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Hello. Quote, give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, unquote. With these words inscribed inside the pedestal, the Statue of Liberty has welcomed immigrants to America since 1903.

But the Statue itself is older than that, and with another meaning, and is in itself an immigrant. Born and raised in Paris, it was shipped across the Atlantic in 214 separate crates, a present to the American people from the French.

The monumental woman is a token of transatlantic friendship forged in a fire of twin revolutions, finessed by thinkers like Alexis de Tocqueville, and expressed in the shared language of Liberty.

But why was this colossal statue built? Who built it? And what did Liberty mean to the Frenchmen who created her and the Americans who received her?

Good to discuss the Statue of Liberty, a Robert Gilday, Professor of Modern History at Oxford University, Kathleen Burke, Professor of Modern Contemporary History at University College London, and John Keane, Professor of Politics at the University of Westminster at Robert Gilday.

The Statue of Liberty, as I understand, it was conceived at a dinner in Paris in 1865 by a man called Edouard Laboulet. Can you tell us what he wanted to do and why he wanted to build this enormous statue?

Yes, well, Edouard Laboulet was Professor of Comparative Law in Paris, and he was one of an endangered species, really, a French liberal of the 19th century.

He was extremely frustrated about the way in which French revolutions, whether the revolution of 1789 or 1848, had failed to found free institutions that they had kind of plunged either into sort of anarchy and terror,

they had developed into the dictatorship of Napoleon I and Napoleon III, who was around at the time of this dinner.

And he said in 1866 that our political education, talking the French, our political education has to begin again, and he looked across the Atlantic, and he saw what he called a wise and well-ordered republic, a republic that was based on hard work, on peace, a republic that the French had brought into being,

and which now could help the French with their way forward. And the moment is important because in the 1860s and 70s, when this plan was conceived, first of all, the Americans were emerging from the Civil War.

And Laboulet had very much taken the side of the Unionists and the Civil War. He saw that this was a war for liberty and for union. He told the French, he said that the fight that's going on in America is for our cause, the cause of liberty.

He wanted the French to support the Union against a succession and slavery. And it was also a moment of crisis for France because in 1870 France was defeated by Germany and the French Oppression War.

It lost the large chunk of its territory, Alsace Lorraine, and it was plunged into revolution the Paris Commune. But the good thing was that this gave the French the opportunity of recreating their political order because the Second Empire fell.

The Second Empire fell and Europe public was declared and Laboulet was instrumental in forging a new constitution which was very much on the American model, with a president, a popular elective, a popular elected assembly, and a senate holding the balance between the two and guarding liberty.

And that was the background in which this statue was conceived. It took 20 years from conceiving the statue to a thing actually appearing. And it is, in a sense, a tribute to the recovery of liberty and union both in France and in America.

Was it nippantuck whether Laboulet could get his ideas through? Was it still possible that France would revert to an Napoleonic monarchy?

Well, after the defeat of the Second Empire in 1870, the Republic was founded with the France against Prussia.

Well, I think the Empire was finished. I mean, there were, after 1870, there was a Bonaparteist lobby which wanted to bring back the Empire in some form.

The main threat actually in 1870, the early 1870s, was from the Royalists. Because if you look at the French history, it tends to go Republic Empire monarchy.

So after the end of the Empire, the monarchy was very much on the cards. And there was an attempt at Monarchy's restoration which failed. So the Republic is there, but it took them about five years to get a constitution together.

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