The Statue of Liberty was a gift to the U.S. from France, and a politician in that European country says that the U.S. no longer deserves to keep it. Raphaël Glucksmann, a member of the European Parliament and co-president of the left-wing Public Place party, has called for its return.
“We’re going to say to the Americans who have chosen to side with the tyrants, to the Americans who fired researchers for demanding scientific freedom: ‘Give us back the Statue of Liberty,’” said Glucksmann in a speech on Sunday. “It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us.”
What’s behind Glucksmann’s accusations? U.S. president Donald Trump has openly sided with Russian president Vladimir Putin in debates over how to end the three-year-old war in Ukraine, which Trump has said Ukraine “should have never started” even though Russia launched a full-scale invasion of the smaller country in 2022. The editors of Nature magazine recently accused the Trump administration of taking a “wrecking ball to science” and placing “Orwellian restrictions” on researchers.
Glucksmann’s demand is certainly a symbolic one only, since the monument is the property of the U.S., as the UNESCO World Heritage Convention points out.
Asked by a Fox staffer at a Monday press conference whether the statue would be returned, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was classy as ever, saying, “Absolutely not. And, my advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now. So they should be very grateful to our great country.”
The (actually named) politician responded on X, saying he would go even further: “I would simply not be here if hundreds of thousands of young Americans had not landed on our beaches in Normandy,” adding that French gratitude is “eternal.”
“But,” he went on, “the America of these heroes fought against tyrants, it did not flatter them. It was the enemy of fascism, not the friend of Putin. It helped the resistance and didn’t attack Zelensky. It celebrated science and didn’t fire researchers for using banned words. It welcomed the persecuted and didn’t target them. It was far, so far from what your current President does, says, and embodies.” He also acknowledges that the call to repatriate the sculpture is symbolic.
The statue’s history began when Édouard de Laboulaye, a French legal expert, poet, author and abolitionist, conceived of a monumental gift to the U.S. in 1865, one that would celebrate the end of slavery of African people, celebrate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence, and honor the close relationship between the two nations.
On both shores, extensive fundraising efforts took place, including the auction of Emma Lazarus’s sonnet The New Colossus (1883). Joseph Pulitzer, publisher of the New York World, promised to print the name of every donor to a massive campaign, which ended up raising more than $100,000 for the pedestal.
Gustave Eiffel, who would go on to erect the famed tower, helped to engineer the monument. “Its design and construction were recognized at the time as one of the greatest technical achievements of the 19th century and hailed as a bridge between art and engineering,” UNESCO pointed out.
The result was The Statue of Liberty Enlightening the World by artist Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a sculpture rich with symbolism: a broken shackle and chain lay at her feet, while her tablet is inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, and her crown represents the light of liberty, its spikes standing for the rays of the sun.
Dedicated by president Grover Cleveland in 1886, the statue is often associated with Lazarus’s poem, but in fact it was only in 1903 that the bronze plaque engraved with that poem was added; it concludes with the famous lines,
“Keep, ancient lands, your storied pomp!” cries she
With silent lips. “Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,
The wretched refuse of your teeming shore.
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me,
I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
Designated a national monument in 1924, the statue has been in the care of the National Park Service since 1933. According to the National Parks Conservation Association, Trump’s executive orders threaten the U.S.’s national parks in various ways.
The artwork has been, Artnet News pointed out in 2022, a “lightning rod” for artists for generations, with artists like Renee Cox, Abigail DeVille, Steve McQueen, Albert Oehlen, Hank Willis Thomas, and Danh Vo making work inspired by Lady Liberty.
