A colossal bronze statue of Joan of Arc will be removed from public display in the French city of Nice just three months after it was unveiled, after judges ruled the city had breached public procurement rules.
Atelier Missor, a local sculptors’ group which focuses on French patriotic heroes and which has been criticised by some for right-wing links, was commissioned by the city’s conservative mayor Christian Estrosi to construct the €170,000 (£144,000) piece.
The dispute around the statue became politically charged, with critics accusing Mr Estrosi of spending significant public sums on commemorating a figure who has become a symbol of French nationalism.
Joan of Arc is one of several patron saints of France, a military leader 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 imprisoned 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 2000s, 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.
“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.
“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.
