Lady Liberty, the incredible gift from the French people to the American people.

To bring Lady Liberty into the world's imagination, it took an obsessive Alsatian, an iron engineer, and three hundred copper plates hammered by hand on Rue de Chazelles. To mark the 140th anniversary of the New York inauguration of the Statue of Liberty and the 250th anniversary of the American Declaration of Independence, the Musée d'Orsay recounts the dream, while the Musée des Arts et Métiers reveals its creation. This is the story of the dream of Auguste Bartholdi, an artist obsessed with the colossal.

Before becoming an icon, Liberty Enlightening the World was a proposed lighthouse for the Suez Canal, rejected in 1869 by the Khediv of Egypt. Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a young sculptor from Colmar who returned fascinated by the oriental colossi from his 1856 trip, joined forces with Édouard Laboulaye, a great republican and fervent defender of liberty, to offer a monument of great scale to the young American republic. The Musée d'Orsay, with the help of the Bartholdi Museum collection in Colmar, offers us a breathtaking glimpse into the construction process of the majestic Statue of Liberty.

To complement this journey into the world of Bartholdi and Eiffel, the Musée d'Orsay offers an immersive experience thanks to its virtual reality deployed across 700m2 on the museum's ground floor. Let yourself be guided through this 35-minute adventure, encountering the main characters of this story, to better understand what Lady Liberty brought to the French and American people.

Here we follow the genesis of the idea, the preparatory voyages, the role of Gustave Eiffel and that of the publisher Joseph Pulitzer who financed the pedestal through public subscription in the pages of the World, and the transatlantic crossing of 1885 aboard the Isère, a ship that has since sunk. The Alsatian sculptor loved the colossal, from the Lion of Belfort in 1880 to the equestrian Vercingetorix; the Musée d'Orsay reminds us that he was, before Rodin, the great French patriotic sculptor of the Third Republic.

MUSÉE D'ORSAY
From September 15, 2026 to January 31, 2027
Espl. Victor Giscard d'Estaing, 75007
Metro: Solférino (Line 12) - Tue. to Sun. 9:30 a.m. to 6 p.m.,
Thurs. until 9:45 p.m. Closed Mon.
Price: €16 - Reduced price: €13 Free for under 26s
VR Experience: €32 Reduced price: €16
Recommended for ages 13 and up