Dr. Lefebvre’s American Dream – The story of a French academic, his love for America and his plan for a post-Civil War gift to the country — in the shape of a giant statue.
April 4, 2014
Carol Harrison’s piece in the NY TImes features Édouard Laboulaye, the primary sponsor of the Statue of Liberty (he shepherded the statue from idea to construction). I appreciate her citing Enlightening the World as a source for her article.
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/04/01/dr-lefebvres-american-dream/?ref=opinion
From Harrison’s article:
“The survival of the Union at a great cost, including especially the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, spurred Laboulaye to imagine a monument commemorating French and American commitment to freedom. Famously, the Statue of Liberty was born at Laboulaye’s dining room table in an 1865 gathering. Among the guests was Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, a sculptor whose ambition to build a modern colossus became part of Laboulaye’s project to erect a monument to liberty. A monument built by French and American efforts would act as a reminder of the “sympathy” between the nations; it would celebrate the survival of American liberty and perhaps remind French subjects of the Emperor Napoleon III of the peril to their own.”
Yasmin Sabina Khan 
April 4, 2014 at 9:13 pm
Nice! Congrats. Bill
April 5, 2014 at 1:29 pm
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