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A colossal bronze statue of Joan of Arc will be removed from Nice just three months after it was unveiled, after judges ruled the city had breached public procurement roles.
Atelier Missor, a local sculptors’ group which focuses on French patriotic heroes and criticised by some for right-wing links, was commissioned by the city’s conservative mayor Christian Estrosi to construct the €170,000 (£144,000) statue.
The dispute around the statue became politically-charged, with critics opposing Mr Estrosi spending significant public sums on commemorating a figure who has become a symbol of French nationalism.
Joan of Arc is a patron saint and military leader of France from the 15th century who led a demoralised French army to several key victories in the Hundred Years War with the English – before she was caught by her opponents and burned at the stake aged around 19.
Jean-Marie Le Pen, the politician who died aged 86 this month, adopted Joan of Arc as a symbol of his far-right National Front, now renamed National Rally and led by his daughter Marine.
The French administrative court cancelled the contract for the imposing statue due to a failure to meet public procurement obligations by not putting it out to tender – meaning other offers for producing the work were not heard.
In Nice, public tender rules can be surpassed if valid artistic reasons are met, but judges said the council failed to do this following a legal challenge by state prefect Hugues Moutouh.
Mr Estrosi, who served in former president Nicolas Sarkozy’s cabinet in the late 200s, reacted angrily to the ruling, writing on X: “What a terrible symbol! Attacking a French destiny, a national and republican figure. I will not give in to the debunkers.”
In an official statement, Ms Estrosi committed to challenging the decision and accused Mr Moutouh of attacking the symbol of a French heroine.
“When France struggles to find its direction in a period of unprecedented instability, its representative in the department, the prefect of the Alpes-Maritimes, attacks the figure of Joan of Arc that we wanted to embody by installing a bronze statue in front of the church dedicated to the heroine who liberated our country,” the statement from Thursday read.
“Joan of Arc ‘belongs to all French people’. She is a figure of unity and French pride, to which Nice can only be very attached.”
The council will now contest the decision in front of the Administrative Court of Appeal, Mr Estrosi said.
