Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (16 page)

The most important aspect of his statue would be her size. In Egypt, he had marveled at the colossi that seemed to embody eternity because of their immovable scale. In one of his last letters to his mother from America, he had talked about his perspective on the universe’s vastness: “I sometimes have the feeling that I am observing our globe hanging in the immensity of space. Human affairs seem so small.”

Bartholdi had planned to start fundraising with the French, but with the five billion francs in war reparations owed to Germany being obtained through heavy taxes, he needed to bide his time and turn to other projects. The first arrived on his desk in 1872. The Thiers government commissioned Bartholdi to create a statue of Lafayette to be placed in New York City as a tribute to French-American friendship. The fact that the government commissioned such a work suggested it endorsed public messages of the Franco-American alliance, meaning Bartholdi’s idea of a communal monument might be met with approval. But the small scale of the planned statue of Lafayette also highlighted how outsize Bartholdi’s idea for Liberty would be. France’s love for America might inspire a small monument, but not the world’s biggest sculpture.

Another Liberty-related project for Bartholdi came from Belfort, the city that had for so long withstood the Prussian siege during the war and had remained French. At the beginning of May 1872, the local newspaper reported that Bartholdi had offered to make a monumental high-relief sculpture of a lion on the castle wall. Bartholdi wanted an image that would embody the spirit of the people, both military and civilian. The city had wanted to somehow commemorate the siege but had been thinking of a cemetery piece.

Bartholdi had written a letter to the mayor of Belfort telling him his own idea for the location should be preferred. Bartholdi argued that his statue would be too isolated if placed in the cemetery. “It must live with the public to become an aspect of the city and identified with it.” He wanted something that would be “very personal to the city” and “visible everywhere . . . even to the passing traveler.”

What Bartholdi wanted as a platform for his work was the city’s cliff itself, which rose above the rooftops of town. The fort from which the Belfort residents tried to fend off the Prussians topped the cliff. The battle and Bartholdi’s memorial would be forever linked.

After visits to the zoo for research, Bartholdi tried sketching a male lion with an Alsatian woman leaning on his back. Then he drew a female lion at rest, and a male lion seated. He experimented with a lion clawing the air in petulant outrage. Finally, he arrived at the idea of a seated lion stretched to its tallest position, front paws extended. The red stone sculpture would be around thirty-six feet high and seventy-two feet long.

By July 1873, Bartholdi had essentially finalized the image. He posed with Simon in front of a vast canvas of the feline, which would later be stretched on the cliff to check the potential effect of the finished work in situ.

This statue would share several elements with Liberty. Because of its scale, its prominent location, and its grand idea—all the elements Bartholdi identified as being critical to his vision—it could not be ignored by the public. It would serve as an icon for the city of Belfort, much as Liberty would later serve as a symbol for the United States.

With that model nearly complete, Bartholdi began paying regular visits to Laboulaye’s house, sometimes meeting with Americans there. They might have been discussing any number of projects. Bartholdi was crafting his statue of Lafayette for the Thiers government, and had the Boston church frieze to occupy him, but it was also that summer when Laboulaye and his associates put together the committee of the Franco-American Union with the purpose of raising funds for the Liberty statue.

Bartholdi proposed that the financing be split in half. France would make and pay for the statue itself, while America merely needed to provide the location and pedestal. Bartholdi estimated each side would be responsible for approximately $250,000—$4.8 million per side in today’s dollars. The Franco-American Union planned a private drive for subscriptions, the tried and tested method of compiling funds for French statuary, and released an illustration of the planned sculpture.

Bartholdi’s first important fundraising test came on November 6, 1875. Bartholdi sat in the Hôtel du Louvre gazing over long, white-clothed tables. Some two hundred men surrounded him, toasting the exciting fact that America and France wished to build a monument together. Just two months prior, France had formally paid off its entire war reparation debt. De Lesseps raised his glass to the project, as did the famous architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, the French ministers of finance and education, members of parliament, and representatives of the city of Paris.

When Bartholdi scanned the dining hall, with its large shields depicting Washington, Franklin, Lafayette, Rochambeau, Lincoln, and Grant, was he nervous, fearing that the entire project might fall apart? In America, few people had any idea that this chandelier-lit dinner even occurred. No committee existed in America to raise funds for the statue or welcome it. All Bartholdi could truthfully boast was that Butler, a humble if successful businessman, thought the statue a nice idea; that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—who held no power at all—hoped the American public would embrace the concept; and that Ulysses S. Grant had given an informal blessing, just as he had for so many other unlikely schemes.

In its fundraising appeal that year, the Franco-American Union boldly claimed that Bartholdi “in going to America . . . came to an understanding with our friends and prepared all the means of execution. . . . We shall amicably offer our American friends the statue, and they on their side will meet the expenses of the pedestal.”

The translation of the appeal produced by the Franco-American committee ended with a grand promise: “The members of the committee, most gratefull [
sic
] for the friendship with which they have been honoured in America, assumed the direction of the movement; the exemple [
sic
] will be nobly followed on the other side of the Ocean.”

The evening yielded 40,000 of the then estimated 400,000 francs necessary to build the statue.

If journalists had probed at all, they would have found that no enthusiasm for the project existed in the United States. No location for the statue had been set aside. No plan for how to keep the statue standing had been devised. Did Bartholdi wonder what he would do should the French raise their portion of the funds and the Americans refuse to finance their side, leaving the statue homeless? For this project, unlike the Suez lighthouse project, he now had gone public in France with the meaning and mission behind the particular design. He could not very well resell the idea to yet another nation if the project failed to gather American supporters.

Bartholdi understood the power of the media and began to work the journalists right away. He wrote to one reporter in France: “My Dear Burty . . . we need to be energetically supported by the media. Speak of us in France; when I say ‘us’ I refer to the Franco-American Union, leave names aside; we are not dealing with personalities nor individual acclaim; it is the moral effect that I want to see succeed and the Alsacian in me is more ambitious than the sculptor.”

About four months later, Laboulaye sent his own partisan-based appeal to every French paper. Not only would the statue be a tribute to French-American friendship; it was “intended to do honor to the glorious memory of our fathers.” Laboulaye promised: “At night, a luminous aureola, projected from the head, will radiate on the far flowing waves of the Ocean.”

Almost all of the newspapers printed Laboulaye’s request for what he called “The Monument to Independence” (The title “Statue of Liberty” had at that moment been taken by W. W. Story for a sculpture he intended to exhibit at the Philadelphia world’s fair in 1876. His proposed twenty-one-foot figure would stand on a giant pedestal around which forty-eight female figures would walk, “representing the states and territories”; a subscription drive had been launched.)

For Bartholdi’s work, carnivals, concerts, and a host of personal appeals commenced. Donations came in from as far away as Algeria, but overall, interest was tepid. The Paris government voted to give a reasonable ten thousand francs. Belfort gave a hundred francs. Colmar—nothing. The French began joking about the project. Bartholdi needed the endorsement of a universally adored figure. Bartholdi needed Victor Hugo.

Hugo had been elected senator for the Seine that February. Since his time eating rat pâté during the siege of Paris and arguing for the rights of Garibaldi on the floor of the Assembly, Hugo had become only more beloved. He had published
Les Misérables,
giving voice to the epic suffering of the French masses. He had endured brutal personal losses, including the death of his two sons and his wife, and the commitment of his favorite daughter to an insane asylum. France had suffered along with him.

Now Bartholdi was attempting to raise funds for his statue, and there was a related project to which the committee hoped to attach Hugo. The Franco-American Union had commissioned Charles Gounod, who had composed the supremely popular opera
Faust,
to craft a cantata honoring “Liberty Enlightening the World,” the name that had been bestowed on Bartholdi’s statue. The musical work was to be performed at a fundraiser two months later at the Opera in Paris.

Gounod wrote to Hugo on March 1, 1876. They had met the day before at an event, but Gounod had been unable to introduce himself properly. The composer explained in the letter that he would be writing the Liberty cantata and had been authorized to choose the person to write the lyrics for the work.

“I will not dissimulate, Monsieur and illustrious Master,” Gounod wrote, tremulously, “that to achieve (or almost) this epic Ode or Hymn one must be a giant, or cling to the shoulder of a giant. I am not that giant: Do you want to be the shoulder of the giant for me?”

Hugo declined. Bartholdi might have felt discouraged at that rejection, but he had more disappointments to weather. The cantata turned out to be a bore and a fundraising failure. The donations gathered in France in the first half year were only about 100,000 francs out of the 400,000 estimated necessary to build the statue itself, and even that estimate was starting to seem far below the reality of what would be required.

Bartholdi planned to attend the world exposition celebrating the centennial of the United States in Philadelphia in 1876, and he needed to send a sculptural emissary to represent his plan. Originally, back in 1871, he had hoped the statue would be fully crafted for the event. Laboulaye had predicted an outpouring of French-American gratitude in both countries at the time of the anniversary. Now Bartholdi would be lucky if he could exhibit even one body part.

That’s exactly what he did. He chose the hand that clutched the torch. Visitors would be able to climb inside the torch, stand as tall as the treetops, and gaze out from the balcony at the rest of the world expo. The flame required delicate metalwork, which could draw attention to the artistry involved, and if the entire endeavor failed, a giant hand clutching a torch might be a usable stand-alone sculpture in a way that even the head would not.

Simply producing a colossal hand and torch sculpture presented extraordinary challenges to an artist. To make that isolated work would require extensive planning and execution, because the statue was several stories tall, and would allow visitors into its interior. There was one catch. In order to create that solitary hand, Bartholdi had to work out the construction of Liberty as a whole.

Bartholdi had never crafted a statue of such size before. The model of his lion in Belfort had towered over him but its full stone version had yet to be completed. Liberty would be five times taller. He might have considered himself in competition with the 175-foot Arminius in Westphalia, Germany, a work that celebrated the ancient Germanic warrior who defeated Roman forces, and which had been finished just after the Franco-Prussian War. Bartholdi wouldn’t want the enemy to be able to boast the world’s tallest statue.

Bartholdi’s Liberty would need to be hollow to accommodate the electrical works should Bartholdi endeavor to light the torch and head, and it would need structural support to allow people to climb inside. In Italy, a visitor could scramble up a steep ladder hidden in the cloak of the seventy-six-foot bronze statue of St. Charles Borromeo and gaze out the nostrils at the crystal waters of Lake Maggiore.

Bartholdi had stopped at that statue on his way back from Egypt. He knew how shocking such a colossal work could be to visitors, even a statue standing only half as tall as Bartholdi’s projected Liberty. “I really quite trembled as [my boys] went up the quivering ladder of forty-eight steps,” wrote one father who visited St. Charles Barromeo, remembering watching his sons make the great adventure, “and when they entered the statue, and looked out to me from a window which opened in the back of it, a hundred feet above my head (half as high as the Monument in London), I was really alarmed.”

“In the head a party of six may breakfast,” another visitor marveled, “and one person can easily get into the nose. The length of [the saint’s] forefinger is above six feet.”

Bartholdi acknowledged that statue’s impressive features, but dismissed it as failing to be “a work of colossal art.” Instead, he said, “It is an ordinary statue enlarged and placed on a deplorable pedestal.” He did take some interest in its construction, as did his mentor, the grand wizard on the Liberty project, Eugène Viollet-le-Duc.