LADY LIBERTÉ — HOW PARIS BUILT AN ICON

The Musée des Arts et Métiers describes Lady Liberté as a temporary immersive exhibition devoted to the construction of the Statue of Liberty. Its official event page gives the run as 22 September 2026 to 1 August 2027.

That makes this more than a one-week opening event. It is a long exhibition window, but the timing still matters for visitors arriving in Paris this September: the doors open only a few days after the European Heritage Days weekend, placing another major culture option into the autumn calendar.

The museum’s emphasis is unusually practical. Rather than treating the statue mainly as a political symbol or as a distant landmark, the exhibition follows the problem of how an enormous copper figure was conceived, enlarged, shaped and assembled with nineteenth-century techniques.

The museum says the statue’s history took shape in late-nineteenth-century Paris, in the workshops used by sculptor Auguste Bartholdi and the metalworking firm associated with Gaget and Gauthier. Before the finished monument stood in New York Harbor, its scale and surface had to be solved in Paris by sculptors, model-makers, metalworkers, carpenters and engineers.

That French workshop story is the exhibition’s central hook. The Statue of Liberty is so strongly associated with New York that it is easy to forget the amount of Paris-based design and fabrication behind it. The museum frames the project as a feat of industrial, human and scientific ingenuity as much as a famous work of monumental sculpture.

For travellers, that gives the visit a useful Paris connection rather than making it an American-history exhibition dropped into a French museum. You are seeing the city’s own role in producing the monument, inside a museum devoted to technologies, inventions and working objects.

The museum and RATP both describe an immersive route using video projections, 3D devices, real sets and sensory elements. The aim is to put visitors inside the construction process rather than simply line up documents in chronological order.

RATP’s current exhibition guide says the display includes plaster models, early wooden templates and pieces specially brought out of the museum’s reserves. Those objects matter because the Statue of Liberty had to be translated from a sculptor’s model into a monument on a radically larger scale. Templates and models show the intermediate physical work that sits between an artistic idea and a giant finished surface.

The museum’s own presentation says the route highlights the industrial, scientific and human dimensions of the job. That makes the exhibition potentially useful for families and general visitors as well as people already interested in Bartholdi, engineering history or Franco-American relations.

The exhibition is being presented in the year of the 250th anniversary of the United States Declaration of Independence. The museum uses that anniversary to revisit the Statue of Liberty as a shared history linking French know-how with an American national symbol.

That context is worth keeping in proportion. The visitor experience is not simply an anniversary display: the official material repeatedly foregrounds the building process, the workers and the technical limits they pushed. The anniversary provides the moment; the construction story provides the substance.

The Musée des Arts et Métiers is at 60 rue Réaumur, 75003 Paris. RATP lists Arts-et-Métiers and Réaumur-Sébastopol as convenient Metro stations for the museum.

The City of Paris event listing currently marks the exhibition as booking required and gives a price range of €9 to €21. Because museum opening hours, ticket categories and timed-entry arrangements can be revised, use the official museum booking page for the final price and entry time rather than treating a saved social post as a ticketing source.

If you are building a 3rd-arrondissement day, the museum can fit naturally with the Arts-et-Métiers area, the Marais and central Paris. But opening-week demand is harder to predict than the long 2027 run, so pre-booking is the safer choice when a particular date matters.

This article was checked on 18 September 2026 against the Musée des Arts et Métiers’ official exhibition pages, RATP’s current partner guide and the City of Paris event listing.

• Musée des Arts et Métiers — Lady Liberté exhibition page
• Musée des Arts et Métiers — exhibition presentation and press material
• RATP — Lady Liberté visitor guide
• Ville de Paris — event listing

Exhibition dates, hours, prices and booking conditions can change. Check the museum directly before making a special journey.