The Statue of Liberty has a little sister. I’d heard of it but had not thought about it in years. Now France has sent her to visit her taller sibling in the U.S. beginning today, July 4th. The nine-foot bronze will visit Ellis Island in New York for about a week, then spend her next ten years at the French Ambassador’s residence in Washington, D.C.
Via Reuters:
“It is a symbol of the friendship between the French and the American people, but it is also a reminder of the importance of the message of liberty and enlightening the world, which is the name of the statue,” said Philippe Étienne, French ambassador to the United States, at an inauguration ceremony.
Adam Gopnik of The New Yorker elaborates with a bit of that history which I admit I knew only sketchily:
Yet, gazing at Liberty a couple of days before the Fourth of July, there is still something hugely moving about her, at any scale. The essential historical confusion that she presents to our understanding is that her proximity to Ellis Island quickly transformed her into a symbol of American immigration, which is not what she was intended to be. She became the “Give Me Your Tired, Your Poor” Lady, rather than the “Enlighten the World” Lady. As first imagined, in 1865, when the sculptor [Frédéric-Auguste] Bartholdi and the novelist and essayist Édouard Réne Lefèbvre de Laboulaye sat down at a (likely apocryphal) dinner, shortly after Lincoln’s assassination, the purpose of this first colossal statue since antiquity in the West was apparent: she was to be both a monument to the triumph of American democracy, rooted in the cause of abolition, and a kind of pledge object, promising the restoration of the French Republic, at a time when France was still under the corrupt and autocratic rule of the Second Empire. Laboulaye had in mind a monument to the end of slavery here and the rebirth of republicanism there. He succinctly summarized what Liberty was against in a prescient list: she was to celebrate a people who had “left behind royalty, nobility, the Church, centralization, permanent armies: privilege never came to them.” Inspired by a transatlantic light, France might leave them behind as well.
“As the president of the French Anti-Slavery Society, de Laboulaye believed that the passage of the 13th Amendment (abolishing slavery in the U.S., 1865) was a milestone and it proved that justice and liberty for all was possible,” reads the National Park Service’s page.
The plaque with the poem by Emma Lazarus — “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free” — added in 1903 quickly overtook de Laboulaye’s original meaning. How very American to emigrate to these shores to redefine oneself.
Gopnik continues:
The dreamers who made the statue had an abiding faith in freedom: they believed that liberty can be the solvent of all other ills. Free people would be prosperous and equal and compassionate. Perhaps sadly, in the past few years, our sense of what liberty alone can do has contracted. We know that liberty guarantees neither social solidarity nor economic equality. A lot of people will tell you that, in the absence of those good things, the liberty from priests and kings, and even the liberty to say what we want isn’t enough—that maybe it isn’t even liberty. Certainly, the faith, once so sure, that free markets would make free men and women has never looked more dubious. (China is providing an instance of how liberty can be squashed in Hong Kong, while a kind of capitalism prospers in Beijing.)
Yet Liberty still counts. This old lady, who is also perpetually young, has never looked more necessary. Indeed, when the little-sister statue was unveiled, a single thing took one’s breath away: compared with her august sister, she has a pinched, determined, furious face. She looks as furious as the suffragists of more than a century ago. This is, in part, a consequence of the rule that, in order for a statue’s facial expression to “carry” across a great distance, it needs to be strong stuff. Yet here the idea implicit in her expression—that the act of enlightening the world with liberty means setting it on fire, that letting freedom ring can mean letting freedom resound, loudly—seems fitting and pleasing and just.
After a year of coast-to-coast protests over the treatment of Black Americans at the hands of police, last week the highest court in the land again took the revanchist position that the right of Americans — Black Americans, especially — to freely exercise this nation’s advertised liberties remains provisional. The broken chain lying at Liberty’s feet remains symbolic.
The heirs of kings, those who would be kings, religious zealots, the rich, the powerful, and their progeny, are forever scheming to reassert their ancient claims to rule over the rest of us as our natural-born superiors. They stand against what Liberty on her pedestal stands for. Today they will celebrate July the Fourth with empty rituals in churches and in the corners of the streets, that they may be seen of men.
Putting out the American flag this morning feels less like an act of civic reverence than one of defiance.