The Lion of Belfort, completed by Frédéric-Auguste…
1880 CE
This is generally regarded as the best of a number of patriotic sculptures by Bartholdi that have been inspired by the French defeat in the Franco-German War of 1870-71.
Bartholdi, now forty-four, continues to work on his monument to the Franco-American alliance of 1778 (which, as the Statue of Liberty, will become his best-known work), but the Lion of Belfort is his masterpiece.
The blocks it is made from had been individually sculpted then moved under Belfort castle to be assembled.
The colossal work, twenty-two meters long and eleven meters high, dominates the local landscape.
The lion symbolizes the heroic French resistance during the Siege of Belfort, a one hundred and three-day Prussian assault (from December 1870 to February 1871).
The city had been protected from forty thousand Prussians by merely seventeen thousand men (only thirty-five hundred were from the military) led by Colonel Denfert-Rochereau
Instead of facing Prussia to the east as had been intended, it is turned the other way because of German protests.
Images
People standing in front of the sculpture, showing its enormous size.
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West Europe
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