Statue of Liberty of War; since 1933 it has been maintained by the National Park Service. Public access to the balcony around the torch has been barred for safety since 1916. According to the National Park Service, the idea for the Statue of Liberty was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time. The project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between de Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist, and Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in
Replicas of the Statue of Liberty This statue was given in 1889 to France by U.S. citizens living in Paris to celebrate the French Revolution three years after the main statue in New York was inaugurated. In 1937, the statue was turned from looking east to looking west straight to the direction of the New York's statue. The statue is near the Grenelle Bridge on the Île aux Cygnes, a man-made island in the Seine (). It is high and weighs 14 tons. Inaugurated on July 4, 1889, it looks southwest, downriver along the Seine. Its tablet bears two dates: "IV JUILLET 1776" (July 4, 1776: