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