The statue of Jean-François Champollion, the decipherer of the Egyptian hieroglyphs, was designed by Frédéric-Auguste Bartholdi for the 1867 Universal Exhibition in Paris. The Third Republic installed it in the Collège de France. As an expression of the imperial consciousness of world and knowledge, the statue is undermined by its own pictorial programme and refers to problems of French universalism that Champollion himself had already reflected on.
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