Washington (AFP)
Some 135 years after the arrival of her big sister in New York, a statue of Liberty in a scale model was installed in Washington as a testimony of Franco-American friendship, at the end of a journey surrounded by multiple precautions from Paris. .
The approximately 3-meter-high statue was to be inaugurated on Wednesday afternoon by French Foreign Minister Jean-Yves Le Drian, accompanied by his American counterpart Antony Blinken.
The bronze statue now sits in the garden of the residence of the French Ambassador to the United States, after a transit that saw it pass not far from Liberty Island, south of Manhattan, where the monumental work is erected. "Liberty Enlightening the World".
"The little sister has arrived," said Philippe Etienne, the French ambassador to Washington, said.
# photo1
"She spent a week in New York, for the American National Day - Independence Day - she was on Ellis Island, she was looking at her big sister. And now here she is for July 14," he said. added.
On loan from the National Conservatory of Arts and Crafts (CNAM) and cast on the same mold as that used by sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, the statue traveled in a specially designed Plexiglas sarcophagus, strapped in a container transported by the French shipowner CMA-CGM.
© 2021 AFP