“There is enough mystery in the facts as we know them, enough of conspiracy, coincidence, loose ends, dead ends, multiple interpretations. There is no need, he thinks, to invent the grand and masterful scheme, the plot that reaches flawlessly in a dozen directions.”
Don DeLillo[1]
Diana’s Flame
Princess Diana’s car left the rear entrance of Hotel Ritz on Place Vendome in Paris at around midnight on August 31, 1997. Shortly after, the car—also carrying Diana’s boyfriend, Dodi Fayed; a bodyguard; and a driver—having made its way into the tunnel under Place de l’Alma amid a swarm of paparazzi on motorcycles, hit a drainage grate at an estimated speed of 105 kilometers per hour before crashing into the thirteenth concrete pillar separating the opposing lanes. Despite many resuscitation attempts, Princess Diana was pronounced dead three-and-a-half hours later at the nearby Pitié-Salp?tri?re Hospital.
The unfortunate events of August 31, 1997, spawned many conspiracy theories: that the British Royal family wanted Diana dead because her new relationships were causing public embarrassment, or because she was pregnant—especially because the father was Muslim; that the car crash had been masterminded by Prince Philip; that the global military–industrial complex wanted her dead because of her public commitment to the fight against land mines; that it wasn’t just paparazzi chasing the car but MI6 agents who used bright flashes to disorientate the driver; that the driver himself was an agent; that the car had recently been stolen; that before crushing against the thirteenth concrete pillar the car hit a white Fiat Uno that was never identified; that CCTV cameras on the approach to the tunnel were turned off on purpose; that the police radio band was silent that night; that French investigators swapped the driver’s blood samples with those of a drunken suicide victim.
At the southwestern corner of Place de l’Alma, roughly above the very pillar hit by Diana’s car, stands a large sculpture of a golden flame mounted on a star-shaped black granite base. The latter is often covered with flowers and messages left by visitors mourning the Princess. It is no wonder that visitors believe they are laying flowers at a monument to Diana; after all, the sculpture resembles a giant Candle in the Wind. And yet, the monument precedes the Princess’s death by almost a decade. Titled Flamme de la Liberté, the sculpture is a full-size replica of the one crowning Lady Liberty’s torch in New York City. It was erected in 1989 by the International Herald Tribune on the centennial anniversary of its English-language daily newspaper published in Paris, and as a symbol of the lasting friendship uniting France and the USA—just like Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi’s original copper-clad statue donated by France to the United States in 1885. Over time, however, the involuntary monument to the Princess has also become the subject of a series of convoluted conspiracy theories.
Lady Liberty: A Tumultuous History
In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Liberty was a common allegorical symbol. Her figure is depicted on the Great Seal of France, appears half-clothed at the head of an armed mob in Eug?ne Delacroix’s blockbuster 1831 painting Liberty Leading the People, and stands proud atop the American Capitol. Lady Liberty’s New York incarnation reprises iconographic references including—but not limited to—the Egyptian goddess Isis, the Greek deity of the same name, and the Roman goddess Libertas, symbolizing with her resolute pose and gigantic accessories the freedom ensured by the republican values that inspired both the French and the American Revolutions, as well as the Union’s victory in the American Civil War and the subsequent abolition of slavery. Reaching a height of around 93 meters over New York’s harbor, Bartholdi’s Lady Liberty—or Liberty Enlightening the World, as the statue is officially titled—holds her torch aloft with one hand and a tablet inscribed with the date of the US Declaration of Independence in the other. Her left foot steps on a broken chain and shackle commemorating the national abolition of slavery.
The complex intercontinental logistics required for the statue’s completion, its transport and placing on the plinth took around 10 years. The right arm holding the torch—originally a lamp made of translucent amber glass—was realized with the technical assistance of Eug?ne Viollet-le-Duc and was first shipped to the US in 1876 to be displayed at the Philadelphia Centennial Exposition and then, between 1876 and 1882, in New York’s Madison Square Park, partly in an attempt to raise funds for the construction of the statue’s pedestal. Upon the arm’s return to France, Gustave Eiffel had taken over the overall structural engineering, proposing a groundbreaking, 200-metric-ton iron-truss tower as an inner support for the 80-metric-ton colossal copper figure. Once finished, Liberty was shipped to New York in crates and assembled on a US-American-designed pedestal, more or less as tall as the statue itself. The statue’s completion in 1886 was marked by New York’s first-ever ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland on October 28. Despite these grandiose celebrations, when her torch was lit, only a faint gleam was visible from Manhattan: “more like a glowworm than a beacon,” as historian Jonathan Harris has put it.[ii] Fittingly, the African American newspaper The Cleveland Gazette argued that Liberty’s torch should not be lit at all until the United States had become a free nation “in reality.” The paper called to “shove the Bartholdi statue, torch and all, into the ocean until the ‘liberty’ of this country is such as to make it possible for an inoffensive and industrious colored man to earn a respectable living for himself and family, without being ku-kluxed, perhaps murdered, his daughter and wife outraged, and his property destroyed. The idea of the ‘liberty’ of this country ‘enlightening the world,’ or even Patagonia, is ridiculous in the extreme.”[iii] Plus ?a change, plus c’est la m?me chose, as the French would say: The more things change, the more they’re bound to stay the same.
As migration from Europe to the United States intensified in the late nineteenthand early twentiethcenturies, Lady Liberty gained a new specific symbolism. Her orientation greeting ships entering the port of New York and her proximity to the immigrant processing station on Ellis Island turned her into the “mother of the exiles,” welcoming millions of Europeans escaping war, poverty, and oppression. Her meaning, like that of liberty itself, further continued to shift as geo-political circumstances changed. During the extensive restorations which took place between 1984 and 1986, the glass torch was replaced with a gold-leaf-covered replica and the original placed inside the Statue of Liberty Museum on Liberty Island. In 1986, during the celebrations marking the statue’s centenary and its reopening to the public, Ronald Regan’s dedication speech proclaimed: “We are the keepers of the flame of liberty. We hold it high for the world to see.”[iv] With these words, pronounced as the Cold War was decisively turning in the West’s favor, Regan unequivocally appointed Lady Liberty as an ambassador for America’s new imperialist ambitions.
One of Many Flames
At this count, we have encountered three flames: the original, its replacement in Liberty’s hand, and the replica of Place de l’Alma. Yet, this is just a fraction of Liberty’s many multiplications; Bartholdi’s statue has been reproduced industriously. Beside Diana’s flame, Paris holds at least four versions of the full statue: the original one-quarter scale model used for the realization of the statue stands now on a plinth overlooking the Seine from ?le aux Cygnes; Bartholdi’s own one-sixteenth scale plaster model is held at the Musée des Arts et Métiers; a bronze copy realized by Bartholdi himself for the 1900 Paris Exhibition was moved from the Jardin du Luxembourg to the entrance of the Musée d’Orsay in 2012; since then, a new copy of the copy has replaced the one removed from the Jardin. In New York, the Metropolitan Museum of Art holds one of many replicas sold in the 1880s to finance the realization of the actual statue; the Brooklyn Museum of Art also holds a nine-meter copy, which once stood atop the Liberty Warehouse on 64th Street; in 2021, one of 12 contemporary replicas of Bartholdi’s original model was shipped from the Musée des Arts et Métiers in Paris to Ellis Island in occasion of Independence Day—it now resides at the French ambassador’s residence in Washington DC; another one is displayed in front of 667 Madison Avenue in Manhattan. The list continues: A notorious half-size copy stands in front of the New York-New York Hotel & Casino in Las Vegas; further copies can be found across the US in Webster, Massachusetts; Schenectady, New York; Mackinac Island, Michigan; New Castle and Ellwood City, Pennsylvania; Leavittsburg and Sunbury, Ohio; Duluth, Minnesota; Madison and Neenah, Wisconsin; Fargo, North Dakota; Sioux Falls, South Dakota; Vestavia Hills, Alabama; Forney and San Antonio, Texas; Tahlequah, Oklahoma; Layton, Utah; Milwaukie and Burns, Oregon; West Seattle and Everett, Washington; San Marcos, California (holding the Bible); and Memphis, Tennessee (holding the cross and the ten commandments). In 1950, approximately two hundred 2.5-meter stamped-copper replicas were distributed by the Boy Scouts of America throughout their local council camps to celebrate the organization’s fortieth anniversary. Beside these, other notable copies around the world can be found in Colmar, Bartholdi’s hometown in Alsace; Bordeaux, where another original Bartholdi copy had been melted by the Nazis during the occupation of France and was erected again in the year 2000; Bangu, near Rio de Janeiro, where a nickel version of the statue was sent to commemorate Brazil’s independence; in the Norwegian village of Visnes, where the copper used for the original statue was once mined; on top of the Huanghuagang Mausoleum in Guangzhou, where it commemorates seventy-two martyrs of the 1911 Second Guangzhou Uprising against the Qing Dynasty; Cenicero, Spain, where it was originally erected in 1897 to honor local partisans who fought in the First Carlist War in the 1830s, then removed by Franco in 1936, and finally restored in 1976; Cadaqués, Spain, where an uncanny copy signed by Salvador Dal? holds both arms up on top of the local tourist office; Barcelona, at the entrance of the Rossend Ar?s Public Library “specialized in freemasonry, labour movement, federal republicanism, anarchism, and the Sherlock Holmes universe”[v]; Leicester, England, in a roundabout, where it landed after being removed from the roof of the Liberty Shoes factory, demolished in 2003; Barentin, Normandy, where a polyester copy realized in 1969 for the set of Gérard Oury’s film Le Cerveau also landed on a roundabout; Nice, on Quai des États-Unis; Pristina, on the roof of the Hotel Victory; in front of two military bases, namely RAF Lakenheath, England, and Chaumont, France; Saint-Cyr-sur-Mer, Poitiers, and Lunel, all in France; and then Buenos Aires, Argentina; Genting Highlands, Malaysia; Lima, Peru; Maceió, Brazil; Osaka, Japan; Lahore, Pakistan … Countless more copies are found across Brazil, placed in front of virtually every Havan megastore. A three-meter copy of the statue stood in Hanoi from 1887 until 1945, when it was toppled after the French colonists were overthrown.
These globalized, multiplied, atomized copies of Lady Liberty are a strange cast of characters. They each tell a different story of imperialism, war, competing ideologies, allegiances, alliances, and diplomacy. They also show how the specific symbolic intent of the original is altered by context, purpose, scale, and material, with each new reproduction taking on its own, and often unsettling, meaning. What is ostensibly the same object becomes at times patriotic, at others ironic, at some commercial, still at others religious, heroic, monumental, pathetic, a joke, a landmark, an advertisement, or pure entertainment. The narratives for which it has become the vessel are multiple and often contradictory.
The proliferation of Lady Liberty’s copies also reveals the complexities of how contemporary architecture constructs meaning: Where is it held if it is not in the object itself? What is solidity when symbolism becomes so slippery? What does it indicate for a physical object when its meaning is produced outside of it through networks of association and the different contexts within which it is sited? Can universal symbolism survive in a culture where these networks constantly shift, where connections flicker, where nodes emerge or fade away? Or where networks of culture and meaning are still shaped by localized forms of culture, knowledge, and experience? Does the object act simply as a lightning conductor? A medium that blows in the wind and channels flows of meaning?
Monuments After Conspiracy
Back to Paris. The Flamme de la Liberté on Place de l’Alma is the fragment of a monument that reminds us of the original torch and of the various meanings it has soaked up over time. We know that the intention of this particular flame was to celebrate the Herald Tribune and the Franco–American friendship, which the newspaper’s presence in the French capital exemplifies. The flame also perhaps hints at the light of truth once associated with the press. We know too, from the wilting flowers and offerings left on its pedestal, that its popular reading is that of a monument to Princess Diana, a meaning accidentally bolstered by Elton John’s lyrics. Conspiracy theorists, however, have yet another reading of the monument: They think the torch was placed as a statement of intent prior to August 31, 1997, signaling an Illuminati plot to assassinate Princess Diana.
Thanks to forums and chatrooms on the then newly publicly accessible World Wide Web, the torch of Place de l’Alma would become a portal into increasingly byzantine narratives: some noted a matching flaming torch on her tombstone in Althorp Estate and claimed that they both refer to the torch of Prometheus, who, in esoteric literature, is often referred to as another personification of Lucifer, as well as the male counterpart—and sometimes a lover of—the moon goddess … Diana. They also found esoteric symbolism in the Parisian infrastructure, claiming that Diana’s place of death below Place de l’Alma is no coincidence, which they allege is a site where witches, Grand Masters and sorcerers of Freemasonry performed their sacrificial rituals. They also claimed that Place de l’Alma had been the site of a Merovingian pagan temple; that Merovech, founder of the Merovingian dynasty, was a follower of the pagan cult of Diana; that the British Royal family are imposters; that the House of Windsor is a fraud; that all true European royalty is descended from the Merovingians, which is to say, descendants of Jesus Christ (see The Da Vinci Code); that Diana’s lineage goes back to the House of Stewart, one of true royal blood. According to some of these theories, Diana’s murder had been planned for a long time, likely since her birth, and the flame of Place de l’Alma had been placed there after a supposed visit by Fayed to Balmoral Castle, where the death of the Princess was plotted together with then-Prime Minister Tony Blair and the Royal family, who are in fact lizards from outer space who moved to planet Earth 6,000 years ago when they began mixing with Earth’s human population. The spiral continues and, at every new spin, the monument gains new meanings both intentional and accidental. Associations pile up and the monument’s meanings keep shifting into new incoherent contradictory narratives signifying both everything and nothing.
Epilog
There was once a lineage, even if esoteric, to the language and symbolism of monumentality, from the obelisks of ancient Egypt—like the one standing in Place de la Concorde, only a few hundred meters away from Place de l’Alma—and the iconography of classical architecture to neoclassical statuary like Lady Liberty. Western art and architecture have been structured, categorized, and ordered by means of clear significances attached to objects that are used to communicate specific tropes, such as victory or death. The multiple meanings of Lady Liberty emerge from this tradition, and yet, like in the case of Diana’s flame, they find themselves lost in an era of instant global communications mediated through irreconcilable data milieus, memes, and information warfare. Perhaps we—that is to say, us, art-historically inclined architects—see this flame in its post-truth, endlessly twisting and tangled significance, just like the hero, played by Charlton Heston, at the end of Franklin J. Schaffner’s 1968 movie Planet of the Apes. As he comes across the rusty head of Lady Liberty lying on a beach far in the future, he shouts: “You blew it up! Ah, damn you! God damn you all to hell!” Heston, representing morality and order, knows all too well what the statue’s ruined figure stands for: His rage emerges from the gap between what he sees (what is) and what he knows (what should be); the gap between Liberty as a promise and Liberty as a ruin, a gap that emerges in the destruction of meaning. While most likely ignorant of Liberty’s complex iconographical sprawl, it takes only one look for Heston—and for the audience—to recognize what the stranded figure stand for: the literal collapse of human society.
For our strange times, we find that our monuments are in an immaculate state of preservation, while their original meanings lie in ruins around us.
[1] Don DeLillo, Libra (1988; reprint New York: Penguin Books, 2006).
[ii] Jonathan Harris, A Statue for America: The First 100 Years of the Statue of Liberty (New York City: Four Winds Press, 1985), 133-34.
[iii] “Postponing Bartholdi’s Statue Until There Is Liberty for Colored as Well,” The Cleveland Gazette, November 27, 1886.
[iv] Ronald Reagan, “Remarks on the Lighting of the Torch of the Statue of Liberty in New York, New York”, Ronald Reagan Presidential Library, July 3, 1986, accessed January 9, 2025, www.reaganlibrary.gov/archives/speech/remarks-lighting-torch-statue-liberty-new-york-new-york#:~:text=We%20hold%20it%20high%20tonight,lighting%20of%20Miss%20Liberty’s%20torch.
[v] See the homepage of The Ar?s Public Library, accessed January 9, 2025, bpa.es/en/the-arus-public-library/.
First published in Arch+ , August 2025