The Parisian symbol of two revolutions
The full name of the monumental statue presented by France to the United States of America in honor of the centennial of the signing of the Declaration of Independence is “Liberty Lighting the World”. All people of the planet are familiar with this 46-meter-high symbol, which has been welcoming ships entering New York Harbor since 1886. However, not everyone knows that you don’t have to cross the Atlantic to see the masterpiece created by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi in the neoclassical style.
In Paris, where the colossal gift was created, made, by the way, of copper smelted at Ural factories, there are the “younger sisters” of the Statue of Liberty. The most famous of the Parisian statues, which has a height of 11 and a half meters, is located near the eastern end of Swan Island, on the Seine River, not far from the Eiffel Tower. It is noteworthy that the face of this sculpture faces west, where the world-famous “American” Statue of Liberty is located, towering over the island of the same name, three kilometers from Manhattan.
The sculpture on the Seine is a reciprocal gift from the American diaspora of Paris to the French capital, timed to coincide with the Day of the Taking of the Bastille. It is noteworthy that the copy is deliberately made not quite accurate. Both statues in the right hand hold a high raised torch. But if in the original, located in New York, on the book in the left hand of Liberty, the date of the founding of the United States is embossed, in the French analog of the sculpture, the dates of the two great revolutions that took place on opposite sides of the Atlantic, in France and the United States.
The model, four times smaller than the original, appeared on Swan Island just four years after the official inauguration of the symbol of Liberty in America. But this is not the only copy of Bartholdi’s world-famous masterpiece. Until 2011 in the Luxembourg Gardens you could see another, 3-meter author’s copy, until unknown vandals deprived it of its hand with a torch.
After restoration work, which took two whole years, the sculpture was put on display at the Musée d’Orsay, a museum of applied and fine arts, and another Statue of Liberty, positioned as an outstanding engineering object, is in the Paris Museum of Arts and Crafts.
On one of the barges moored on the right bank of the Seine, you can see another, fourth copy of the famous sculpture. It can be seen directly from the observation deck of the Eiffel Tower, or during a ride on a sightseeing water “streetcar” running along the banks of the main waterway of Paris.
We cannot ignore a copy of the torch held by the New York symbol of democracy and freedom. This torch is located at the entrance to the capital’s “d’Alma” bridge, in the tunnel under which the ill-fated car that took the lives of “Lady Di” and Dodi Al-Fayed crashed. Perhaps because people who came to honor the memory of Princess Diana placed flowers at the foot of the gilded torch, many people think that the sculptural replica is dedicated to this tragedy.
Did you know that…
– Originally, the symbol of the two revolutions standing on Swan Island did not face west, as Bartholdi had planned, as this would have meant that the statue was turned with the back of its head towards the Eiffel Tower. The sculptor’s original idea was not realized until 1937, but before that Liberty underwent a restoration and traveled to Japan, where it was exhibited from 1998 to 1999.
– The huge sculpture was originally proposed by Bartholdi for the opening of the Suez Canal, but the idea did not materialize due to lack of funds.
– The Statue of Liberty required 90 tons of copper smelted by industrialists Demidovs at the Nizhny Tagil mines.
