As a historian of unwanted statues, I ♄ this story about the statue of Louis XVI in Louisville so much. There's some looooooong, important history at work here. Settle in
1/ https://twitter.com/ericcrawford/status/1266206301270544386
First question, what's a statue of Louis XVI doing in Louisville, KY anyways? Louis de Bourbon, current Bourbon pretender to the French throne, says it's because Americans are so grateful for French help in the War of Independence. 2/ https://twitter.com/louisducdanjou/status/1266578060259872768?s=20
Well sort of
 It's true that Louis XVI sent money and matériel to support the American revolutionaries. (Mostly to stick it to the Brits, and the expense helped bankrupt the French crown and start the French Revolution. Oops.) 3/
And yes, the city of Louisville is named for King Louis XVI. White settlers built their first town on Shawnee & Osage land in 1778, the year France became the first European state to recognize the U.S. independence. https://native-land.ca/  4/
(Side note: Bourbon whiskey, which Louisville, aka "Bourbon City," says is "the spirit that continued and created Louisville itself," gets its name from the French Bourbon dynasty.) 5/ https://www.gotolouisville.com/ 
So it makes some sense that Louisville has a statue of Louis XVI. But that statue didn't get there until 1966, when it was given to the city as a gift from the southern French city of Montpellier. 6/
Why would Montpellier give a statue of Louis XVI in the 1960s, you ask? There's a history there too. 7/ https://twitter.com/susandamussen/status/1266738492534484997?s=11
(Side note:🚹 College & grad students in KY can still do a summer exchange in Montpellier, which is a lovely town!) 9/
https://www.sclou.org/montpellier 
But sister city deals are also ways for cities to brand themselves. Louisville has long ties to France, including early settlement by Huguenot refugees & royalist emigrés. The city seal is a fleur-de-lis, symbol of the Bourbon monarchy 11/
City government, incl. leftist mayor Jean Zuccarelli (pretty obscure for a longtime mayor—this ugly bridge is named after him), was dominated by professors, doctors & lawyers tied to the university. 14/
So a university-led sister city deal made sense. Education remains a central component of most of Montpellier's current sister city relationships 15/
http://www.montpellier.fr/30-six-villes-jumelees-a-montpellier-un-jumelage-sur-4-continents.htm
But why a statue of Louis XVI? By 1966, Montpellier politics had swung right. The new mayor François Delmas (1959-77) was also a university man, but a conservative Catholic roots in the fascist Croix de Feu movement of the 1930s 16/
https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fran%C3%A7ois_Delmas
Why Montpellier had a white elephant of a royal statue in 1966 is the result of another history of politics and revolutionary iconoclasm, going back to the French Revolution 19/
The execution of the king (1792) & Marie-Antoinette (1793) horrified French royalists, who thought the nation needed "atone" for this terrible sin after the monarchy was restored in 1815. (Sheryl Kroen's history of this movement is amazing! https://bit.ly/2ZTHJem ) 20/
During the Restoration (1815-30), royalists made the anniversary of Louis XVI's death a national day of mourning & put up "expiatory" monuments to the "martyrdom" of Louis XVI and Marie-Antoinette 21/
The revolutionaries had torn down royal statues, so the Restoration put them back & or replaced them. Here's Louis XIV coming down in 1792 & Henri IV being put back in 1818. See Victoria Thompson's brilliant history of the Henri IV https://bit.ly/2TTtEKh  22/
In Montpellier, the regional council tore down the statue of "the tyrant Louis XIV" in 1792. Royalists replaced it in 1814 with a Latin inscription "RAGE OVERTURNED, LOYALTY REPLACED" 23/
Louisville's Louis XVI came from the same desire to demonstrate loyalty to the restored Bourbon King Louis XVIII. Commissioned in 1819, it got the simpler inscription "TO LOUIS XVI, THE CITY OF MONTPELLIER, 1819" 24/
The statue, sculpted in marble by Achille Valois, was inaugurated in 1829 on the renamed "Place Louis XVI" (now the Place du Marché aux Fleurs, a lovely place for a drink en terrasse) 25/
But it didn't last long there. France had another revolution in 1830, and partisans of the new, more liberal regime started a war against the symbols of the reactionary Bourbons. The prefect had to take down the statue & stash it in the army barracks to prevent unrest 26/
Three regime changes later, a local historian wondered if the statue had lost enough of its political power to come out of storage. Definitely not to a public street street, but maybe a museum? 27/
Mais, non! When the army wanted its storage space back in 1899, the statue was moved to the back room of the regional archives in Montpellier. 28/
By 1966, when Delmas was looking for a way to "tighten an already very intimate union" with Louisville, the archives were also beginning to outgrow their space. VoilĂ ! A perfect solution to two problems 29/
(Side note: The archives moved to a very snazzy new Zaha Hadid-designed cultural center in 2012, and the old archive building turned into a squat for homeless Montpéllerins by a leftist collective called Luttopia) 30/
Louis XVI was packed up and shipped off to Kentucky, where his arrival in December 1966 apparently caught Louisville by surprise. 31/
In July 1967 the statue was inaugurated, in front of the mayors of Louisville and Montpellier, on a symbolic spot in front of the Jefferson County Courthouse (now Louisville Metro Hall) downtown, facing city hall across the street. 32/
Because the right hand and left foot of the statue had a habit of coming loose, the installers made plaster copies just in case they needed to be replaced. Good thing—here he is without his foot in 1974 33/
So this week's protests and the damage to the Louis XVI statue come out of long, intersecting histories of urban politics and revolutionary iconoclasm. 35/
Louis de Bourbon's whining about protestors' disrespect to his ancestor is historically ignorant nonsense. This local historian knew better when he wrote to the Louisville Courrier-Journal in June 1967. 36/
P.S. There are lots more revealing stories of statues defaced, removed, and repurposed. One of my faves is the headless JosĂ©phine in Fort-de-France, Martinique. Read @UICProfWatch for more, https://bit.ly/2ZTbzji 
Et fin.
(But really—the political history of statues is SO SO SO interesting!)
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