France gifted the Statue of Liberty to the United States. The monument, formally titled Liberty Enlightening the World, was presented to commemorate the alliance between the two countries during the American Revolution and to celebrate shared ideas about liberty.
The statue was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, with engineering assistance from Gustave Eiffel. Its copper sheets were assembled using the repoussé technique, while the internal framework supports the figure and its raised torch. The statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886, in New York Harbor.
The figure stands on Liberty Island and holds a tablet inscribed with the date July 4, 1776, written in Roman numerals. Emma Lazarus’s sonnet “The New Colossus,” including the famous line about welcoming the “tired” and “poor,” was added to the pedestal in 1903. The statue is sometimes mistaken for an American-designed gift, but its conception, construction, and presentation were fundamentally French.