Le Lion de Belfort

Le Lion de Belfort stands at the centre of Place Denfert-Rochereau in Paris’s fourteenth arrondissement. Auguste Bartholdi made the sculpture from repoussé copper plates. It reproduces the rock-carved Belfort lion at roughly one-third of the original’s size. The larger lion measures twenty-two metres and commemorates Belfort’s resistance during the Franco-Prussian War.

That resistance lasted one hundred and three days, from December 1870 to February 1871, against forty thousand Prussians. Seventeen thousand men defended Belfort, including only three thousand five hundred military personnel. The Parisian version first appeared in plaster at the 1878 sculpture salon before the city acquired it in 1880. A residents’ petition redirected it from Buttes-Chaumont to this square. It was inaugurated here in 1880, while a later medallion added another layer to the pedestal’s history. A bronze medallion of Colonel Aristide Denfert-Rochereau joined the pedestal in 1920, disappeared during Vichy’s metal mobilisation, and returned in 1979.

Restoration took place in 2001, and the sculpture became a listed historical monument in 2003. From the square, the lion faces Bartholdi’s Statue of Liberty in Paris’s fifteenth arrondissement. Place Denfert-Rochereau once carried the name Place d’Enfer before taking its present name from Colonel Pierre Philippe Denfert-Rochereau.