20 hours ago
The French sculptors building the new Statue of Liberty
At a miserable-looking rally for the centre-left Place Publique in mid-March, its co-president, MEP Raphaël Glucksmann, made international headlines calling for the Trump administration to return the Statue of Liberty, gifted by the French in 1886 to commemorate the Declaration of Independence: 'It was our gift to you. But apparently you despise her. So she will be happy here with us.' The predictably sensationalist headlines dissipated in a flurry of Republican outrage against 'the low-level French politician' as quickly as they had arrived. But Glucksmann's demand – sincere or not – caught the attention of a group of sculptors who, in their words, have 'taken up the dream of civilisation' to produce monumental civic sculpture.
Two days after the MEP's proclamation, Atelier Missor posted on X: 'Keep the Statue of Liberty; it's rightfully yours. But get ready for another one. A New Statue of Liberty, much bigger, made from titanium to withstand millions of years. We, the French people, are going to make it again!' It was accompanied by an AI-generated image of her future titanium partner Prometheus. So far, so American Golden Age, validated by a typically laconic reply from Elon Musk: 'Looks cool.' The brief online exchange was a public-relations coup for Missor – and decried as such by cynics. Surely no one believed that this hare-brained scheme could be feasibly implemented? Think again.
To understand the sincerity of Missor, one must return to where their ambitions started. 'I found the toppling of public statues intolerable,' its namesake founder Missor Movahed tells me at their studio on the outskirts of Meaux, 40 miles north-east of Paris. 'I did not understand what these people were doing or what they were saying. Would they rather these great men had never existed?' he says, referring to the convulsive, iconoclastic riots of 2020 – the respective beheadings and defacements of Columbus, Colston and Churchill. Movahed was 30 years old and had no prior sculptural training. He and his friends began discussing the postmodern cultural malaise on a YouTube channel from a disused garage in Nice, with the ambition of producing small figurative busts, at scale, of the luminaries to whose lives and writings they were turning: Nietzsche, Napoleon, Joan of Arc, Dostoevsky.
The son of a successful painter, Movahed grew up in Paris with neither plans nor qualification: 'For 12 years, I did nothing with my life: I led a life of a wastrel bohème. But being in Paris – the greatest work of art in the world – I felt a growing weight to produce something monumental… to create monuments that will stand on the landscape of humanity.' All simultaneously informed by and documented on YouTube – a kind of modern carnet – they constructed rubber moulds and later a working smelter for limited-edition bronzes fashioned by hand. 'There is no sculptor or foundry that produces classical civic sculpture in France to whom we could apprentice ourselves: all of them have closed, other than those we have on the internet.'
Don't mistake the lack of formal training, however, for a lack of rigour or thought: 'We sculpt the statues out of clay always questioning what one of the Greek philosophers would say if he were watching… [Only a few other] highly specialist sculptors are using the 1,000-year-old 'lost wax method'.' This process involves 1,300°C molten bronze being poured into plaster casts of wax models. Within six months, orders were in the hundreds; by their third year, they numbered more than 5,000, helped by the binge in late-night mail-ordering that came to characterise successive lockdowns. Online, Missor had captivated a receptive audience, one that was seeking a resurrection of their European cultural inheritance.
In August 2023, Missor received its first public commission: a €170,000 gilded bronze of Joan of Arc from the centre-right mayor of Nice, Christian Estrosi. The 15th-century soldier-saint is a figure fiercely contested in France: à gauche, a martyred, cross-dressing teenage farmer; to the right, a devout Catholic rebel who lifted the siege of Orléans. Delivered a year later, the nine-tonne, 4.5-metre high statue was unveiled in December at the inauguration of a new car park next to the Eglise Sainte-Jeanne d'Arc.
But there was a problem: the statue was found to have broken public procurement obligations and in January 2025 it was ordered that she should be removed. It sparked a huge backlash and in March this year, protestors arrived by dawn to pour a layer of asphalt around the base. Joan was going nowhere.
There is no sign of the impending threat of prosecution when I arrive at the atelier, a corrugated shed off the Parisian suburban line: a dozen workers in dungarees – a uniform they trace to the compagnons du devoir who built the French cathedrals – are methodically plastering a monumental classical face surrounded by scaffolding. Their troubles played out between the regional and national headlines, the atelier seldom gives interviews. For nearly three hours, we speak, stood between remnant prototypes and plaster models that are now the subject of public – and legal – controversy. 'All sculptures are public memories that last, until we topple them, and by not making them we are losing our memories,' Movahed tells me. 'There are many who are artistically revolted by what we do as a momentary reaction to contemporary art. But there is a morbidity to civic 'fine art' today because of the way it depresses those who have funded it – us, the people.'
He explains that titanium has never been used before for figurative sculpture. He views it as 'the frontier of both engineering and art – two things that must work together'. And for him the Franco-American alliance that spawned the Statue of Liberty was more than simply a historic fact: 'The founding myths of revolution that underpin the French and American republics represent an emancipation of the individual will and an unleashing of potential.' He talks with such passion that he forgets the sans-culottes tore down civic sculpture on an industrial scale.
'The Statue of Liberty represented the most beautiful thing a country can do: it was by the people, for the people. Prometheus will represent the possibilities of modern patronage: we have received hundreds of messages asking us to open crowdfunding.' Indeed, Movahed does not name the 'significant American backers' that have pledged support but cites Musk's Starbase as the intended location. A tiny bronze maquette of the rebel Titan – credited with shaping humans from clay – sits atop a pyramidal pedestal no taller than a hand that will 'chart the history of civilisation'. It is a world away from Boca Chica, Texas, and the task he illustrates with maddening conviction under a looming court order is beyond reason. 'We are called crazy, but our aim is simple: to let people dream as we have chosen to dream.'
