Why a politician with an intriguing Jewish history says the U.S. should give back the State of Liberty
Raphaël Glucksmann’s call for the iconic statue’s return is more than just a political gibe
Should this statue be returned to France? Photo by IStock
Robert Zaretsky March 20, 2025
“Give me your tired, your poor,
Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free,The wretched refuse of your teeming shores
Send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me…
Better yet, as these waves of tsuris advance,
Why not just send me back to France?”
Have scholars uncovered an early draft or Emma Lazarus’ “The New Colossus,” the celebrated sonnet enshrined on a plaque on the base of the Statue of Liberty? If only. Instead, as the world is discovering, the raison d’être of the statue — gifted by France to America in 1886 to praise the preservation of the union and democracy in a nation recently rent by civil war — now risks becoming irrelevant.
This point was made, aptly enough, by a Frenchman earlier this week. In a speech to the burgeoning political movement, Place Publique, that he founded in 2018, Raphaël Glucksmann addressed recent events in America: “We say to those Americans who now side with tyrants and to those Americans who fire researchers who insist on the freedom of scientific study, give us back the Statue of Liberty. We gave it to you as a gift, but it seems you now scorn it. And so, she will find a home chez nous.”
Trump has become the gift that never stops giving to French political figures. He has catapulted other French politicians to global notoriety: In a speech he gave two weeks ago in the main chamber of the French Senate, the most sedate and serious of places, the centrist politician Claude Malhuret declared, in a quiet and measured tone, that Washington had become “Nero’s court, with an incendiary emperor, submissive courtiers and a buffoon on ketamine in charge of purging the civil service.” Within 48 hours, the speech, translated into English, was watched by millions of viewers.
So, too, with Glucksmann’s jibe about the Statue of Liberty. It caught fire on social platforms, plumes of smoke reaching as far as the White House. A Fox News reporter asked the press secretary, ex-Fox intern Karoline Leavitt, if the administration plans to return the statue. “Absolutely not,” Leavitt responded, “and my advice to that unnamed, low-level French politician would be to remind them that it’s only because of the United States of America that the French are not speaking German right now.”
With the pitiless cycling of news and the relentless withering of attention caused by the internet, this exchange hardly amounts to a hill of beans. But it is a revealing mound of beans, nevertheless, one that pays to sort and study. First, there is the biographical context. Raphaël Glucksmann is the son of the late French intellectual André Glucksmann. During the 1970s and 1980s, the father, crowned by his trademark mop of hair — more George Harrison than Paul McCartney — was one of the leaders of the nouveaux philosophes. As with his friend Bernard Henri, Glucksmann once flirted with communism and Maoism. Both soon embraced what could be called the “extremism of the center,” opposed to all ideological extremes. This helped Glucksmann to persuade the conservative Raymond Aron and Marxist Jean-Paul Sartre, two of his teachers who, once old friends who fell out over communism, to join one another in 1979 to call upon the French government to allow 100,000 Vietnamese boat people into France.
This leads to a second bean: the political values of Glucksmann fils. As both a thinker and actor in French politics, the son has gravitated to the same ideological center once occupied by the father. As leader of Place Publique and member of the European Parliament, Glucksmann has been a persistent and eloquent advocate for progressive causes, ranging from his insistence on the “devoir de sauver,” or duty to save immigrants trying to enter Europe, to meeting the existential threat of global warming by turning to green technology.
Crucially, Glucksmann also insists upon the shared affinities between Marine Le Pen’s far-right National Rally and Jean-Luc Mélenchon’s far-left Defiant France. Inevitably, these opposing extremes meet on certain subjects. There is, of course, the genetic predisposition to antisemitism baked into the National Rally, the rebranded successor to Jean-Marie Le Pen’s National Front. Yet there is a kind of antisemitic je ne sais pas quoi that hovers over Defiant France, which continues to refuse labeling Hamas as a “terrorist” organization. Equally unsettling are the attitudes held by Mélenchon and Le Pen towards Vladimir Putin. Mélenchon has persistently blamed NATO’s expansion into East Europe as the cause of the war, while Le Pen, long suspected of financial ties to Russian banks, has consistently minimized the danger this represents for Europe.
Despite his bone-deep distrust of Mélenchon, Glucksmann agreed to join the leftwing coalition, dubbed the “New Popular Front,” that prevented the National Rally from gaining a majority in last year’s legislative elections. But after that initial success, other parties soon came to share Glucksmann’s misgivings over Mélenchon, leading to the coalition’s eventual collapse. He has since announced his party’s alliance with the Socialists for the next round of elections in 2027, raising hopes that a revived left, unshackled from its own extremists, will defeat the extremists represented by Le Pen.
This brings us to one last bean, the one that reflects the deadly seriousness that underlies Glucksmann’s taunting demand that we return the Statue of Liberty to France. Entre nous, France has no need to ask. The statue is administered by the US Park Service, one of the agencies gutted by the Trump administration. As a result, the French could simply reclaim statue the French by landing on the island, dismantling its gift, packing it onto a French ship, and bolting back together in Paris.
But here is where it gets serious. While our new government might not return the Statue of Liberty, they have just returned a French scientist to France. This morning the French press revealed that, a week ago, a French researcher was refused entry at Bush Intercontinental Airport in Houston. Flying in for a space exploration conference, he was forced to fly back to France when airport authorities found emails that “express hatred towards Trump.” These same authorities concluded that the researcher’s personal opinions in these emails found on his computer could “be qualified as terrorism.”
It is, of course, impossible not to think of Glucksmann’s astonishment that the Trump administration is firing men and women engaged in scientific research. But it is also impossible not to think with astonishment that the beacon’s light held aloft by the “Mother of Exiles” rather than “glowing world-wide welcome,” now flickers and may well soon be extinguished.
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