In the center of the garden park.
Statue
A brass statue of Lafayette riding a horse mounted on a cement base; about 12 feet tall with inscriptions on front and back of the base.
The statue remembers the famous French General Lafayette who fought in the American Revolution.
Description:
Sculptor: Claude Goutin
1930 – 2018 French sculptor
On the very place where Lafayette took the decision to join the cause of American independence, at the Governor’s Palace in Metz, an equestrian statue by the American sculptor Paul Wayland Bartlett (a pupil of Frémiet) was inaugurated in 1920. This statue was torn down in World War II. A new equestrian statue by Messin Claude Goutin replaced the one in Metz in 2004. The Association of the Knights of Columbus sponsored this truly lively statue of the young Lafayette ‘to commemorate the fraternal participation of France to the foundation of the United States’. The snail on the pedestal may be a reference to the tortoise on the pedestal of the Lafayette statue in Hartford in the US.
The statue in Metz by Bartlett was a copy of the one inaugurated in Paris in a court of the Louvre in Paris in 1908. It was a gift from five million American school children, and therefore known as The Children’s Statue of Lafayette. The statue was later relocated on the right bank of the Seine, where it still stands today.
Source: https://equestrianstatue.org
The inscriptions on the base are inscribed in French.
Front side:
“DU PREMIER MOMENT
OU J’AI ENTENDU LE
NOM DE L’AMERIQUE JE
L’AI AIMEE, DES
L’INSTANT QUE J’AI SU
QU’ELLE COMBATTAIT
POUR SA LIBERTE, J’AI
BRULE DU DESIR DE
VERSAR MON SANG
POUR ELLE”
English Translation:
“FROM THE FIRST MOMENT
WHEN I HEARD THE
NAME OF AMERICA I
LOVED IT,
THE MOMENT THAT I KNEW
WHICH SHE WAS FIGHTING
FOR FREEDOM, I HAd
BURNING FROM THE DESIRE OF
SPILL MY BLOOD
FOR HER"
Rear Side:
C’EST D’ICI A METZ
QUE LA LAFAYETTE PARTIT
COMBATTRE POUR
L’INDEPENDENCE DES
ETATS UNIS D’AMERIQUE
8 aout 1775
English Translation:
FROM HERE IN METZ
LAFAYETTE DEPARTED
TO FIGHT FOR
THE INDEPENDENCE
OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA
8 August 1775
