Liberty's Torch: The Great Adventure to Build the Statue of Liberty (4 page)

Conditions became dangerous for those with nerve and stature enough to denounce Napoléon III. Victor Hugo, now thoroughly disgusted with the man he had formerly endorsed, sneaked out of the country with false identity papers, disguised in a workman’s smock. Not long after, Napoléon III’s government published a list of those not welcome in France. Hugo, the hero of the French masses, was on it.

Napoléon III’s return and rise to power would greatly affect the young Bartholdi’s life. In those tempestuous times, with no regular studies to occupy them, Charles and Auguste tormented their mother with their waywardness and lack of discipline. She wrote in her diary: “They are both ungrateful and don’t understand me at all. Life is so bitter for me I would like to leave it. It seems to me I can’t wait for that moment.”

Charles, who was now twenty-four, pained her with what she considered his hypocrisy and duplicity. She had hired a tutor to help Charles study for his law degree despite the fact that he went to bed late, slept late, and disappeared without warning. “What is this devil that corrupts Charles?” she wrote in her journal.

To her disappointment, Auguste would side with his brother in family arguments, or escape into his drawing. She hated the fact that he wouldn’t tell her his daily plans; he had indeed begun to hide his whereabouts from her. At Easter in 1852, Charlotte found herself at her husband’s tomb, wondering when she too could die. “I am alone in this desert of men,” she wrote.

Yet Charlotte continued to help Auguste. She acquired a temporary space for him on rue Carnot, in Levallois-Perret, a suburb of Paris. She also hired tutors to help him pass his baccalaureate, so that even as an artist he would have the security of the certificate. Charlotte understood that he would need to present the trappings of an established sculptor, so she found money to move him to 23 rue de la Rochefoucauld in the ninth arrondissement, not far from the Saint-Lazare train station. About a year later, Charlotte bought the atelier in which Bartholdi would live and work for the rest of his professional life.

Its location was fashionable enough to attract potential clients who might have strolled through the Luxembourg Gardens. The pleasant little four-room house at 40 rue Vavin, just behind that park, had two entrances, one a narrow doorway for visitors and the other high double doors to move statues in or out. A tightly curved spiral staircase led to an upper balcony. The studios themselves were large, with tall windows protected by wrought-iron gratings, providing abundant light. Bartholdi could greet clients in a sort of parlor studio with a small desk and velvet chairs, where he displayed his maquettes in a highboy. In the next room, he created his sculptures and paintings. His busts and models of fountains lined the shelves of his workspace.

At nineteen, he managed to get a piece accepted into the Salon, a ten-inch by fifteen-inch dark bronze of the Good Samaritan drooping over a limp and handsome traveler. The dramatic piece clearly echoed his teacher Scheffer’s style but Bartholdi failed to secure a medal and the sculpture passed without much attention. What he needed was a way to launch himself into the establishment.

A
statuaire
—a maker of statues—created by commission to please his audience. He could never shock as a sculptor could. A statue maker’s goal was to revive a lost memory, whether a vision of how the world could be, or a moment in time that captured humanity’s greatness. He could commemorate bloody sacrifices, and resuscitate the dead with a bust or a gravestone, but a steady livelihood required business allegiances and political support.

In January 1854, Émilien de Nieuwerkerke received a letter. Nieuwerkerke, Napoléon III’s cousin’s lover, was ex officio president of art juries in perpetuity; director general of national museums; and superintendent of fine arts in the emperor’s household and at the Louvre.

“Mon brave, I request permission to present to you next Friday a young man passionate for sculpture. It is the young Bartholdi, of a very honorable Alsace family and very rich. . . . He is so
gifted
in this art (in which you were the past master),” the letter continued, “that, after his first works, the town of Colmar has charged him with making a statue of general Rapp, the reduced model of which he has completed. This work, my dear friend, denotes the capacity and a bright future for this young amateur.” The letter was signed by a Colonel Marnier.

Nieuwerkerke scheduled a meeting with the nineteen-year-old Bartholdi for the next Friday.

The letter’s author had been aide-de-camp to French army general Jean Rapp, a Colmar war hero. Admirers of Rapp in both Colmar and Paris had planned a monument in his honor, and Charlotte had campaigned for Auguste to receive this commission. She may have passed along the intimate connection between Rapp and the Bartholdi family; allegedly, Rapp once told a roomful of men, pointing to her late husband, Jean-Charles, who was still a boy, “Gentlemen, without the father of this young man, I would be still planting cabbages in Colmar.”

Not even finished with his studies at the lycée, Bartholdi won the commission, pushing aside far more established artists. Young Bartholdi himself tracked down the organizer of the Rapp commission in Paris to inform him that he had been chosen for the piece. The Parisian authority acknowledged in a letter to a colleague that he would have to defer to the Colmarians. Charlotte almost exulted in the envy caused. “What jealousy! But on the other hand, goodness and kindness!” she wrote. “It makes me feel good.” The money to pay for the actual sculpture would be raised by subscription, the customary way to fund statuary at the time.

In Paris, on Monday, March 6, 1854, Charlotte wrote in her diary: “This morning at eight o’clock, Auguste began the great work of the statue Rapp.” He brought in three trucks of clay, 1,500 pounds of iron, and an anvil. With his hired model, a strapping working-class man named Galali, Bartholdi began a monument twice his own size.

Bartholdi had chosen a somewhat awkward pose for his General Rapp. This defiant soldier, with proud boxy chin and thick wavy hair, held his stiff arm across his body at a diagonal. He clutched no sword. The empty hand extended outward, fingers stretched. Perhaps Bartholdi intended the arm to appear to be swinging as the figure walked, but the hand was crossed too far over the body to suggest a natural motion. Or perhaps Bartholdi meant Rapp’s pose to reflect a defensive protection of the torso, but the elbow was not bent as it would be if fending off the enemy.

Rapp’s statue was so large it skimmed just an inch below the atelier’s ceiling. Bartholdi clearly wished to make work that would intimidate even himself. This would be a theme throughout his life as a sculptor. As in a Greek myth, such hubris could at times lay him open to real danger. One day, Charlotte noted in her diary, Auguste tumbled from the scaffolding’s top and lay unconscious a whole hour at his statue’s feet. He lay on the floor like the tumbled craftsman, Daedalus, while his brother Charles and a friend applied leeches to try to revive him. When Auguste finally came to, he suffered bouts of amnesia.

In 1855, Napoléon III announced that “the work best capable of honoring or serving the state” would receive a prize of twenty thousand francs in a triennial awards competition. That same year was the great Exposition Universelle for which Napoléon’s government handpicked every jury member to choose the works displayed in the Salon. Bartholdi’s General Rapp was selected after much campaigning by his mother.

When the expo opened on May 15 at the Palais de l’Industrie, twenty-five countries displayed their wares and inventions. It was only the second world exhibition, the first having been held four years earlier in London. Napoléon commissioned the construction of vast new buildings to house the exhibits, including the banner-draped Palais.
Trophées d’armes,
urns, statuary, and sculptures of rearing horses decorated the interior. A throne for Emperor Napoléon III had been placed on a dais covered with crimson velvet.

At the top of the Palais de l’Industrie, at the grand entrance, towered
France Crowning Art and Industry,
composed by Élias Robert. The three female figures included two women—“Art” and “Industry”—seated right and left, clothed in stolas. Standing between them, arms outstretched to either side, loomed “France,” a twenty-one-foot woman crowned with a diadem with seven rays. Bartholdi kept a photograph of this Robert sculpture in his files. A woman that would come to Bartholdi’s mind years later would greatly resemble “France.”

Not even the enormous Palais could accommodate everything that Napoléon III’s government wished to exhibit. Two temporary buildings were added nearby. The art was exhibited at the Palais des Beaux-Arts. As it turned out, whether by design or accident, Bartholdi’s Rapp statue was too tall to be housed inside the exhibition space, so he was allowed to place it directly at the entrance. His statue’s prominent placement, required by its size, earned him the annoyance of his colleagues and the notice of the media and judges. He would learn that large works won attention.

His subject matter clearly pleased the government selectors: they had chosen his statue to be exhibited. In contrast, Gustave Courbet had resorted to building his own Pavilion of Realism, nearby, to exhibit more provocative works that had been excluded. The twenty-year-old Bartholdi did not provoke with his work, but he managed to earn his first public attention. “M. Auguste Bartholdy [
sic
] also gave full military energy to his remarkable statue of general Rapp,” reported one newspaper whose influential political editor hailed from the same rue des Marchands in Colmar. Charlotte responded to one reporter who praised her son by acknowledging publicity’s importance: “You, better than anyone, know that when you see talent, a young artist can not succeed without being known by the voice of journalists.”

Indeed, Charlotte worked tirelessly to draw attention to Auguste’s General Rapp. She petitioned the French journalist Auguste Nefftzer, a fellow Colmarian, to lend support to her young son’s endeavors. Nefftzer wrote a letter to the prominent French art critic Théophile Gautier to ask if he would write something about the statue while it was on display. Nefftzer even suggested the wording: “Exhibited a few days ago, on the Champs-Elysées, a statue in bronze of General Rapp. This statue is a beautiful figure and an original sculpture that is exhibited in the Salon because it will be inaugurated in Colmar on August 25. It is a credit to its author M. Bartholdy [
sic
].”

In his letter to Gautier, Nefftzer confided that “between us, the statue isn’t worth anything,” but admitted he had his own reasons for asking and would be happy if Gautier would run the lines as a personal favor. Gautier acceded to the request, mentioning the statue’s existence without praise or criticism, but those few words were enough to acknowledge Bartholdi as an artist.

Later, one of Bartholdi’s friends would mention the complaints the statue inspired behind the scenes: “In the Champ de Mars [in Colmar] stands a statue of General Rapp which has raised harsh criticism, I dare not say unfair, only we should not lose sight of the fact that the author, Mr. Auguste Bartholdi, a young Colmar sculptor, . . . started to model when he was preparing for his baccalauréat. But if, as the author and his best friends (and I flatter myself to be one) are forced to recognize that this work denotes a youthful inexperience that made it unworthy to decorate a public place, Mr. Bartholdi has been quick to take glowing revenge.”

Bartholdi managed a third-place medal at the Salon, which was enough to establish him as a sculptor worth following. His mother hoped to secure a Legion of Honor medal for him, to further boost him into the world of distinguished artists, but he did not share the same passion for campaigning at that moment. He felt the call of adventure.

2
Bartholdi Down the Black Nile

Just before the Salon’s closing on October 31, 1855, Bartholdi received a letter from Hippolyte Fortoul, minister of public instruction and culture. Bartholdi and the prominent painter Jean-Léon Gérôme had been given approval for a trip to study the antiquities of Egypt and Palestine. Bartholdi’s goal was to make “photographic reproduction of the principal monuments and the most remarkable types of the diverse races.”

The Near East had long been a place of fascination for the French. Napoléon had invaded Alexandria with hundreds of ships in 1798 to drive out the British and secure this passageway to India. He attempted a turbulent occupation of Egypt until 1801, when British and Turkish forces ousted his army, but his government would continue to exert influence on Egyptian affairs. He asked his ambassador to Egypt to identify the man likely to be the next pasha of Cairo and support him with all diligence, gambling that an early friendship could pay great dividends in international political loyalty. This French ambassador marked Muhammad Ali, an Albanian general drafted years before to fend off the French, as a man of ambition and drive.

By 1805, Muhammad Ali controlled Egypt and set out to transform and Europeanize Egyptian society. During his forty-three-year reign he was extremely friendly toward his French benefactors, keeping French as the court language and hiring French officers to train his military. Cairo could boast some of the finest French restaurants and theaters.

Napoléon had brought along some 160 French scientists and intellectuals on his Egyptian military excursions. They left behind their expertise and exported the inspiration of Egyptian marvels, including items actually boldly seized, such as the Rosetta Stone. From 1809 to 1829, these French experts published the wondrous
Description of Egypt,
which cataloged all that was then known of ancient Egyptian culture and its natural history. The Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion published his translation of the Rosetta Stone in 1824, rapidly opening Egypt’s ancient civilization to scholars. In 1851, Auguste Mariette, an agent of the Louvre, dug below the buried shoulders of the sphinx of Memphis and found its temples and catacombs.