Equestrian statue of Joan of Arc - Place des Pyramides, Paris

"Emmanuel Frémiet was commissioned to create the sculpture in 1872. At that time, the Third Republic had been in place for less than two years and France's defeat in the war with Germany was close at hand. At the same time, the figure of Joan of Arc was enjoying a resurgence in popularity (in 1869, the Bishop of Orléans delivered a panegyric on Joan and her beatification was launched, which was completed in 1909); the new regime saw a parallel between the situation of France in 1429, invaded by English armies but on the verge of regaining its territory, and its own, with France militarily occupied by Germany and amputated from Alsace-Lorraine. Frémiet was then a 48 year old sculptor, specialising in realistic animal sculpture. The war affected him considerably: his studio was looted by the occupying forces and several of his public commissions disappeared in the destruction of the Tuileries Palace and the events of the Paris Commune. After making a plaster cast, Frémiet received a firm order from the State on 15 December 1872, for the sum of 25,000 francs.
The model for the statue is not known: according to legend, Frémiet chose a peasant woman who was born like Joan of Arc in Domrémy and who later died in 1936 in a fire in her building.

The statue was cast in 1874 and erected on the Place des Pyramides, in the 1st arrondissement of Paris, near the place where Joan of Arc was supposedly wounded during her attempt to enter Paris."