Statue of Liberty Symbolizes Freedom Uniquely American

Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament from the Progressive Alliance of Socialists and Democrats, recently said we should return the Statue of Liberty to France: "We gave it to you as a gift, but apparently you despise it. So it will be just fine here at home."

Glucksmann has since said he wasn't serious — this was just a "wake up call." He adds that "the statue is yours. But what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe."

Actually, the Frenchmen who conceived the statue, raised the money to build it, and presented it to the people of the United States in 1886 hoped that Europeans, and ultimately everyone in the world, would "take up the torch."

The statue was first imagined by Édouard-René de Laboulaye, a college professor, enemy of slavery, advocate for religious freedom, and liberal republican (in mid-nineteenth-century France this was not an oxymoron).

Laboulaye was infatuated with the idea of America. Although he had never been to the United States he was known as the most American of all the French. He dressed plainly, as he imagined all true Americans did. He translated Benjamin Franklin's autobiography and wrote a three-volume history of the United States, in which he argued that the creation of the American republic was the beginning of a new order of things in which American liberty would ultimately enlighten the world.

In the spring of 1865 Laboulaye hosted a dinner party at which he proposed a monument, designed in France and "built in America as a memorial to their independence."

Among his guests was Frédéric Bartholdi, an ambitious young sculptor. Bartholdi had been to Egypt and was deeply impressed by its monuments, especially the colossal statues of Ramses II at Abu Simbel. He volunteered to design the memorial Laboulaye had in mind, but the project was impractical during the reign of Napoleon III, who was hostile to republics.

In the meantime Bartholdi proposed a colossal statue for the northern end of the new Suez Canal — a statue of an Egyptian woman wrapped in robes and holding a torch, which he called Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia. The light he imagined was progress — presumably the economic and technical progress represented by the canal. The Egyptian government passed.

Shortly thereafter Napoleon III was deposed, a new French republic launched, and Laboulaye and Bartholdi went to work on their statue of Liberty — the kind of Liberty Laboulaye hoped to memorialize in America so that it might be realized, first in France and then everywhere else in the world.

The statue, he explained, would not represent Liberty in general. It would symbolize "American Liberty."

In Europe the cause of Liberty had too often degenerated into licentiousness and unchecked bloodshed — the Liberty of limitless state power that led to the guillotine and marching armies of liberation indistinguishable from the ancient tyrannies it replaced.

Laboulaye wanted the world to understand that Liberty did not have to be that way. The statue he imagined, Liberty Enlightening the World, would represent ordered liberty, limited government, and the rule of law:

She is not Liberty with a red cap on her head and a pike in her hand, stepping over corpses. Ours in one hand holds the torch — no, not the torch that sets afire, but the flambeau, the candle-flame that enlightens. In her other she holds the tables of the law. ... This statue, symbol of liberty, tells us at one and the same time that Liberty lives only through Truth and Justice, Light and Law.

He knew how uncommon they were, how difficult to nurture.

To make the source of this idea completely clear, the "table of law" Liberty holds is the American Declaration of Independence, which is based on what it says is the self-evident truth that "all Men are created equal" and possess "unalienable rights," among which are "Life, Liberty and the Pursuit of Happiness."

"This," Laboulaye added, a little plaintively, "is the Liberty that we desire."

He had the pleasure of seeing the finished statue in Paris, but he died in 1883, before it was brought to America. He would surely be grateful — as M. Glucksmann says he is — that Americans by the million have fought, and many died, defending the liberty of France.

But he would probably be disappointed that Europeans submit so much of their lives to state control, understanding as he did that limited government under the rule of law is essential for liberty to flourish. We are trying — it's not at all easy — to restore that kind of government after decades of profligacy and neglect.

The Statue of Liberty he imagined still lifts her lamp and faces out to sea as if looking for an answering light from the Old World, but no light comes.