Editing Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi (section)

=== The war and Statue of Liberty ===
[[File:Bartholdi's Statue of Liberty.png|thumb|Bartholdi sculpting with a miniature of ''Liberty Enlightening the World'', now known as the [[Statue of Liberty]], to his left]]
Bartholdi served in the [[Franco-Prussian War]] of 1870 as a squadron leader of the National Guard, and as a [[liaison officer]] to Italian General [[Giuseppe Garibaldi]], representing the French government and the [[Army of the Vosges]].{{citation needed|date=August 2016}} As an officer, he took part in the defense of Colmar from Germany. Distraught over his region's defeat, over the following years he constructed a number of monuments celebrating French heroism in the defense against Germany. Among these projects was the ''[[Lion of Belfort]]'', which he started working on in 1871, not finishing the massive sandstone statue until 1880.<ref name="Bartholdi_NGA"/>

In 1871, he made his first trip to the United States, where he pitched the idea of a massive statue gifted from the French to the Americans in honor of the centennial of American independence. The idea, which had first been broached to him in 1865 by his friend [[Édouard René de Laboulaye]], resulted in the [[Statue of Liberty]] in [[New York Harbor]].<ref name="Bartholdi_NGA"/> After years of work and fundraising, the statue was inaugurated in 1886.<ref name="Bartholdi_NGA"/> During this period, Bartholdi also sculpted monuments for other American cities, such as the [[Bartholdi Fountain]] in [[Washington, D.C.]], completed in 1878.<ref name="Bartholdi_NGA"/>