Libre......

Ingrid Betancourt was freed along with 3 Americans in Columbia yesterday. Betancourt was held hostage for 2321 days after being kidnapped while running for president in Columbia; she is a French citizen and honorary citizen of Paris. This photo with the days in captivity has been in front of the Hotel de Ville (City Hall),
and others are in prominent places in the city like the gates to the Jardin du Luxembourg. (Do we even know the names of the Americans who were hostages?)
Today, the Mayor of Paris, Bertrand Delanoe, held a press conference to celebrate her freedom, and stated that, "she is free, we can all be free." I went and listened.



Tomorrow is the 4th of July, Independence Day. But it is not Liberty Day, although we proclaim liberty in the Declaration of Independence as an inalienable right. We Americans cherish our individual independence which we often confuse with liberty. Bertrand Delanoe is correct: we can only be free when we are all free. And that inalienable right to liberty is God given to all.

And it pre-dates the State of New Hampshire's license plate....

The following is an Op-Ed piece that appeared in the New York Times today (I hope I have not broken any copy right laws by re-printing, but it has information that we as Americans should know....)

A Gift From France, to France

By EDWARD BERENSON
Published: July 3, 2008
ON a recent visit to the Statue of Liberty, my first since the sixth grade, I was struck by how many French people were at the site. Why more French than others from abroad? The answer may lie in the statue’s history. After all, it was conceived nearly 150 years ago almost as much for France as for the United States.

The idea for the monument stemmed from a French struggle for freedom that began in 1852, when Louis Napoleon Bonaparte, having overthrown France’s democratic republic, declared himself emperor. In the summer of 1865, after enduring 13 years of Napoleon III’s near-dictatorial rule, Édouard de Laboulaye, a historian, hosted a dinner for a small group of French liberals to celebrate the North’s victory in the American Civil War. To Laboulaye, the restoration of orderly liberty in the United States put his own government to shame.

Over brandy and cigars, he and his guests, who included Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi, the prominent sculptor, decided to organize a public campaign to commemorate American liberty with a grand gift to the United States. But the gift would double as an implicit critique of Napoleon III.

Bartholdi later envisioned a mammoth statue of the kind of ancient Roman goddess that since 1789 had symbolized liberty and the Republic. The French revolutionary tradition actually produced two goddesses: one sported the “liberty cap” and appeared in ardent motion, her breasts often bared, a fierce expression on her face. Her counterpart stood erect and still, her body modestly draped, her expression calm and serene.

Bartholdi chose the second, unthreatening icon to have his “Liberty Enlightening the World” depict the stability that French liberals saw in the United States and wanted for their own turbulent land.

By the time construction began in the mid-1870s, Napoleon III had been removed from power and his opponents had created a moderate republican regime. France had escaped the twin perils of revolution and reaction that had characterized its political life for nearly a century. Now, Bartholdi’s statue could stand for both the French and the American republics.

The statue took shape over the next 10 years in a huge workshop near the western edge of Paris. Gustave Eiffel, Bartholdi’s chief engineer, created its iron skeleton, allowing him to test certain techniques he would use for his great tower in 1889. Fully assembled, the 151-foot “Liberty” loomed high over the Paris rooftops. When it was dismantled for shipment, in 1885, Parisians would miss it. Several smaller versions were built, and two of them still stand in Paris.

Americans would come to regard the statue as a beacon for immigrants. The French have always related it to their complex struggle for liberty. On my visit, I passed a young French woman posing for a snapshot, her right arm raised as if she had become, for a moment, the goddess herself.

Edward Berenson, the director of the Institute of French Studies at New York University, is writing a book about the Statue of Liberty.

The Statue of Liberty in sculptor Bartholdi's atelier, rue de Chazelles (in the 17th just beyond Parc Monceau and NE of the Arc de Triomphe) in 1885.

As is self evident, I am a liberal Democrat, and every 4th of July I read the Declaration of Independence as the Boston Globe prints it on the Op-Ed page. It should be on the front page. I read it to remind myself how important freedom and liberty are --for all of us, including immigrants, and to remind myself that we can be better than we what we have become-- and that is being patriotic.
By the way, as French as the French are, there are no lapel pins.