In a ceremony held in Paris on July 4, 1884, the completed
Statue of Liberty was formally presented to the United
States ambassador as a commemoration of the friendship
between France and the U.S.

The idea for the statue was born in 1865, when the French
historian and abolitionist Édouard de Laboulaye proposed
a monument to commemorate the upcoming centennial of
U.S. independence (1876), the perseverance of American
democracy and the liberation of the nation’s slaves.

By 1870, sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi had come up
with sketches of a giant figure of a robed woman holding
a torch—possibly based on a statue he had previously
proposed for the opening of the Suez Canal.