The town of Izon, near Bordeaux, is rebuilding the Statue of Liberty that once stood in its main square, 100 years after it was first donated by a local man who emigrated to the United States – and with it, restoring a sense of pride.
The town of Izon sits halfway between Bordeaux and Libourne – a string of family homes along a 4-kilometre stretch of the D242 departmental road, with no real centre.
During the 1980s and ’90s, the town’s population doubled to around 6,000, which is where it stands today, as people working in the nearby cities moved in.
But with this rapid growth and the town’s new status as a commuter hub, Izon lost some of its local character.
“We are interested in creating more ties within the community, to avoid this becoming a city where you just sleep, leave for work in the morning, come home in the evening and stay at home,” explains Sophie Carrère, the newly elected assistant mayor in charge of culture.
“It’s a very residential town, with maybe a bit less of a collective mindset.”
Now a new project linked to local history is aiming to restore the town’s civic pride.
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‘A crazy idea’
In 1926, a Statue of Liberty was donated to Izon by a local man named Rey Jeanton, who left for the United States in the 1890s and made a fortune in farming and real estate in California.
He returned to Izon to retire and decided to donate a statue to commemorate his success in his adopted country.
The statue stood in a small plaza across from the town church for more than a decade, until it was destroyed during World War II, when the Nazis occupied Izon and the surrounding areas.
After that, it was forgotten.
“Nothing remains where the statue was, just parking spots,” says André Veyssiere, a local councillor.
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The idea to rebuild it came during a project in which the town hung posters of old postcards in the locations the photos had been taken.
Virginie Vidorreta, a former town councillor, was involved in choosing the images and putting them up and she noticed the statue.
When she asked the mayor what he knew about it, he proposed rebuilding it.
“I said yes! It was a crazy idea,” she says. “That started the investigation – the quest to find out the details about the statue.”
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Differences from original
Vidoretta spent months digging into Jeanton’s life and legacy – and the statue itself, which it turned out was not a reproduction of the original Statue of Liberty by Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi.
When she contacted the Grand Palais museum, which holds moulds of France’s sculptures and monuments, including a reproduction of the Statue of Liberty – of which there are around 35 across France – she was told it was possible to order one, but that the Izon statue was not the same.
Looking closer at the few images of the statue that remain from when it stood in the town, Vidoretta found that, indeed, Izon’s Lady Liberty had her left hand on her heart, instead of holding the constitution.
There were other differences too: her hands were bigger, her crown was different, and instead of holding a flame aloft, she held a ball that had probably been lit up.
Vidoretta managed to identify the sculptor as someone named Toussaint, but could find no other trace of the statue’s origins, no original plans or moulds.
Izon ended up commissioning a foundry in Bordeaux to scan a reproduction there and digitally modify it to match the archival images, in order to create a mould to cast the statue.
Search for identity
The story passed down among locals is that the Nazis stationed in Izon tore down the statue one drunken evening and melted it down for munitions.
“I am not sure that it was the Germans who destroyed it,” says Vidorreta. “The French state was also melting down statues. In 1941 they melted down the one in Bordeaux, so why would the one in Izon have escaped the same fate?”
She adds: “There was a lot that went unsaid about the Second World War.”
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Vidorreta has worked to piece together what she can about the statue and about Jeanton, who did not leave behind letters or diaries, hoping to rebuild the town’s identity alongside the story, and the statue.
“Perhaps there’s an identity tied to the notion of freedom,” says Carrère. “Maybe Rey Jeanton intended for us to become its bearers, to pass it on to future generations as well.”
Izon has launched a crowdfunding campaign that has raised almost €15,000 of the €100,000 needed to reinstall the statue.
It will be inaugurated on 14 July this year, France’s national holiday, 100 years after it was donated by Jeanton.
Amateur historians
Vidorreta also hopes the campaign will bring forward people with information about Jeanton, who she says she has become fascinated with.
“He must have been impressive, to leave at 40 years old, not as a young 20-year-old, to start a new life,” she says.
The process of researching the statue and Jeanton’s life has turned this primary school teacher into something of an amateur historian – and inspired her to turn her pupils into amateur sleuths too.
“I developed a programme with exercises on how to do research, just like we did,” she says. “The students look at how to read a death or birth certificate, how to find newspaper archives.”
For her, Jeanton’s life and his statue are a quest that keeps on giving: “It’s like a story out of a novel.”
For more on Izon and its Statue of Liberty, listen to the Spotlight on France podcast here.
