A collection of scholarly works about individual liberty and free markets. A project of Liberty Fund, Inc.
This engraving from the magazine Le Monde illustré appeared
shortly after the inauguration of the monument in Mugron
on 23 April 1878 and accompanied a report of the event.
The well-known sculptor Gabriel-Vital Dubray (1813-1892)
had been commissioned to design and create the monument.
As the engraving above indicates, Dubray
created an elaborate monument with the classical figure
of "Fame" leaning
against the pedestal and writing with her pen the titles
of the three books for which Bastiat was best remembered
and for which he deserved to be famous: the work in
which he first introduced the French to the ideas on
free trade of Richard Cobden and the Anti-Corn Law
League Cobden
and the League (1845), his best selling collection
of witty and clever articles debunking the economic
myths of the protectionists Economic
Sophisms (1845, 1848), and his incomplete magnum opus on economic
theory Economic Harmonies (1850). In 1942 during the occupation
of France by the Nazis any statues containing bronze
were seized and broken up for their metal content.
This was the unfortunate fate of the Bastiat monument - the bust of Bastiat
and the figure of Fame were taken for scrap for war
matériel. The bust could be reconstituted after the
war because the original mold had survived, but the
figure of Fame was lost forever. It is both sad and
ironic that this would be the fate of Bastiat's monument
as Bastiat had dedicated himself to the cause of peace
and opposition to war as his writings and his participation
in the Peace Congresses of the late 1840s attest. [More] |
Last modified April 13, 2016