Raphaël Glucksmann, a French politician of the country’s political left, has called for the United States to return the Statue of Liberty to France, on the basis that America no longer deserves to keep it. The Trump White House has pushed back in frank terms. A birthday gift for the hundredth anniversary of America’s Declaration of Independence, Lady Liberty underscored France’s friendship with the young nation, having shared its fight for freedom. But, while she embodies the values of ‘liberty, equality and brotherhood’, the origin of the copper-clad lady on Ellis Island isn’t French, it’s Egyptian. And if its artist had had his way, she would be greeting ships in Port Said on the Mediterranean, at the entrance of the Suez Canal.

On his journey up the Nile in the winter of 1855, French sculptor and painter Auguste Bartholdi (1834-1904), was moved by Egypt’s ancient monuments and towering statuary, ‘centuries old granite beings in their imperturbable majesty’. The young artist was apparently also impressed with real-life Egyptians he encountered. He dreamed of his own monolith, in the image of a full-figured country woman from Upper Egypt, draped in traditional garb. Ten years later, Bartholdi returned to Egypt with a plan to bring her to life.

In Alexandria he sought out the French vice-consul, Ferdinand de Lesseps, who won the concession to build the Suez Canal from his friend, the Khedive Said, in 1856. Egyptian leaders in antiquity and again in the Middle Ages considered cutting through the strip of land separating the Red and Mediterranean seas but never attempted it. When Napoleon came to Egypt in 1798 his engineers did a feasibility survey and wrongly concluded it was impossible. A Frenchman named Barthélemy-Prosper Enfantin determined otherwise, and now everyone was talking about the project that would redraw the maritime map of the world.

Bartholdi was no Michelangelo, but he had a gift for public relations, and he felt sure he could find favour with Enfantin and the new khedive, Paris-educated Ismail, who had replaced his uncle Said. To Bartholdi, the faces of ancient Egyptian kings and queens ‘seemed to disregard the present and to be fixed upon the unlimited future’. The Suez Canal belonged to such a future, of fast travel and mass transport. Thinking big, Bartholdi pitched his project as a statue to rival the Colossus of sun-god Helios that was said to have straddled the harbour at Rhodes, one of the wonders of the ancient world. Bartholdi’s colossus went one better; Egypt as a beautiful woman with light pouring from her forehead, showing humanity the way forward. He called his lady lighthouse ‘Progress’. Ismail was sympathetic to the idea, but was focused on the Canal opening ceremony, a costly extravaganza for royalty and bankers, and said he couldn’t afford it.

Disappointed but undaunted, Bartholdi gave it a rethink and hatched a plan for France to offer America a spectacular birthday present in the form of a woman holding a blazing torch. Renamed ‘Liberty, Enlightening the World’, Bartholdi spent the next few years raising funds for her manufacture in France. American supporters organised a site for the statue to stand on. The poem ‘The New Colossus’ (1883) by American poet Emma Lazarus  (‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free’) was written as part of a fundraising effort to build the statue’s pedestal.

Building the monolith itself required special engineering skills and vision, and Bartholdi secured the assistance of French architect Viollet-le-Duc (1814-79) and Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923), who had yet to create his tower. Bronze and stone were eliminated as materials; Liberty would be made of lighter, more malleable steel. A steel skeleton (weighing 125 tons) anchored to a central iron pylon was designed to allow for the thermal expansion and contraction of the 35-ton copper cladding. Lady Liberty’s dress needs a perfect fit to keep her upright without cracking. Designated a National Monument in 1924, the National Park Service entrusted with her care is now slated for heavy cutbacks under the Trump administration.

Inaugurated in 1886, 30 years after her conception, Bartholdi must have rejoiced to behold his Statue of Liberty. At 46 metres tall (nearly 93 metres with pedestal), she was only slightly less ‘imperturbable’ than her stony pharaonic forebears; in a high wind, she sways a few inches, as does her torch.

Bringing Liberty to life secured Bartholdi’s fame and legacy. In Paris he helped mount fundraising efforts, benefit concerts, exhibitions and a lottery while the statue was being built. He travelled frequently to America and produced a cast-iron fountain in Washington DC. He married a French woman in Rhode Island and made a brisk living selling statues, portraits and monuments. A creative, energetic entrepreneur, Bartholdi embodied the American dream. As much as he travelled, it seems he never returned to Egypt, the place where the story began.