L'Âme de la France
| L'Âme de la France (“The Soul of France”) | |
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| France | |
Statue of Victory in Hell-Bourg, in the Hauts de la Réunion
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| For World War I | |
| Location | 21°03′53″S 55°31′18″E / 21.064667°S 55.521667°E |
| Designed by | Charles Sarrabezolles |
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"the victory of a France grateful to her dead"
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L'Âme de la France (“The Soul of France”) is the name given by the French sculptor Carlo Sarrabezolles to three identical monumental statues that he executed in three different materials during the interwar period, the first in plaster in 1921, the second in stone in 1922, and the last in bronze in 1930. 3.2 metres tall, they represent a female warrior with naked breasts raising her arms toward the sky.
Executed from the first of the three models, the newest sculpture is currently located on a pedestal at the entrance to Hell-Bourg on the Heights of the island of Réunion, an overseas département of France in the Indian Ocean. It was presented by the deputy Lucien Gasparin to the commune of Salazie in 1931 and since then has gone through island history in unusual fashion.
At first erected in the little village centre before the town hall, it was quickly dynamited off its pedestal by the priest, then successively kept in pieces behind a hair salon, repaired by welding, and at last moved several kilometres to the place where it still stands. There, it was once again torn off its pedestal by a tropical cyclone, then abandoned, face down on the ground, for twenty years before finally being found by chance during construction work in 1968. It was then put back in place, rehabilitated as a memorial to World War I dead, celebrated in magnificent public ceremonies, registered in the general inventory of historic monuments, and finally classified as such in 2004.
Like the two other examples, in plaster and stone,L'Âme de la France in bronze is a statue 3.20 m high. It depicts a helmeted female warrior stretching her two arms toward the sky, her right hand ending in a delicate little spray of flowers and, by contrast, her left fist forcefully gripping a shield slipped onto her forearm.
This singular V-shaped pose is not random. According to Le Quotidien de La Réunion, “this woman symbolises ‘the victory of a France grateful to her dead’”, in this case the soldiers who fell during World War I, in which the people of Réunion participated, notably led by the aviator Roland Garros. Thus, the figure visually depicts the country’s gratitude toward the poilus through what the Mérimée Database of historic monuments calls a “secular allegory”, and the statue can thus be used as a war memorial, as is the case on Réunion.
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Wikipedia