Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (3 page)

For several weeks every other year, citizens of all classes crowded the Salon, an exhibition hosted by the Académie des Beaux-Arts, the illustrious school for male artists (women were forbidden). The widely distributed catalogs from the exhibit would essentially ordain which artists were notable at that moment, and the event itself became a spectacle.
Vernissage
—varnishing—came to mean an art opening because painters at the Salon would be shellacking their canvases, hung floor to ceiling in alphabetical order, up to the last moment.

In the Place de la Concorde an exotic, mysterious pillar had recently been installed, having journeyed from Luxor—a gift from Egypt. On its sides were depicted the fantastic machines that had been used in ancient times to create it. This obelisk reminded artists and explorers of what monumental creation man was capable of achieving. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi would eventually feel its exotic pull, too.

In January 1844, Charlotte enrolled her boys in the city’s most prestigious secondary school, Lycée Louis-le-Grand, a massive temple of learning founded in the Latin Quarter in 1563. The expansive building was the alma mater of such luminaries as Molière, Voltaire, and none other than the most important cultural figure of the period, Victor Hugo.

Hugo was in his early forties but thought of as a “sublime infant,” as his writing mentor François-René de Chateaubriand had dubbed him—emotional, volatile, almost insane, but charming for his fervor. He was just twenty years old when in recognition of his first volume of poetry he received a donative from King Louis XVIII. He was granted a regular government-bestowed salary after the publication of his first novel and a parade of poetry and prose followed, capped with the monumental success of his
Hunchback of Notre Dame
in 1831. King Louis-Philippe granted him a peerage, the nation’s highest honor, allowing him to sit with the nation’s lords and decide the country’s fate.

Hugo could be readily recognized on the boulevards, with his pale, round face and thin, long hair parted to one side. He often wore a look of intense turbulence suggesting he would be quick to get into a brawl, should the need arise. He maintained a complicated stable of mistresses, including one who ended up going to prison for her adultery with him, while he managed to escape charges since peers enjoyed immunity. Hugo was seen as the ideal artist: committed to his craft and wedded to the epic of human life.

Here, at Lycée Louis-le-Grand, one might dream of becoming such a man. Auguste and Charles Bartholdi could meet other boys who would, either through their fathers or on their own, provide professional relationships that would last a lifetime. Auguste and Charles promptly distinguished themselves with their failings.

“To avoid punishing him too frequently, I am forced to isolate him often,” wrote one teacher about Auguste in his first year, “because he is always disturbing his classmates. . . . He pays no attention to the class exercises.”

Another instructor complained, “He is weak and unaccustomed to work. His memory needs to be exercised.” The teacher at least offered one consolation. “Other than that, there is no lack of good will or judgment.”

Auguste sketched exquisite cartoons of his teachers, who wondered if he might fare better living at the school, as most students did, instead of attending as a day student. Yet if he had gone to board at the lycée, he would have missed the extraordinary additional instruction Charlotte arranged in their home or in the nearby
ateliers,
the workshops, of Paris’s artists.

There Auguste received lessons from the same artists who exhibited at the Salon or whose work hung in the Louvre. The musician Auguste Franchomme—a friend of Mendelssohn, and the most famous cellist of the time—visited the Bartholdi house to provide music lessons. The Alsatian painter Eugène Gluck, one of the founders of the plein air movement, would spend time with the boys and discuss art. Auguste was given “sight-size” instruction, copying a sculpture or a model’s pose onto a canvas placed at a distance so that the object could be rendered at exactly the same size it appeared to the eye. He would be coached in how to use a feint of color or line to create false perspective.

In 1847 Charlotte sent Charles to the atelier of the celebrated painter Ary Scheffer. Auguste tagged along. Scheffer, a Dutchman, had set up his home and studio on rue Chaptal, in a neighborhood of artists and opera performers. The wealthiest Parisian children came here for art instruction. Behind the gate, a narrow path led to a picturesque back courtyard and a small group of buildings where one might find a rug airing over the stair railing or a dog wandering the cobblestones. The house proper stood immediately across the courtyard, with Scheffer’s atelier off to the side.

There in the studio, enormous gilt mirrors and vast canvases propped on easels reached almost to the high ceilings. Light let in by the latticework windows allowed Scheffer’s students to perfect their brushwork, their imitations of life in oil pigment or clay or marble under natural conditions.

Charlotte immediately took to Scheffer. Like Charles and Auguste, Scheffer had been raised by a mother who had been widowed fairly young and who had dedicated her life to developing her sons’ artistic and intellectual talents. Like Charlotte, Scheffer’s mother had chosen to move her sons to Paris. “How admirable he is like Christ! What a genius this man . . . ,” Charlotte wrote in her diary. She considered his studio “a sanctuary.”

Scheffer was handsome, spoke several languages fluently, and showed a tremendous wit and a gift for storytelling. In 1818, when Scheffer was twenty-three, the Marquis de Lafayette, the most famous man in France, invited him to his estate to paint his portrait and serve as artist in residence, teaching the young ladies sketching and painting. Scheffer’s portrait of Lafayette now hangs in the U.S. House of Representatives.

Lafayette could no doubt see in Scheffer a similarly extraordinary man. At nineteen Lafayette had defied his government, left the potentially easy life of a rich nobleman, and chartered his own transatlantic ship to join General George Washington in the fight against the British redcoats. Upon his return to France, he was thrown into prison, and on his release drafted the Declaration of the Rights of Man. He commanded the National Guard during the French Revolution. Scheffer would attempt to assist Lafayette in a coup to overthrow the French government and both barely escaped with their lives.

Madame Scheffer and her sons were ardent Republicans, fascinated by the political daring of the American experiment. They hated the papacy for its oppression and believed in the wide expansion of voting rights. But Scheffer’s friendships were more open: his social circle would extend to the family of the Duke of Orléans, descendants of the monarchy, and friends of Lafayette. The patriarch, Louis-Philippe, had been in exile in the United States, but with his cousin King Charles X on the throne, he had felt comfortable enough to return. Scheffer was asked to provide art lessons to Louis-Philippe’s children. He eventually fell in love with Louis-Philippe’s daughter, Marie, during her adolescence. Scheffer provided advice to Louis-Philippe after he became the constitutional monarch in 1830, a rise in Louis-Philippe’s status that made Bartholdi’s art instructor the teacher of princes and princesses.

To a fatherless son such as Bartholdi, Scheffer would make an excellent role model and mentor. Bartholdi began sculpting small models out of wet bread and eventually worked up to clay. He crafted a life-size sculpture of the founder of the convent at Colmar, Agnès de Hergenheim, which caught the attention of sculptor Antoine Étex, who had created the Peace and War figures on the Arc de Triomphe in Paris and whom Prime Minister Adolphe Thiers compared to Michelangelo. Bartholdi would come into contact with such dedicated artists as the composers Chopin, Liszt, and Gounod. He was also said to frequent the studio of Jean-François Soitoux and studied with the celebrated architect Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, who had won a famous commission to restore Notre Dame and add a vestry. Hugo’s
Hunchback
had attracted such crowds to the near-forgotten landmark that the French government had been forced to reckon with the cathedral’s decrepitude or face worldwide embarrassment.

Paris was becoming not just a thriving capital, but a worldwide tourist attraction. On a visit, U.S. Secretary of State James Buchanan saw nothing but prosperity ahead. “Production is everywhere increasing. Tranquility everywhere prevails,” he wrote on September 24, 1847. “Were Napoleon to come back again, he would hardly know the Paris he left, so much has it advanced in size, commerce, beauty, and above all, cleanliness.”

Beyond the gardens and palaces, though, Louis-Philippe had allowed the lives of the poor to grow still more wretched. Free speech was banned, the national deficit was out of control, and voting rights belonged only to the wealthy. Prime Minister François Guizot offered by way of tone-deaf consolation that if the poor showed more industry, they might earn enough money to vote as well.

The tension culminated in February when the government canceled a Reform Banquet, an unauthorized political gathering where opponents voiced their fury. Troops marched onto the Champs-Élysées on the gray winter morning of February 22, 1848. As the hour for the banquet neared, protestors began their own procession toward the rue Royale. Thousands of students sang the Marseillaise as they merged with the protesting workers, many shouting for Guizot’s ouster.

A scuffle between the marchers and the soldiers crowding them led to a full battle, with barricades thrown up and stones hurled. Guizot resigned; luckily there had been few injuries. But later that afternoon someone fired a shot that killed the horse of a National Guard officer and injured the man. The soldiers shot back at once, killing or wounding fifty protestors. The eyewitnesses fled in all directions, bearing the corpses and the news.

At dawn on February 24, every adult male citizen was considered a potential soldier of the National Guard, and all were called to protect the king. “From every window, peeped a head, and not very actively did the National Guards assemble. It requires a vast deal of patriotism to turn out of a comfortable bed and home to be shot at on a cold miserable February morning,” recounted an eyewitness, novelist Frederick Chamier.

The numbers of revolutionary combatants swelled. Scheffer, Auguste’s art teacher, ended up being the National Guardsman to smuggle the king and queen out of the palace and into a carriage that would take them toward safety in exile. Moments after their departure, mobs ransacked the palace, shattering the throne and shredding the royal robes.

At Louis-le-Grand, the boarding students heard the shooting the first day and huddled inside. The day students, coming from their homes in Paris, reported citizens dead in the streets. During the turbulent fighting of that February, a placard put up on the wall of the Lycée Louis-le-Grand stated, “Stay armed, citizens! For fear the revolution will not pass you by”; no one knew who might suddenly be swept into the violence. A student of mathematics died on the barricade.

The Bartholdis were not among the wealthiest Parisian citizens—although Charlotte’s savvy dealings in real estate would soon make them very rich—but they mixed with the upper classes. Politically, they were aligned with the revolutionaries but would have been fearful of the aggressive class-based politics that ruled the day. Bartholdi rarely attended classes after the mayhem began. Between his house and the school—which had just been renamed the Lycée Descartes—lay the barricades.

Poverty grew more severe, and the provisional government seemed to be abandoning its “right to work” principle.

In June, violence raged again. Cannon fire riddled the façade of Louis-le-Grand, and the infirmary became a makeshift hospital. That month, Bartholdi’s other instructor, Viollet-le-Duc, sketched his gargoyles for the top of Notre Dame. Those gnarled, grisly faces would reflect the carnage Viollet-le-Duc witnessed in the streets of Paris. “These are the invasions of barbarians from within; the war will not be over until civilization has repulsed the last of these monsters or until they have massacred the last civilized man. One does not know the number of dead on our side, but they have already killed many, between five and ten thousand,” he wrote in a letter to his father.

Into the political breach came Louis-Napoléon Bonaparte, nephew of Napoléon Bonaparte, who although long dead still had legendary status among the French peasant classes. This Louis-Napoléon had been angling for power since the 1830s, mainly on the basis of his lineage. He had actually devised several violent coups against Louis-Philippe but all had failed and he had gone into exile.

Upon his return, Louis-Napoléon earned election to the legislature and the confidence of other legislators, such as Victor Hugo, who also won a seat. In December 1848, in the historic first elections of a president of France, Louis-Napoléon won by a landslide. According to term limits, he would rule for four years. While still in office, he toured the country condemning stricter voting laws approved by the Assembly, making himself more popular still.

In 1851, before his term limit expired, he staged a coup d’état, dissolving the Assembly, while simultaneously expanding voting rights. He extended his term to ten years and granted himself further powers. Shockingly, a referendum backed up his rule.

A year after the coup, Louis-Napoléon introduced a referendum that would proclaim him emperor, a title that had not been used since the reign of his uncle. The change also telegraphed his ambitious intentions outside the borders of France, since “empire” referred to dominion over multiple countries. This referendum passed with a highly suspect 97 percent in favor. He became Napoléon III.