In 1865, during a dinner party near Versailles, French sculptor Auguste Bartholdi was inspired by a proposal from lawyer and liberal republican Édouard Laboulaye to create a monumental statue symbolizing liberty as a gift from France to the United States. At the time, France was ruled by Napoleon III, whom Laboulaye viewed as a tyrant. The idea only gained political traction after Napoleon III was deposed in 1870 and the country became a republic.
While Laboulaye conceived the original proposal, it was Bartholdi who transformed the vision into a practical project. The Statue of Liberty, now an iconic landmark in New York Harbor, was completed in 1886, yet Bartholdi’s role in its creation remains lesser known. To highlight his contribution, the Musée d’Orsay in Paris has launched an exhibition titled *Auguste Bartholdi: Liberty Enlightening the World*, tracing his career up to the statue’s completion.
François Blanchetière, the museum’s chief curator for sculpture, described the statue as the largest in the world at the time, embodying a belief in progress. He noted that the project’s architects were liberals who supported the rule of law rather than revolutionaries. Both Bartholdi and Laboulaye opposed Napoleon III’s regime but were cautious of the revolutionary violence that had previously afflicted France, instead looking to the American republic as a political example.
Bartholdi, from a wealthy Protestant family in Alsace—a region annexed by Germany after the Franco-Prussian War in 1871 and returned to France in 1919—was a skilled networker and tireless advocate. He made five trips to the United States to promote the project and secure a site for the statue.
Beyond its symbolic meaning, the statue also had diplomatic implications. It sought to renew Franco-American friendship after tensions had risen during the Franco-Prussian War, when the United States had remained neutral partly due to its German immigrant population's influence. Relations were also strained over France’s intervention in Mexico during the 1860s, which installed Archduke Maximilian as emperor, an effort opposed by Washington.
The Statue of Liberty was a private initiative financed through public fundraising on both sides of the Atlantic. A committee founded by Laboulaye in 1875 raised about $250,000 in France for the statue itself through banquets, concerts, art fairs, a lottery, and public appeals. An American committee collected funds for the pedestal and installation, but when their resources ran short in 1884, newspaper publisher Joseph Pulitzer helped salvage the project.
Completed in France in 1884 at the workshops of Gaget, Gauthier & Company, the statue was dismantled and shipped to New York the following year. Bartholdi created the statue’s design and enlisted engineer Gustave Eiffel and his team to build the iron framework supporting its copper exterior. Bartholdi had previously proposed a similar colossal statue for the Suez Canal entrance.
When exhibited in Paris in 1884, some lamented the statue’s departure to New York. Paris later installed its own smaller replica on the Île aux Cygnes in the Seine in 1889, near the Eiffel Tower.
The Musée d’Orsay exhibition presents around 100 works, including about 70 loans from the Bartholdi Museum in Colmar. Featured items include a plaster model of the statue, engravings of its construction, documents related to its presentation to the United States, a sculptor’s plaster cast, and paintings showing the statue in both Paris and New York. Juliette Chevée, director and curator of the Bartholdi Museum, described the display as telling the story of one of the 19th century’s most ambitious artistic and technical undertakings.