Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia Bartholdi designed and built "Liberty Enlightening the World", which became known as the Statue of Liberty, and placed it in New York Harbor in the United States. Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia Egypt Carrying the Light to Asia, also known as Progress Carrying the Light to Asia or pedestal committee; was a plan for a colossal neoclassical sculpture. Designed in the late 1860s by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, a French sculptor, the project was to be a statue of a robed female figure bearing a torch at the entryway of the Suez Canal in Port Said, Egypt. Both the khedive
Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi of building some suitable memorial to show the fraternal feeling existing between the republics of the United States and France was suggested, and in 1874 the Union Franco-Americaine (Franco-American Union) was established by Edouard de Laboulaye. Bartholdi's hometown in Alsace had just passed into German control in the Franco-Prussian War. These troubles in his ancestral home of Alsace are purported to have further influenced Bartholdi's own great interest in independence, liberty, and self-determination. Bartholdi subsequently joined this group, among whose members were Laboulaye, Paul de Rémusat, William Waddington, Henri Martin, Ferdinand Marie de Lesseps, Jean-Baptiste Donatien de Vimeur, comte de