Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (12 page)

“Life is tiresome here and everywhere else,” Bartholdi wrote to Édouard Laboulaye, the man whose bust he had sculpted and who had spoken of liberty and America so inspirationally in his conservatory. Laboulaye too had suffered during these war years. He had gone from standing-room-only crowds for his lectures to being heckled so severely in the spring of 1870 he had been forced to abandon his podium, race into the street, and even there, employ every wile to escape a wild mob.

During the war, Laboulaye had served as a hospital nurse in Paris, but had been threatened by communists and retreated to Normandy to organize ambulances. The placid, clerical Laboulaye had turned virulent about the Prussians. “I have conceived a profound hatred for this hypocritical and perverse race, incapable alike of nobility and generosity,” he wrote to the U.S. ambassador. When he returned to his home in Versailles, he had found it moderately ransacked.

Only five years earlier, Bartholdi had visited that home to dine with the eminent French elite and dream of international gratitude, perhaps even a monument forged between nations. Now he was beached in Colmar, the town emptying of its residents, with Germans taking their place.

“By way of a rest,” Bartholdi wrote on, “I have six Prussians living with me in the house. So far I have been unable to accustom myself to the sight of these animals in a domestic setting, but it seems I shall have to.”

Things weren’t better in Paris. Weary of the Thiers government, which had established its capital in Versailles, a group of working-class citizens of Montmartre called the Communards had, through a public subscription drive, purchased two hundred cannons. With amazing industry, they had dragged them to the top of steep Montmartre, which looked down on Paris. On March 18, when the Thiers government sought to remove the cannons, the Communards took two generals captive. At a makeshift trial for the seized generals, the Communards became incensed at the soldiers’ impertinence. They took them to a wall on rue des Rosiers and shot them. The government ordered the National Guard to fire on the Communards, but the soldiers refused. By the end of that month, the Communards had seized the Hôtel de Ville. The question was not if, but when, Thiers would send troops to initiate a full battle to reclaim the capital.

For Bartholdi, who was still contemplating his future in Colmar, Parisian anarchy and a war reparation of five billion francs offered barely any hope to earn a living. Bartholdi had to find another nation with wealth and hubris.

America blossomed with new construction. The governor of New York had just authorized the creation of a vast American Museum of Natural History. There were the parks: Fairmount Park in Philadelphia, which was to host the first American world’s fair in 1876, as had been determined only months before, in January 1870. Central Park and Prospect Park in New York, still under construction, would require statues near those artificial lakes and simulated woods.

Bartholdi hoped to build his harbor colossus, in spite of Egypt’s rejection. Perhaps the new world could provide an appropriate location.

Therefore, Bartholdi yearned to go to America, but he needed Laboulaye’s help to escape. As a member of the assembly, Laboulaye could help him gain the documentation he required, and he had American social connections that could earn Bartholdi commissions. Laboulaye had expressed a belief that a long-lasting tribute to American-French friendship might one day be built, in time for the centenary of America, and Bartholdi could offer his colossus for that purpose.

More even than Laboulaye’s love of America—despite the fact that he’d never set foot on its shores—the factor that would make him a key partner for Bartholdi was that Laboulaye championed the fantastic. He had translated his fairy tales into English, an offering he felt would seal the transatlantic alliance.

He dedicated the treasury of giants, princesses, and fairies not only to American children but to his granddaughter: “Some day, doubtless, when you are a tall girl of fifteen, you will throw aside this book with your doll, and perhaps even wonder how your grandfather, with his gray beard, could have had so little sense as to waste his time on such trifles. Be not too severe, my dear Gabrielle . . . experience will teach you only too quickly that the truest and sweetest things in life are not those which we see, but those of which we dream.”

“I have reread and am still rereading your works on the subject ‘liberty,’” Bartholdi wrote to Laboulaye in seeking the letters of introduction, “and I hope to honor your friendship, which will subsidize me. I will endeavor to glorify the Republic and liberty over there.”

As the month of May wore on, Paris trembled with dread of a final confrontation between the Communards and Thiers’s soldiers, led by General Marshal Patrice de MacMahon. Thiers, having in the 1840s overseen the building of those mighty walls around Paris, knew exactly where to strike. He entered through Auteuil’s Point-du-Jour on the twenty-first.

Thiers’s troops showed no mercy as they drove out their adversaries. As the Communards fled, first from the town hall, then to the twentieth arrondissement, they burned down the Hôtel de Ville, the Palais des Tuileries, the Palais Royal, and the Palais de Justice. Thiers’s mansion got the match, and, by decree, the Communards pulled down with ropes Bonaparte’s Victory Column and the statue of Napoléon in the Place Vendôme.

As the battle raged on, the Communards killed the archbishop and fifty prisoners, including ten Jesuit priests.

Ernest Vizetelly, an English writer who fought in the streets, recalled: “I saw Paris burning. I gazed on the sheaves of flames rising above the Tuileries. I saw the whole front of the Ministry of Finances fall into the Rue de Rivoli. I saw the now vanished Carrefour de la Croix Rouge one blaze of fire. I helped to carry water to put out the conflagration at the Palais de Justice. . . . All that period of my life flashes on my mind as vividly as Paris herself flashed under the wondering stars of those balmy nights in May.”

Bartholdi’s rue Vavin, where his studio had been a refuge of art and polite conversation, turned into the staging point for the National Guard defense led by Maxime Lisbonne. In retreat, Lisbonne’s men blew up the powder magazine in the Luxembourg Gardens.

The writer Edmond de Goncourt, a neighbor of Bartholdi, recalled the view on May 24: “The whole of the evening, through the trees, I have watched burning Paris; the sight recalls one of those Neapolitan gouache paintings, showing an eruption of Vesuvius outlined on a sheet of black paper.”

As the Communards battled the Thiers government troops in the streets of Paris, Bartholdi set out with his mother from Colmar to Strasbourg, on his way back to Paris, not knowing exactly what he would see. The capital of Alsace had fallen first in the war in September under heavy bombardment and now, like Colmar, was part of Germany.

“Saw . . . the poor city,” he wrote. “In the evening at 5:30 I leave for Paris. Mother, very brave, puts a good face on my departure. I am glad of this, for—although I am certain I am doing right—it is hard for me to leave her.”

On Sunday, May 28, he wrote in his diary, “Still the Prussians are everywhere. . . . Smoke over Paris, war clouds near Belleville.”

That night, a last macabre battle took place among the tombstones in the cemetery of Père-Lachaise, across the Seine, three and a half miles from Bartholdi’s home. The last holdouts of the Communards huddled among the crypts, battling the Versailles troops. Eventually they were backed against the far southeastern corner. Thiers’s troops lined up the last 147 Communards and shot them, burying them in a common grave.

The death toll of those who had fallen in the fighting in Paris can barely be imagined. Bloody Week took an estimated 10,000 lives. More than 43,000 prisoners were seized, more than 100 death sentences handed down. Thirteen thousand people went to prison, and close to 4,000 were deported to New Caledonia.

Bartholdi seemed almost oblivious of the carnage unfolding when he arrived in Versailles on Monday, May 29, the day after the Lachaise battle: “saw Laboulaye, very encouraging.”

Bartholdi found at that house some of the same men he had mingled with at the 1865 dinner party, as he would write later in his own history of the statue: “Messieurs Lafayette, Henri Martin, Remusat, Wolowski, de Gasparin and other distinguished men whose sympathies toward the United States were well known. They talked again of American sentiment, of the shipments which the Americans had made to Paris [during the siege], of the diverse opinions which prevailed in America. I repeated all that I had heard said on board the Transatlantic steamships. M. Laboulaye took up again his views . . . and declared that without any doubt there would be at the hundredth anniversary of the Independence of the United States a movement in America patriotic and French as well.”

When Bartholdi wrote that description of the meeting, he credited Laboulaye with the dreamy vision of a centennial celebration at the very moment when corpses were creating landfill in the streets of Paris. Perhaps Bartholdi’s account is true; after all, Laboulaye appreciated fairy tales. Perhaps Laboulaye could be light and optimistic the moment the guns fell silent. There is evidence, though, that Laboulaye might not have shared the same fervor for the Bartholdi project at that moment. He was war-weary. Even a month and a half later, he put off a suggestion that he take a stronger role leading the country with these words: “I am old, tired, without ambition, and lack everything that is needed to lead a party or to assist in leading it.”

Yet Bartholdi’s ambition almost served as an opiate to dull him to the pain of all the national tragedies he had witnessed for nearly a year.

“Go to see that country,” Bartholdi remembered Laboulaye saying. “‘You will study it, and bring back to us your impressions. Propose to our friends over there to make with us a monument, a common work, in remembrance of the ancient friendship of France and the United States. We will take up a subscription in France. If you find a happy idea, a plan that will excite public enthusiasm, we are convinced that it will be successful on both continents, and we will do a work that will have a far-reaching moral effect.’ It was, then, in these convictions of M. Laboulaye that the germ of the monument of the French-American Union was found.” Given Laboulaye’s writings at that time, and the actual events unfolding, it is very unlikely that Laboulaye acted as such a cheerleader.

Bartholdi set off for Paris, which had begun stumbling back to life. Paving stones were replaced and citizens returned to their homes. Wives of the Paris insurgents offered wine to the Versailles troops in a gesture of truce. Many grateful soldiers accepted. Within moments, they fell to the pavement breathless. One woman who had poisoned forty soldiers was walked to the door of her home by soldiers and shot. On one street corner, fourteen women were executed in similar fashion for the same crime.

Bartholdi arrived in Paris on Tuesday, May 30. He wrote: “At Point-du-Jour—Ruins at the Paris gate, houses disemboweled. On the trip, not as much damage to be seen as I expected at the Tuileries, Cour des Comptes, sad; but Rue Vavin—what a surprise!—houses in ruins, facades torn to pieces. Troops have occupied my house. Holes in the courtyard walls to go through. Etienne [the housekeeper] is ill from emotion, not a pane of glass left, but . . . no rubbish inside.”

On Wednesday, May 31, he wrote: “Poor Paris! one says here—and poor France! When one is at Versailles!”

Monuments built by Napoléon had fallen. Unlike the sphinxes, some of the great works of French emperors would not be eternal. Someone had locked the gates of Parc Monceau since so many people had been executed there; the grounds too were going to be used to bury the corpses brought from the barricades. Paris reeked of decomposing bodies. “As I pass over places where I saw deep trenches dug in front of the barricades three weeks ago,” wrote the American minister William Gibson, “and now, from unmistakable signs, cannot fail to know that there are dead men underneath the newly-laid road, many passages of the Word come to my mind: ‘Whoso diggeth a pit shall fall therein.’”

Bartholdi left for America, not with a deep abiding love for that nation, but with a dread for what his own country had become.

Book II

The Gamble

6
America, the Bewildering

On board the
Pereire
, June 17, 1871

Position at noon, 42 degree latitude, 51 degree longitude

“Dear Mama:

“When you receive this letter, you will already have had news of me by telegraph. You will note that, by an innocent subterfuge, I sent you the news of our departure from France and our arrival in New York. I did not want you to be worried for twelve days or more, at every breeze that caressed the tall poplars of Colmar. Our crossing is a very pleasant one, and we shall probably be safely in New York four days from today.

“We are now opposite the grand banks of Newfoundland; but for all that there is nothing to see . . . for a whole week one might suppose that the world was created for fish rather than for mankind.”

This ship that took Bartholdi to America was an extraordinary vessel, capable of accommodating three hundred people. It carried only forty on Bartholdi’s voyage, presumably because few people could scrape together the fare, after months of war and siege and civil unrest.

Bartholdi did not venture to America alone. He brought with him his beloved elderly assistant, Marie Simon, whom he had picked up at his home in Rennes. Simon, a white-haired, bearded man with brown eyes, could have been mistaken for Bartholdi’s father. He was born around 1814, and first appeared regularly in Bartholdi’s life around the time of this American voyage. He traveled by his employer’s side to various statue projects through at least 1885.