Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (7 page)

Bartholdi had been invited presumably as an up-and-coming artist in the process of making Laboulaye’s bust. The year before, Bartholdi had been promoted to chevalier of the Legion of Honor for a fountain he created to honor Admiral Bruat, the Colmar war hero from the Napoleonic Wars. At the Salon, the fountain had recieved only an honorable mention, which infuriated Bartholdi, who claimed he preferred to receive nothing rather than be runner-up. And Nieuwerkerke had granted Bartholdi’s advancement in the Legion of Honor only reluctantly. “I believe M. Bartholdi is a little young and has not obtained the prior awards,” he replied to the first heavy campaigning from Charlotte’s contacts, but eventually he gave in. The honor would place Bartholdi in the company of other eminent men.

At Glatigny, portraits of Jefferson and Franklin hung on the wall; bookcases held tomes by and about Americans, including Laboulaye’s own three-volume American history, and probably copies of his extremely popular satire,
Paris en Amérique,
published under the pseudonym René Lefebvre. Fortunate guests might even be allowed a glimpse of Laboulaye’s letter signed by Abraham Lincoln on Executive Mansion stationery.

For intellectuals such as Laboulaye and his friends, the end of the Civil War had won America a place of favor again, but Lincoln’s assassination had caused a mass outpouring of grief in the streets of Paris. Lincoln seemed the epitome of a righteous man, so unlike their own leader, who’d stolen the republic from their grasp. Bartholdi recalled that, after dinner that summer night, the guests, all powerful people in politics and letters, had strolled to the conservatory and begun a casual conversation about international relations—in particular, the sentiments of Italy toward France. Bartholdi did not speak up himself. He was not particularly political (he had happened to be traveling when Lincoln was assassinated, but over many months of letters to his mother, he appears to never have mentioned the event).

In the discussion that night, one of the gentlemen put forth the idea that gratitude was not a sentiment that could exist between nations. “The least material interest, the lightest political breath, would break every tie of that sort,” the guest observed.

Laboulaye bristled at the statement. He had spent his entire career underscoring this mutual love between the United States and France. He admitted that loyalty between Italy and France might waver because it was based on mutual military agreements, but the French-American relationship was built on a shared “community of thoughts” and “common aspirations.”

It was their common adventure stories that bound the two peoples, Laboulaye argued. “No one in the United States speaks of the Treaty of Versailles, which made the United States what they are,” he said. “Many Americans are ignorant even of the date of that treaty. On the other hand, every one recalls the name and the deeds of the French soldiers.” Indeed, at that moment in time, the heroics of the teenage Lafayette and the affection of the stern Washington for him circulated widely in both France and America.

Speaking before his eminent guests in the conservatory, Laboulaye suggested that because of their dramatic common history, it would be likely, should there ever be a monument built as a memorial to America’s independence, that France and America would erect the monument together.

At least that is how Bartholdi remembered the conversation years later.

Perhaps Laboulaye merely intended to say that while the future for democracy in France might look bleak under Napoléon III, French Republicans had fostered a healthy democracy elsewhere. They could take solace from having deeply contributed to a democracy that seemed now capable of flourishing across the Atlantic. If America trumpeted its independence, France might rightly feel pride for its part in the project.

Or perhaps Laboulaye was merely jawing after a good meal. He had just signed on to a committee to raise funds for emancipated slaves, and was in all likelihood not looking to get involved in another fundraising scheme.

In addition, beginning on May 1, 1865, a penny drive had been launched in France to raise money to forge a gold coin to present to Mrs. Lincoln as an expression of affection for her murdered husband. The coin would include the praise, employed in a letter from the city of Caen to the American ambassador just after the assassination, that Lincoln had achieved all he had “without veiling the statue of liberty; it was because he had become a great man by respecting the laws, and remaining an honest man.”

All donations for this gold coin were limited to two cents to ensure that a great many people could contribute. Over a year and a half, money secretly accrued, but in December 1866 the funds would be confiscated by Napoléon III, who was angered by the political overtone of the gift. Ultimately the donations would be clandestinely gathered a second time, and the coin would be struck in Switzerland and smuggled to the American ambassador John Bigelow with a note saying: “Tell Mrs. Lincoln that in this little box is the heart of France.” The box would also include a letter signed by twenty Republicans, including Victor Hugo.

It is clear that the fundraising efforts for the coin were well known in Republican circles—illustrious Republicans such as Hugo would not have signed on to an unknown effort. Given that forty thousand people contributed two cents or less, we know that the medal must have cost eight hundred dollars or less. If such a small project caused so much trouble and was so hard to realize, Laboulaye probably did not intend to attempt to suggest a project that would require a significantly larger amount of money. It’s not even clear that Bartholdi himself thought at that moment a statue might be created based on the after-dinner conversation at Glavigny. He never mentioned the moment in his letters or journal for twenty years, nor had he ever seemed before this point particularly interested in America.

Yet, somehow, the dream of a colossus to Liberty started here.

In April 1867, the Paris Universal Exposition opened on the Champ de Mars, the military parade ground near the banks of the Seine. This somewhat desolate area had been transformed for the occasion into a giddy world village. You could walk from rue Vavin to see the American sailboat that had crossed the Atlantic, marvel at camels from Tunisia, or take in a Chinese theater performance.

You could wander in just a few minutes from a Greek temple to the catacombs of Rome to a Danish cottage. You could sit under a pagoda and peer up at a minaret. You could watch the spin of a French windmill, or the hammer of machines in a British factory. Arranged on the patches of grass was an outdoor museum of sculptures, fountains, and equestrian statues. The contrasting architecture surrounded a vast rounded arcade, the Palais du Champ-de-Mars. Inside, intricate birdcage-like elevators rose three stories up, then descended. Submarines attracted writer Jules Verne to examine their intricacies and begin imagining a remarkable adventure story set twenty thousand leagues under the sea.

With so many emperors, princesses, presidents, and sultans roaming Paris, ordinary citizens became celebrity watchers. They stationed themselves all day at the doors of the exhibition hall or on certain street corners hoping to catch glimpses of royalty.

In late April, the
New York Times
reported a celebrity sighting at the Paris exposition that seemed more momentous and portentous than most. It was Napoléon III: “The Emperor passes just now leaning on the arm of Gen. Beville [the quartermaster general of the French army] and followed by a solemn escort of jurymen and policemen, who would not whisper in the Imperial presence under any consideration. The procession looks like a funeral, and his Majesty looks sluggish and
ennuied,
as a ‘grey-eyed man of destiny’ ought to look, and as if his thoughts were elsewhere—and I rather think they are.”

Indeed, the emperor had a great deal on his mind. Prussia and France teetered on the brink of war. Prussia was the Germanic-Polish nation that encompassed most of the southern Baltic coast and extended east from France’s border into what is now Russia. The turmoil, which would ultimately engulf France, would curb professional plans and dreams, including those of Bartholdi.

It began with a misunderstanding. Napoléon III thought he had an unwritten agreement with Prussia allowing France to annex Luxembourg, provided France not interfere with Prussia’s imminent war with Austria and the German states. Prussia invaded and defeated Austria in a three-and-a-half-month conflict concluded in August 1866. France stood idly by.

Napoléon III then tried to annex Luxembourg by purchasing the territory from William III of the Netherlands, who was desperate for money. William III agreed, but to Napoléon III’s surprise, Prussia refused to allow the transfer. The Prussian government, led by Bismarck, revealed that it had made secret mutual defense agreements with all of southern Germany and was willing to go to war with France to prevent the expansion of France’s borders.

Napoléon III had miscalculated badly. Not only had he allowed Prussia to significantly expand its borders through his passivity; he would now not be able to take Luxembourg without starting a war with Prussia.

Despite the happy pageantry at the exposition, a Frenchman might worry at what the Prussians had put on display. The enormous cannon that they had installed looked as if it could level the minarets, the Gallery of Machines, and the elevators in a single blow. The “dictatorial” statues of the Prussian king and of Bismarck seemed menacing.

On May 11, only two weeks after the exposition’s opening, officials from France, Prussia, the Netherlands, Luxembourg, and other countries journeyed to London to sign a treaty averting war. The treaty reaffirmed Luxembourg’s tie to the Netherlands, but the concession left unfinished business. France had merely forsaken its desire to gain Luxembourg and felt cheated. Prussia had managed to intimidate France into squelching its plans through the revelation that it was now an untenably engorged power.

Despite these undercurrents, the expo was attracting nearly seventy-five thousand people each day, and rather than prove the financial disaster all had expected, it looked likely to turn a profit of forty million francs. For Bartholdi—young, ambitious, and thirsty for inspiration—it offered many points of particular interest.

The Roches-Douvres iron lighthouse, which stood on the shore of an artificial pond, was the exposition’s main visual attraction. We do not know for sure what Bartholdi thought of this lighthouse but the style of its construction certainly heralded his future colossal edifice. “The chief peculiarity of this fine piece of work was that the structure depended for its strength wholly upon its skeleton; the external iron plates being merely a shell upon which no reliance is placed for strength,” the U.S. general survey of the exhibition reported. That description would echo later assessments of the Statue of Liberty’s brilliant engineering.

Bartholdi had wanted to craft his own visually stunning work for this exhibition. He in fact had proposed a model for the entrance of the Palais du Champ-de-Mars, monumental reliefs representing in allegory France sovereign as the dispenser of work, knowledge, and peace. These would have been his first colossi: two enormous, half-reclining classical women. The proposal had been refused.

But Bartholdi did receive one consolation. At the end of a pathway lined with sphinxes, Egypt had built a mock temple, the sandstone merely plaster blocks covered with sand. The display included an Arabic palace, an
okel
(a covered market) and its outbuilding, a café, shops, workshops, accommodation for the Egyptian staff, and a room dedicated to the study of Egyptian mummies and skulls.

Auguste Mariette, the Louvre agent who had discovered the catacombs under the sphinx of Memphis in 1851, had since been named the director of antiquities for the khedive, the ruler of Egypt, and gone on to unearth the vast city of Dendera and the pyramids of Memphis. He had set up this faux temple in the Parisian park to be a museum. He published a pamphlet called
Description of the Egyptian Park,
in which he led the reader through the buildings. Wrote Mariette: “Between the Okel and the temple is the plaster model of a statue: It is that of Champollion.”

Champollion stood with one leg propped on the head of a toppled sphinx, his arm leaning on that crooked knee, his chin on his hand. “The illustrious founder of Egyptology is in the pose of meditation,” wrote Mariette. “The Egyptian sphinx, so long and so obstinately silent, will open its mouth. A few more efforts of this deep thought, and the veil that covers forty centuries of history will be torn. The statue of Champollion is exhibited in the Egyptian Park by Mr. Bartholdi, its author. It is intended for the public square of Figeac, which prides itself on having given birth to the great man. A public subscription generously shared the costs.”

Bartholdi had demonstrated more skill with this piece than he had with his statue of Rapp. A viewer could circle the figure and find visual interest from all angles, but it embodied a strange message. In Bartholdi’s statue, Champollion leans the whole weight of his body on a sphinx head, a fragile piece of antiquity. Bartholdi probably meant to suggest that Champollion had somehow conquered the mysteries of the ancient past, but it read as an echo of a later criticism of the Egyptologist: he tended to rip out his precious finds of tablets or statuary without regard for proper preservation or context.

The Egyptian temple complex also provided one of the most intriguing celebrity sightings of the expo. This was where the thirty-seven-year-old Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, liked to spend his time socializing and meeting visitors. Ismail Pasha was the grandson of Muhammad Ali and the nephew of Said Pasha, the macaroni lover who had granted de Lesseps the contract for the Suez Canal. With the death of his uncle four years earlier, Ismail Pasha was now the ruler of Egypt.