A call that could easily have gone unnoticed for the Statue of Liberty to be repatriated to France has generated a media swarm over the sculpture and sparked a war of words between a European Parliament member and the White House press secretary.
Raphaël Glucksmann, one of France’s 79 members of the European Parliament, called for Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty to be returned to its sender, citing President Trump’s allegiance to “tyrants” and gutting of scientific research institutions at a center-left convention on Sunday, March 16.
While it was a passing remark made at a French political event, the comment nonetheless found itself at White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s podium on Tuesday when a reporter asked her head-on whether the infamous gift would be returned.
So will the Statue of Liberty, which has sat in the New York Harbor since October 1886, be uprooted, dismantled, and shipped across the Atlantic back to France?
“Absolutely not,” Leavitt said. “My advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now, so they should be grateful to our great country.”
Responding to Leavitt’s jabs, Glucksmann posted a statement on X, in English, clarifying his calls for the “symbolic” repatriation of the statue.
“No one, of course, will come and steal the Statue of Liberty,” Glucksmann said. “The statue is yours, but what it embodies belongs to everyone. And if the free world no longer interests your government, then we will take up the torch, here in Europe.”
The statue, a fixture of the New York Harbor horizon, was conceived as a gift to commemorate the centennial of the Declaration of Independence and the abolition of slavery the year prior.
France dug into public funds to construct the statue and Americans fundraised to construct the foundational pedestal through benefit art exhibitions and auctions and a direct call for donations by Joseph Pulitzer in his newspaper, New York World.
The American-funded pedestal is marked by a 1903 bronze plaque inscribed with Emma Lazarus’s 1883 sonnet “The New Colossus,” which imagines the “mighty woman with a torch” declaring: “Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free … I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
However, Glucksmann argues, the United States has strayed from the values the statue’s inscription purports.
“We are counting on you,” Glucksmann wrote.