In late August of 1871, the Franco-Prussian War, which had pitted France bloodily against Germany, had recently ended. During the new peacetime, New York’s French residents determined to tie in an expression of gratitude for the city’s acts of fraternity during the recent conflict with their upcoming birthday commemoration for the Marquis de Lafayette.
“As soon as I heard of the Declaration of Independence, my heart was enrolled in the cause,” the 18th-century French aristocrat had written in his memoirs. Lafayette’s cross-Atlantic mission to offer France’s aid to Gen. George Washington’s Continental Army - in the throes of the American Revolution - was now the stuff of legend. So a local organization - the Cercle Français de l’Harmonie, or French Fellowship Society - commissioned a statue to honor the man who was venerated by French and United States citizens alike. Indeed, the Marquis' name even gave itself to a major road in upper Manhattan: Lafayette Boulevard (now a continuation of Riverside Drive).
Lafayette’s esteem was not lost on Frederick Auguste Bartholdi, “a distinguished Paris sculptor,” whose Statue of Liberty would rise years later in the city’s harbor, and thrust him into celebrity, and whose later statue of Lafayette et Washington would be erected in Paris and Harlem. Inspired by his predecessor’s first-hand accounts, Bartholdi set out to depict Lafayette in his twentieth year - nearly his age when he landed in South Carolina in 1777 - standing upon the prow of a ship, as if disembarking upon America’s shores. Or perhaps in this case, on Central Park’s newly laid-out greensward.
Lafayette Intended for Central Park
Bartholdi finished Lafayette’s seven-foot-tall likeness four years later, and was paid “one hundred and fifty thousand francs for his work.” Mr. A. Salmon, president of the Cercle Français, paid for the statue’s cross-Atlantic transport out of his own pocket.
Appropriately, on Wednesday, July 14, 1875, (Bastille Day, France’s most important national holiday) the Amérique from Havre made port at New York. “The statue of Lafayette…arrived,” the Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported, “and will be set up in the Central Park.”
A few weeks later, a select group of New Yorkers previewed the statue. The figure was described as “poised in a graceful position, with the left hand extended and the right hand thrown across the breast and grasping his sword at the hilt. The weight of the body rests upon the left foot, and a mass of drapery which falls from the arm adds greatly to its dignity and strength.”
“There is no doubt,” the Brooklyn Eagle opined, “that this statue when unvailed [sic] to the general public will prove to be one of the most attractive works in the Central Park.” Indeed by early August of 1875, enthusiasm for the statue’s Central Park unveiling led its proponents to request the Park Commissioners to approve a parade for the ceremony by the Fifty-fifth Regiment, originally a French command known as the “Lafayette Guard.” But the proposed fanfare was putting the cart well before the horse.
A New Site Chosen
By May of 1876, the placement of Lafayette’s monument in Central Park had still not been decided on, nor even officially addressed. A committee of the city’s French residents pledged to provide the pedestal as it persisted in “asking that a site be designated for the erection of the statue.” But surely to be framed by the renowned park would have elevated the monument's prestige higher than anything on which it was mounted.
Despite the selective preview and media coverage of the statue the previous year, Parks Commissioners moved for a reevaluation “as regards its merits as a work of art.” A committee was assigned “consisting of the Presidents of the National Academy of Design, the Metropolitan Museum of Art and the New York Chapter of the American Institute of Architects.” The Commissioners also determined “that the Landscape Architect [Frederick Law Olmsted] be directed to report a suitable site.”
But a few weeks later the committee of French residents revised its request altogether for the Lafayette statue’s erection. It now asked “that a site for said statue be designated at the south end of Union Square, in place of in the Central Park.” If the committee’s change of heart seemed baffling, the Parks Commissioners refrained from commenting—at least in the official minutes—but tabled the new request until their next meeting.
On July 26th, the Commissioners granted the Lafayette statue its new location. They arranged “to make changes in the walks in that portion of Union Square” as were necessary and ordered that the foundation for the pedestal be prepared. By early August, New Yorkers were reading of the inauguration of the Lafayette statue to take place at Union Square on the 6th of September.” It would be the 119th anniversary of Lafayette’s birth.
Unveiling at Union Square
Newspapers made much of this gift from the French Government to the American people. Why the years-long lobby to place Lafayette in the city’s most famous park was so suddenly abandoned remains unclear. One might speculate that the Cercle Français deferred to the lower Manhattan vicinity of the Academy of Music - on East 14th Street, near Union Square - where its annual bal masqué (masked ball) was one of late 19th-century New York's most anticipated social events. Whatever the reason, the change of venue did not diminish the significance of the statue’s reception in Union Square.
“Never before, we believe, has one great nation made a similar gift to another,” a pundit noted in the New York Tribune, impressed with Lafayette’s distinction of having “so naturalized himself in the hearts and memories of a foreign people that they have set him, irrevocably, in the ranks of their own heroes.”
Sources:
- New York Times, “Military Gossip,” August 8, 1875.
- Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 16, August 23, 1875; August 5, September 2, 1876.
- New York Tribune, September 6, 1876.
- Various Minutes of Proceedings of the Board of Commissioners of the Department of Public Parks, 1875 – 1876.
Eric K. Washington - Eric K. Washington is the author of Manhattanville: Old Heart of West Harlem and contributed to the recent MTA-licensed guide book, New ...
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