, agreed to see the French sculptor, who proposed to build a mammoth statue at the southern end of the newly opened Suez Canal, built by another Frenchman, Ferdinand de Lesseps.21 Bartholdi’s monument would embody Egypt’s new role as linchpin between East and West. Although Ismail proved noncommittal, Bartholdi produced a series of drawings in which the proposed statue began as a gigantic female fellah, or Arab peasant, and gradually evolved into a colossal goddess that resembled the ones he had contemplated in the early and mid-1860s. If the original sketches already recalled his mentor Ary Scheffer’s republican goddess of 1848, Bartholdi’s final drawing for the khedive bore an uncanny likeness to what we know as the Statue of Liberty. Perched atop a high pedestal, the colossus, draped in loose-fitting robes, holds a torch high above its head. As a beacon, it would light the way for oncoming ships, and Bartholdi told the khedive it would symbolize “Progress,” or “Egypt carrying the light to Asia.”22 Colossi of Thebes. (B. Anthony Stewart/National Geographic Stock) EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 20 Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, c. 1869. (Musée Bartholdi, Colmar) We don’t know whether the khedive ever considered Bartholdi’s project seriously, but it’s likely that he couldn’t afford it. The Egyptian ruler had already overspent himself and his kingdom into a mire of debt; there would be no colossal lighthouse at the tip of the canal. Bartholdi returned to France without a commission and at a professional dead end. He eventually decided to develop a series of patriotic sculptures to commemorate French greatness and the country’s historical resistance to invaders. Meanwhile, the election of Ulysses S. Grant as U.S. president in 1868 momentarily cheered Laboulaye and his circle of French liberals, who considered the former Union commander a great abolitionist and potential friend to France. But Grant and a majority of Americans seemed to prefer Germany to the homeland of Lafayette. Since the American revolution, and even before, Germans had migrated in large numbers to the United States, making German the United States’ second language and giving German Americans considerable influence in Washington—far more than any spokesmen for France.23 This situation increasingly worried Laboulaye, who feared that the United States’ pro-German orientation would deter his country, long plagued by a seesaw of revolution and reaction, from emulating the orderly democracy and balanced Constitution he so admired in the United States. He also worried that America’s economic dynamism and growing international strength would connect it more to Europe’s dominant economic powers, Britain and Germany, than to France. The desire to prevent his country’s European rivals from monopolizing economic relations with the U.S. made Laboulaye all the more eager to offer a gesture of French goodwill and friendship toward this awakening power. The professor wanted at once to remind Americans of their debt to France, whose financial and military help contributed to the American revolution’s success, and to convince them of the economic and cultural advantages of close relations with his homeland. Unfortunately for Laboulaye, a great many of his compatriots rejected his views; members of the cultural elite remained unconvinced that the United States represented a model for them. In 1867, two of France’s most prominent writers, Jules and Edmond de Goncourt, denounced what they took to be America’s worship of science and technology at the expense of art and culture and condemned the United States’ growing influence over their country. They criticized the Paris International Exposition (world’s fair) of that year as “the final blow in the Americanization of France, industry triumphing over art, the steam engine reigning in EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 21 place of the painting.”24 French commentators who traveled to the New World during this period leveled equally harsh critiques. Alexandre Zannini found America riddled with racial prejudice, hostile to immigrants, and suffering from sharp social inequalities. Meanwhile, Louis-Laurent Simonin, also unsympathetic to the U.S., encountered little love for France among the Americans he met.25 Such realities appear to have escaped Bartholdi, who stayed in contact with Laboulaye and remained faithful to his ideals.26 Both men maintained faith in the United States until 1870, when the Franco-Prussian War of that year dashed their hopes—at least for a time. That conflict, which the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck wanted and Napoleon III foolishly initiated, resulted in the Prussian occupation of large swaths of France, the encirclement of Paris, and the seizure of France’s easternmost provinces, Alsace and Lorraine. With Bartholdi’s hometown of Colmar now in German hands, the sculptor felt himself an exile, his family trapped behind enemy lines. Laboulaye and Bartholdi hoped for American help—or at least sympathy—if for no other reason than the American revolution’s debt to France. Instead, the U.S. government sided with Prussia, as did American editorialists and ordinary citizens from one end of the country to the other.27 Patriot that he was, Bartholdi soldiered on. He fought to defend Colmar, and when that effort failed, he joined a group of international volunteers led by the famous Italian revolutionary Giuseppe Garibaldi, who had come to France to defend liberty from Prussia’s militaristic regime.28 Outgunned and outnumbered, these forces, like the main French army, retreated south and west toward Bordeaux, where France’s newly declared, if highly fragile, republic had taken refuge. The young French leader, Leon Gambetta, had escaped a besieged Paris in a hot air balloon. The Prussian siege, which lasted from September 1870 to January 1871, caused enormous hardship in the French capital, whose residents were reduced to eating horses and then dogs, cats, and—it was rumored—even rats. This suffering expressed itself first as a fierce, patriotic anger against the Prussians and then as working-class antagonism against a French government blamed for leaving at Bismarck’s mercy those Parisians too impoverished to escape the city. The antagonism sharpened when the government, now ensconced in Versailles, signed a “shameful” peace treaty with the German chancellor in early 1871. The result was a huge urban insurrection, a civil war pitting Paris against the provinces, urban workers against rural landowners and the comfortable bourgeoisie. This Paris Commune, as rebel leaders called it, appeared to announce the class warfare Karl Marx had advocated since the 1840s, and it terrified property owners, solid citizens, and the bulk of provincial France. After ruling Paris for slightly more than two months, the Commune fell to an invasion launched from Versailles and planned by a broad coalition of monarchists, Bonapartists, and conservative republicans. Laboulaye and Bartholdi belonged to the latter group; for them the Commune marked a return to the French revolutionary violence that made them despair of their country’s future and admire America’s apparent republican moderation all the more. Laboulaye was, at least, safely ensconced in his country retreat near Versailles, but Bartholdi almost literally found himself without a home. The Germans made it difficult for French citizens who had left Alsace to return there after the war, and in any case, enemy soldiers were billeted in the sculptor’s house. He traveled there briefly in May 1871, but to stay would have meant becoming a citizen of the new German Empire, something he couldn’t possibly do. At the same time, Bartholdi wanted no part of the Paris Commune, which made his Left Bank apartment off-limits and perhaps out of reach. As for Versailles, this too seemed alien ground, as it was in the great chateau’s legendary Hall of Mirrors that Bismarck had announced the creation of his victorious Second Reich. “At the end of the war,” Bartholdi wrote, “I couldn’t go to my home province, since the Germans had excluded me, while in Paris, the Commune was in full force and civil war at hand.”29 A political exile in his own country, the sculptor resolved to head for the United States. Did he plan to emigrate there for good? We know, of course, that in the end he didn’t, but he may well have entertained the possibility. He arrived in New York with the inflation-adjusted equivalent of over $40,000 in his pocket—not an insignificant sum.30 The woman he would marry in 1876, whom he had doubtless met while still in France, traveled to the United States at about the same time as he, although she took up residence in Montreal, not New York. Whatever his long-term thoughts, Bartholdi made it clear in the spring and fall of 1871 that he couldn’t remain in France. As he told one friend, “Discouraged by EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 22 everything and finding my ancestral lands prussified, I resolved to travel to the United States.”31 Before leaving, Bartholdi wrote Laboulaye that he had just reread his works on the United States and that he would “try to glorify the Republic and Liberty over there, while waiting for them to be restored one day in our own country—if ever that can happen.”32 Once the Paris Commune fell in late May 1871 and the moderate liberal Adolphe Thiers took the political reins in France, the sculptor likely felt a measure of relief over his country’s political future. His larger concern at that moment may well have been the fate of his “prussified” Alsace. During a stealthy visit to his mother in Colmar, Bartholdi expressed a bitterly wounded Alsatian patriotism by sketching a sculpture titled The Curse of Alsace. The work shows a woman prostrate beside a dying child, a grimace of anger and vengeance on her face. At about this time, Bartholdi conceived a funerary memorial to Alsatian national guardsmen killed defending their province, and in 1872 the mayor of Belfort asked him to create a monument commemorating the city’s heroism in fighting off the Prussians. Belfort had distinguished itself as the lone Alsatian town not to fall to enemy troops. The result was the Lion of Belfort (1880), Bartholdi’s most admired work after the Statue of Liberty. The sculpted lion, which Bartholdi had earlier conceived as the symbol of Napoleon’s defense of Paris in 1814, now became the emblem of Alsatian fortitude and hope for the future. Set in a citadel overlooking Belfort, the Lion is wounded but appears to growl with defiant rage. With this Alsatian context in mind, José Marti, the Cuban independence fighter and friend of Bartholdi, later wrote that the sculptor had intended his Statue of Liberty “to demand Alsace back for France rather than to illuminate the freedom of the world.”33 If Marti’s comment exaggerates the role Alsatian patriotism played in the genesis of the Statue of Liberty, it suggests nonetheless that the monument’s origins lay in a tangled web of thought and design: moderate liberal ideology and iconography; the example of ancient colossi; French idealization of the United States and the wish to mark the abolitionists’ success; the abortive Suez lighthouse project; and Bartholdi’s Alsatian pride and self-exile to the United States. The statue’s origins were at once very French and highly personal to the sculptor himself. Bartholdi doubtless had little conscious awareness of all these sources, and when he first explained the Statue of Liberty’s genesis in the pamphlet of 1885, he overlooked or downplayed several of them. In any case, it is likely that what would become the Statue of Liberty began to take shape in Bartholdi’s mind on the eve of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–71. After returning from Egypt without a commission in the fall of 1869, Bartholdi apparently decided to transform his Egyptian colossus into a neoclassical Statue of Liberty. Art historians have found a series of sketches and clay models apparently done between the spring of 1870 and the spring of 1871 in which the Egyptian figure gradually became Roman and Greek. Whether Egyptian or neoclassical, all shared an up-stretched arm, usually but not always the right arm, holding a torch. The other arm is down by the waist. In some models, especially the Egyptian ones, the breasts are prominent; in others, they are barely visible. Ultimately, Liberty emerged as far more androgynous than her khedival ancestor. And as she left her Egyptian roots behind, she shed her North African dress for the draped garments of ancient Greece. Although the source of light ultimately shifted from her crown to her torch, sketches from the mid-1870s still show beams of light radiating from Liberty’s head. But by mid-1871, the statue’s headdress became a diadem with seven ray-like spokes, said to embody the Masonic symbolism of the enlightening sun. The rays projected outward toward the Earth’s seven continents. Other newly added symbols included the broken chains of slavery trampled under Liberty’s feet and, to emphasize the point, another broken chain in her left hand. In the final sketches and the statue’s definitive model, the chains underfoot shrank to the point of near invisibility, and the one in her left hand gave way—at Laboulaye’s behest—to a Ten-Commandments-like tablet of laws bearing the inscription “July 4, 1776.” By 1871, emancipation was an accomplished fact and America’s Reconstruction regime too immoderate for Laboulaye’s taste. The cautious professor disliked the Radical Republicans’ use of federal power to deprive former Confederates of citizenship rights while abruptly extending such rights to all adult black men. Under Laboulaye’s influence, the Statue of Liberty’s early meaning as symbol of abolition surrendered to a new significance as sign of the return to normalcy, to American’s republican continuity since 1776, to the restraining authority of its Constitution, and to the majesty of its law. Bartholdi didn’t write about the process of turning the Suez lighthouse into the American colossus of EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 23 liberty—in fact, he later denied any connection between the two—so it’s impossible to know how deliberate the process of transformation was.34 What is clear is that by the time he boarded ship for the United States on June 10, 1871, the transformation was largely complete. He set out for New York with one, and perhaps two, models of the colossal statue in honor of American liberty he intended to build. In the course of his New World journeys, which lasted almost six months, Bartholdi outlined the great symbolic ambitions he held for his colossus and tried to convince influential Americans to support what must have seemed to them, at least at first, an impossibly grandiose idea. That he ultimately succeeded testifies not only to his brilliant salesmanship, but to the statue’s ability—even while still on the drawing board—to become what a wide variety of Americans wanted it to be. EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 24 TWO Paying for It Those who have told the history of the Statue of Liberty have commonly criticized the United States for failing to see the monument’s virtues immediately, for being reluctant to contribute to its expense, and for delaying its construction for a decade. Such criticisms are unfair.1 With hindsight, we know what an extraordinarily successful piece of public statuary Liberty has been, but none of this was evident in June 1871, when the virtually unknown Auguste Bartholdi arrived in New York. Rather than shake our heads over the imaginative failings of Americans in the Gilded Age, we should marvel at the ability of Bartholdi and his allies to transform, in the space of fifteen years, a small clay model into the world’s largest statue and place that statue in one of the most prominent locations in the world. For comparison’s sake, it’s important to keep in mind that the Washington Monument, designed by an American architect to honor perhaps the most widely admired figure in U.S. history, took thirty-six years (1848–85) to build. The Lincoln Memorial took fifty-five years (1867–1922) from conception to realization, and the Roosevelt Memorial twenty-three (1974–97). When Bartholdi first set foot on U.S. soil, he spoke almost no English, knew essentially no one, possessed no knowledge of the United States beyond what he had read in Laboulaye’s books, and had no American intermediaries to help with his audacious quest. He did have the money to live and travel comfortably here for many months, and he came armed with letters of introduction from Laboulaye to important people in different walks of life. He thus enjoyed advantages denied to most immigrants in search of fame and fortune. Laboulaye had corresponded with a great many Americans—mainly people who shared his moderate liberal politics and abolitionist convictions. It was an impressive but relatively narrow group. Before arranging to meet Laboulaye’s contacts, Bartholdi scouted New York for a place to anchor the statue he had in mind. He visited Central Park, the Battery at the southern tip of Manhattan, and sailed around New York Harbor. He quickly eliminated the park, which then seemed more a suburban green space than an urban sanctuary, and decided that the Battery’s dense backdrop of buildings would not give his statue the prominence he desired. Bartholdi turned to the harbor, whose vitality and activity amazed him. “The first thing that strikes the eye,” he wrote his mother, “is the immense steamers called ‘ferry boats.’ . . . They move this way and that across the bay, full of people and covered with flags, emitting deep-toned blasts from their whistles. [The waters] are covered with shipping as far as the eye can reach.”2 If he were to place his statue in the harbor, this limitless flotilla would circle it every day. Even better would be to build it just inside the bay from the narrows, the thin channel through which all ocean vessels coming into New York must pass. On his second day in the city Bartholdi found his spot: Bedloe’s Island, a tiny dot of land occupied only by a little-used military fort. From this perfectly situated island, Bartholdi’s colossus would be visible from the city, from the harbor, and, perhaps most important, from every ship sailing from the Old World to the New. The Frenchman’s next task was to organize American support. He was aware of the magnitude of his undertaking and told his mother not to mention his project to anyone for fear he “would appear eccentric, even a little crazy.”3 Understandably, he began with American Francophiles likely to be interested in strengthening Franco-American ties. On his third day in New York he met Mary Louise Booth, whose grandfather was French and who spoke the language perfectly. She had translated one of Laboulaye’s books and, most important, edited the magazine Harper’s Bazaar. He then saw several sculptors familiar with his work, the French consul general, and the editor of New York’s French-language newspaper, Le Courrier des Etats-Unis. All of these people greeted Bartholdi warmly, but none showed interest in his project. He quickly realized that he lacked a clear rationale for building such a statue and thus couldn’t explain why Americans might want it and contribute to its costs. It was at this point that he decided to “speak of his project from a new point of view,” and began to assert that his colossus would represent “French society’s” gift of a EBSCOhost - printed on 2/1/2020 12:36 PM via SOUTHERN NEW HAMPSHIRE UNIV. All use subject to https://www.ebsco.com/terms-of-use 25
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