Statue of the French colonial heritage of Algeria.

Cast in bronze from cannons captured from Constantine and Algiers, the statue of Ferdinand d’Orléans stood against the Djemaa el-Djedid mosque in Algiers from 1845 until 1963 (then the Place du Gouvernement, now Place des Martyrs). The crown prince of France’s July Monarchy had contributed to the invasion of Algeria in 1835 and so, following his accidental death in 1842, sculptor Carlo Marochetti was commissioned to produce a monument to the prince and, by extension, the colonial conquest of French Algeria.

Royalist groups saw this as an opportunity to reconnect Neuilly with the July Monarchy. The Duc had died in Neuilly, where the Orléans family had one of its estates. Indeed, their motivation to rearticulate such ties in public space is clear when we note that the Marochetti was among the first 25 statues from Algeria to be reclaimed by Metropolitan entitled (out of a total 150 colonial monuments that were repatriated following independence in 1962).

the statue’s unusual trajectory from prominent Algiers landmark to a Paris suburb, Sessions notes that Marochetti’s monument is a pertinent symbol of French colonial memory.