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Removed during protests, Louisville's statue of King Louis XVI is still in limbo
Louisville’s statue of French King Louis XVI was removed after it was vandalized during protests in 2020. The 200 year-old monument was a gift from Louisville’s sister city of Montpellier, France.
Stephanie Wolf/Louisville Public Media
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Stephanie Wolf/Louisville Public Media
Louisville’s statue of French King Louis XVI was removed after it was vandalized during protests in 2020. The 200 year-old monument was a gift from Louisville’s sister city of Montpellier, France.
Stephanie Wolf/Louisville Public Media
Local leaders in Louisville, Ky. are trying to figure out what to do with a statue of its namesake, King Louis XVI of France, nearly four years after it was moved into storage.
The 200-year-old statue was damaged during protests over the police killing of Breonna Taylor in 2020. Protests broke out across the country that summer, forcing local governments to address long-standing racial disparities and police misconduct. It also caused them to rethink controversial monuments.
Jessica Bennett Kincaid, Louisville’s public art administrator, said the city has no plans to put King Louis back on display, for now.
“I think I think that some might assume that we’re sort of stalling, but we just don’t have an obvious solution at this point,” she said.
How we got here
On May 28, 2020, protesters gathered in front of Louisville Metro Hall after the city released the gut-wrenching 911 calls from Taylor’s boyfriend and neighbors after the shooting.
As the demonstration swelled, one man got up onto the plinth where a 9-ton marble statue of King Louis XVI had stood since the 1960’s. Then the man, and Louis’ marble hand, fell into the crowd.
The statue remained on display throughout the summer, handless and covered in graffiti. The city eventually took it down, citing public safety concerns.
Protesters spray painted and broke a hand off Louisville’s King Louis XVI statue in May 2020. Officials removed the monument in September that year.
Ryan Van Velzer/Louisville Public Media
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Ryan Van Velzer/Louisville Public Media
Protesters spray painted and broke a hand off Louisville’s King Louis XVI statue in May 2020. Officials removed the monument in September that year.
Ryan Van Velzer/Louisville Public Media
An analysis by three conservation firms found damage dating back much further than 2020. The statue — commissioned by King Louis XVI’s daughter after his execution during the French revolution — was moved multiple times after it was first displayed in 1830.
“The stone material has veining in it and some of those veins can release over time,” Kincaid explained. “The more you move such a heavy object, the more likely it is to have those veins release.”
Montpellier, France gifted the statue to its sister city Louisville in 1966. Since then, Kincaid said the freeze-thaw cycle of the Ohio River Valley hasn’t been kind to the monarch’s likeness.
“If something is a porous material, water and moisture can seep into it and, of course, when it freezes, it expands,” she said.
Kincaid said part of the reason the statue to Louisville’s namesake hasn’t been put back on display is the price tag. Repairs have been estimated at around $200,000.
But, like other communities across the country, the city has also spent the last three years grappling with what their public art represents.
A survey conducted by Louisville in 2022 found 40% of respondents didn’t think the 18th Century monarch represents their values. Some of them noted Louis’ connection to colonialism and resistance to democracy at home.
Some who want the statue restored, like Republican Metro Councilman Kevin Kramer, said it symbolizes what the city’s founders believed: that France’s support was instrumental to the American Revolution.
“If it hadn’t been for the French willingness to be involved in this, if it hadn’t been for the distraction [they created], I don’t know how you overlook the significance of that,” Kramer said.
Ninety percent of the people who responded to the city’s survey agreed with Kramer, saying they want the statue put back on display. But they differed on what that would look like.
“Same spot but minus his head. For historical accuracy,” one person responded. Others said the damage and graffiti should stay, as a symbol of the 2020 protests.
Lessons from near and far
Many of the conservators contracted by the city initially declined to do any preservation work until officials conducted a comprehensive public engagement process. That’s because in 2020, the American Institute of Conservation put out a position paper urging cities and preservationists to think more critically about what it called “contested monuments.”
Katherine Ridgway, a conservator at the Virginia Department of Historic Resources, was one of the authors of that paper. She said the goal was to lay out a process for how cities can work with communities when deciding what to do with controversial statues.
She said leaving monuments graffitied and damaged, as some survey respondents in Louisville suggested, can be the right decision for some cities.
“The goal with this was to make a definition between vandalism that is for damage’s sake, and the idea that there is graffiti and vandalism that has to do with social justice movements,” Ridgway said. “That is absolutely part of our history now.”
A handful of Confederate statues in Richmond, Va. were removed in 2020. One such statue, which depicts Confederate President Jefferson Davis, is on display at a local history museum dented and covered in graffiti, the same condition as when it was toppled.
A statue of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis lies on the street after protesters pulled it down in Richmond, Virginia, on June 10, 2020.
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A statue of Confederate States President Jefferson Davis lies on the street after protesters pulled it down in Richmond, Virginia, on June 10, 2020.
Parker Michels-Boyce/AFP via Getty Images
Just a three hour drive from Louisville, in Columbus, Ohio, residents and city officials have spent the last three years debating a statue to their own namesake: explorer Christopher Columbus.
Like Louisville, Columbus removed its monument from the front of city hall in 2020. But the city recently received a grant from the Mellon Foundation to explore what contextualizing the statue might look like.
Jennifer Fening, deputy director of the city’s department of development, said they’ve hired a Native-American-led design firm to help tell a more nuanced story about Columbus, the historical figure, and Columbus, the community.
“We hope to design a space where the statute can be used to tell the stories of people who haven’t felt seen and celebrated in our city, and to articulate who we are as a community today, in light of our namesake,” Fening said.
Protesters hold their fists in the air at the base of the Christopher Columbus Statue at Columbus City Hall during a protest organized against police brutality and the Columbus statue on June 27, 2020.
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Protesters hold their fists in the air at the base of the Christopher Columbus Statue at Columbus City Hall during a protest organized against police brutality and the Columbus statue on June 27, 2020.
Matthew Hatcher/Getty Images
Columbus will hold multiple public meetings in the coming year that will center the communities with the biggest stake in the conversation: Italian-American and Native-American residents.
Indigenous activist Shelly Corbin was part of a previous advisory committee on the Columbus statue. Corbin, a member of the Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe, said she thinks the Reimagining Columbus project could help the city find consensus not just on the statue, but on other important issues.
“If we can ultimately be successful with this movement, how much more engagement and really creating a community-centered Columbus could that do, in terms of shifting narratives, in terms of building bridges?” she said.
The City of Columbus has set aside $3.5 million for the project, including $1.5 million for the creation of new public artworks.
Where does Louisville go from here?
The King Louis statue’s future is less clear in Louisville. Efforts to find a new home where residents and visitors could admire the centuries old sculpture, are at a standstill.
Conservation firms have advised the city that the statue not be placed outdoors again for fear of further damage by the elements.
Kincaid, Louisville’s public art administrator, said the city recently reached out to local museums to talk about taking King Louis on loan, but so far there’s been little interest. She said most just don’t have a place to display a 9-ton statue.
“It can’t just be put into any building,” she said. “There would have to be structural support, reinforcement of floors, having an access point large enough to get the sculpture through the door.”
For now, city officials say they’ve exhausted all options.
Kincaid said discussions have moved on to what should take King Louis’s place outside city hall and, perhaps more importantly, how permanent this new piece should be.
“Most public art programs are a little cautious to turn around and replace these statues with something else very permanent while we’re still navigating that conversation that precipitated the removal of all these monuments in the first place,” Kincaid said.
City officials hope to find a new namesake, of sorts – something that can represent the community and its values in the present day.
An illustration of the Boston Tea Party, when colonists dumped British East India Company tea into the harbor on Dec. 16, 1773. Some accounts say this marked a pivotal moment when Americans started loving coffee. But one historian says Americans were drinking lots of coffee before then.
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A consequential act of defiance secured tea’s place as perhaps the most iconic beverage of America’s colonial era.
The Boston Tea Party became an essential ingredient in the recipe for revolution in the following years.
But tea wasn’t the only hot beverage with a prominent role in America’s fight for independence.
Coffee was an important part of American culture from the start. And coffeehouses were essential, too — serving as hubs for brewing ideas of independence.
As the United States celebrates 250 years, here’s what to know about America’s early history of coffee.
Colonists were drinking coffee long before the United States existed
Europeans brought coffee with them when they came to America.
“The first documented example of a mortar and pestle used to grind coffee beans was on the Mayflower” in 1620, says historian Michelle Craig McDonald, the author of Coffee Nation: How One Commodity Transformed the Early United States.
“The fact that coffee was present so early is not surprising if you think about it,” McDonald says. “A number of those who were on the Mayflower came to North America from Amsterdam, which was a major coffee trading center in Western Europe by the 17th century.”
The first coffeehouse in the colonies opened in 1676 in Boston, a century before the U.S. declared independence, she says. Some taverns sold coffee even earlier.
The Boston Tea Party probably wasn’t the dramatic turning point toward coffee that some claim
On the night of Dec. 16, 1773, disgruntled colonists boarded three ships moored in Boston Harbor and threw overboard more than 92,000 pounds of tea owned by the British East India Company.
Tensions had been building between the Crown and the colonies over the previous decade, as Britain tried to levy taxes on its colonies to recoup war debts.
The Boston Tea Party protest was targeted at the British government’s passing of the Tea Act in 1773, which granted the East India Company a monopoly over tea sales in the colonies. While the British had removed some unpopular taxes in the preceding years, they left tea taxes in place. Colonial merchants were especially upset that the act allowed the East India Company to undercut their tea business.
To build solidarity for their cause of sovereignty, some patriots called on colonialists to swear off tea in favor of coffee. It’s why many histories point to the Boston Tea Party as a turning point when Americans switched from mostly drinking tea to mostly coffee. The anti-tea sentiment was immortalized in a founding father’s now-famous letter.
In July 1774, John Adams (before he became the second U.S. president) wrote to his wife Abigail, recounting an incident during his travels. After a long day, he asked the proprietor of the house where he was lodging for a cup of tea, provided it was smuggled and free of British taxes.
” ‘No sir, said she, we have renounced all Tea in this Place. I cant make Tea, but I’le make you Coffee.’ Accordingly I have drank Coffee every Afternoon since, and have borne it very well. Tea must be universally renounced. I must be weaned, and the sooner, the better,” Adams wrote.
Despite John Adams claiming a newfound patriotic duty to appreciate coffee, McDonald says colonists had been drinking lots of coffee all along.
She studied advertisements from the 1760s and ’70s to estimate how many shops sold coffee versus tea. Even before the Boston Tea Party, she says, “coffee is definitely more broadly available than tea is.”
A big reason? It was cheaper. “Its price again per pound is significantly less, which tells you about its availability, its accessibility to drinkers.”
Historians say it’s hard to definitively compare tea with coffee consumption, though, as official records from before America gained independence were inconsistent.
And smuggling was rampant, making official records even less reliable.
“There is a vast amount of smuggling,” says Joyce Chaplin, a professor of early American history at Harvard University. “So they’re not paying formal duties on tea that they get from the Dutch. They’re probably not paying formal duties on coffee from the French Caribbean.”
And Chaplin notes that people who loudly proclaimed a new appreciation for coffee over tea weren’t always doing what they said. It could have been political pandering. “I do not drink tea that comes via the East India Company,” she posits someone of the era saying. “But, you know, other sources are fine. Ditto for the coffee.”
Coffeehouses were a hub for revolutionary ideas
A coffeepot with cover, circa 1795. It has an American eagle motif, made in China for the American market. Coffee was part of a growing trend of globalization in the colonial era.
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In the colonial era, coffeehouses were hotbeds for seditious thought — where people planned acts of revolution.
“Coffeehouses are kind of famous for being places where people think and plot things,” says Mark Pendergrast, author of Uncommon Grounds: The History of Coffee and How It Transformed Our World.
A coffeehouse called the Green Dragon served as one of the locations for planning the Boston Tea Party. Years earlier, the Old London Coffeehouse in Philadelphia was a meeting place for strategizing responses to another British tax, the Stamp Act of 1765.
In Britain, coffeehouses were nicknamed “penny universities,” Pendergrast says: “because for a penny you could go and learn a whole lot by sitting around in a coffeehouse and discussing everything.” The same attitude traveled across the Atlantic.
Early American coffeehouses would commonly have city business directories, libraries of newspapers and currency exchange information. People could get maritime insurance there or buy things at auction.
“There’s a reason why coffeehouses become places of colonial protest … in the 1760s, in the 1770s, and it’s because it is the place where traders and merchants tended to gather,” historian McDonald says. “That’s where they heard about the economics of the day.”
Taverns were more likely than coffeehouses to have rooms for rent and stables for travelers’ horses. They were also more likely to have food.
Interestingly enough, coffeehouses could serve alcohol and taverns could serve coffee.
But the vibes at each were different. While women and men could “riotously drink together” in taverns, coffeehouses often didn’t allow women, according to Chaplin of Harvard.
“The sense was the coffeehouse was the place where you had a clear head — to argue about politics, to find out what was going on in the business world, to cut a business deal,” she says. “Whereas taverns were places where, in a sense, you refueled.”
Still, she says, the lines between the two “weren’t completely clear.”
The cost of America’s revolutionary drink
Coffee (and tea for that matter) was part of a growing globalization of trade around this time.
Much of the coffee in the colonies was grown in the Caribbean, while tea came from China.
Supply was up and coffee was easier than ever to drink. “Trade and frankly, imperialism, are making it possible for … colonial products to be produced and transferred to other parts of the world in greater and greater quantities,” says Chaplin.
As a result, by the time of the American Revolution, both coffee and tea were in reach for many common people. “They’re both becoming affordable luxuries,” Chaplin says.
Fancy coffee and tea paraphernalia were also part of this increasingly global market. Middle and upper-class people would have wanted special implements for drinking these beverages and a place to drink it. That meant they needed wood for coffee tables, silver for coffeepots, and porcelain for teapots.
“These two beverages are encouraging people to consume all kinds of new stuff,” says Chaplin. “The mahogany that comes out of the Caribbean, the china coming out of China, silver that is mined principally in South and Central America and processed in a lot of the parts of the world.”
There’s a dark side to coffee’s history, too. The plantations that supplied the crop ran on the labor of enslaved people. By 1790, half of the world’s coffee was being grown in the French colony of Saint-Domingue, in what is today Haiti, Pendergrast says, where slaves were routinely mistreated, raped and murdered.
The Declaration of Independence, signed in 1776, is infamous for a contradiction. It proclaimed that “all men are created equal,” but failed to acknowledge the hundreds of thousands of enslaved people living in America at the time.
Coffee carried a similar contradiction. The beverage that fueled conversations that inspired America’s fight for independence — centered on the ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness — depended on enslavement.
“Coffee had this paradoxical effect, that it did promote revolutionary thought,” Pendergrast says. “But it was also grown by slaves.”
Just in time for a contentious 250th anniversary of the United States of America, historian David S. Reynolds’ latest book, Two Ships, helps us realize that any country that couldn’t agree on its own origin story is destined for divisive times.
Two Ships is about the complicated, conjoined legacy of the landings of the Mayflower, which carried the Pilgrims to Plymouth, Mass., in 1620, and the White Lion, which arrived in Jamestown a year earlier, bringing the first enslaved Africans to Virginia.
As Reynolds demonstrates, it’s not so much the facts of these two voyages, as it is the meanings ascribed to them, that made them such a powerful metaphor for two conflicting visions of American identity.
To simplify, the Mayflower’s passengers were separatist Puritans, dissenters to the reign of the English king, James I. As the United States developed, the Mayflower was credited with carrying the seeds of a radical democracy to the New World, one in which all men (in theory, at least) were equal before God.
In contrast, the European settlers of Jamestown were Royalists, also known as Cavaliers. Loyal to the monarchy, they believed in a strict hierarchy.
But the meaning of the images of the two ships shifted depended on who was invoking them and when. Not surprisingly, the metaphor was deployed most vigorously during the Civil War. In abolitionist speeches and writings, the White Lion or the “Slave-Ship,” as it was commonly called, was condemned for infecting America with the “plague-spot” of slavery.
Reynolds says that Frederick Douglass resorted to the “two ships” metaphor frequently, while Lincoln avoided it, hoping to preserve a unified ship of state. Meanwhile, Southern descendants of Cavaliers invoked the Mayflower to emphasize the intolerance and “cruel, persecuting” character of the Puritans. In a comment that resonates for our own times, Reynolds says:
It didn’t matter to the South that … by the mid-nineteenth century, the North had become a kaleidoscope of religious denominations, …, few of which resembled the faith of the Plymouth colonists. Distortion is intrinsic to cultural memory, especially when amplified by sectional or political bias. For Southerners, the Mayflower had brought Puritanism, which had yielded fanatical movements like abolitionism, now a dire threat to the Union.
In a brief-but-fascinating digression into the unpredictable power of literary fiction, Reynolds observes that the South’s fondness for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s anti-Puritan novel, The Scarlet Letter, and, even more, for the medieval historical romances of Sir Walter Scott, bolstered its nostalgia for a largely-imagined feudal society.
Reynolds quotes the always-quotable Mark Twain, no fan of Scott’s, as saying that Scott “did measureless harm; more real and lasting harm, perhaps, than any other individual that ever wrote …”
Two Ships is a dazzling survey of some three centuries of American history through a close reading of a metaphor. By the 1890s, Reynolds says, the interpretive tide had turned again: “Southern and Northern whites, feeling threatened by people of color and by an array of European immigrants, were retreating to a cocoon of racial solidarity that Mayflower celebrations helped reinforce.”
By the later-20th century, the image of the Mayflower was depoliticized and commercialized into Pilgrim hats and Black Friday sales. The powerful metaphor of the two ships receded into the mist.
Seven years ago, however, the 1619 Project piloted the White Lion — “The Slave-Ship” — back into view and anchored it at the center of debates about slavery’s place in the national story. The 1619 Project has been faulted for its historiography, and it does lie outside of the chronological boundaries of Reynolds’ book; still, it seems too momentous a reappearance of the White Lion not to at least acknowledge in this book.
That criticism noted, I think reading Two Ships would be an excellent way to observe this particular Fourth of July. It’s wise for all of us to have a more informed awareness of how Americans have understood, misunderstood and, often, flattened each other into stereotypes. Or, as Ernest Hemingway, one of the Mayflower Pilgrims’ more cynical descendants, might say in response to that sentiment: “Isn’t it pretty to think so?”
I took a kid’s camera to Paris Fashion Week, because was it ever really that serious? Yes and no. This men’s season happened during one of the hottest weeks in France’s recorded history, which inspired that specific brand of collective hysteria brought on by living through yet another unprecedented moment together — taking over our brains and ruining our plans to wear boots — and a grander reflection on what we were doing there and why. The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week. If the world is ending, you might as well swim in dirty water and have fun doing it, no?
As far as the shows went, there was the coastal stoner energy of Tokyo-based Auralee — brightly colored leathers and furry flip-flops — that reminded me of the low-key elegance of hanging out in Southern California. At the Rick Owens show, Rick-heads made minimal weather-restrictive tweaks to their usual uniforms — platforms, leather, ground-grazing garments — making you appreciate the beauty in that level of ascetic dedication. Louis Vuitton built a literal beach as its runway, complete with sand and a giant wave that felt like a mirage: Is this a heat-induced hallucination or yet another buzzed-about set design under men’s creative director Pharrell Williams? At the Dries Van Noten show, there was an ice-cold beer fridge and popsicles, a chic and inspired detail only rivaled by a collection that was a breath of fresh air during a week where I Googled the symptoms of heat stroke more than once. The Willy Chavarria show was air-conditioned, pumped with Xinú perfume and felt expensive. Sven Marquardt, a Berlin photographer and Berghain’s most famous bouncer, was sitting in front of me, which I took as an incredibly good omen. The painted blue feet and Oakley collab sunglasses at the Kiko Kostadinov show felt auspicious as well.
A look from the Auralee show.
There were conversations floating around about how apocalyptic it felt sitting at a fashion show in over 100-degree Fahrenheit weather, our backs soaked, our minds dizzied, when the industry is responsible for something like 10% of global greenhouse gas emissions. The cognitive dissonance contributed to the thickness in the air that week.
At the Comme des Garçons show, called “If the War Were to End..,” models danced and ran and skipped out onto the runway for the finale, soundtracked by the joyous sound of children singing “You’re So Good to Me” by the Langley Schools Music Project. In that moment, we were happy, we were clapping, we might have even been hopeful. Humans have the capacity to hold a lot — a fan in one hand while attempting not to completely melt in the front row, and a fantasy that there might still be a future where we get to wear those leopard-print Dries shoes we fell in love with on the runway.
The moments before the Comme des Garçons show.
Comme des Garçons show attendees.
Comme des Garçons, head-to-toe.
The Comme des Garçons show.
The Dries Van Noten show.
A chic and inspired detail at the Dries Van Noten show: ice-cold beer.
Scenes from the ERL presentation.
The Kiko Kostadinov show.
Tapping in from Louis Vuitton beach.
Quavo at the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from after the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Louis Vuitton show.
Scenes from the Nahmias x Puma dinner at Gigi Paris.
Scenes from the On X Online Ceramics rave.
At Silencio to see Venezuelan DJ and producer Safety Trance.
The Willy Chavarria show.
Scenes from Willy Chavarria.
The throngs of teenagers doing back flips into the Canal Saint-Martin and playing soccer in the street set the mood for the week.
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