male figure would have been. After a turbulent first decade in the 1870s, by the 1880s the republic was accepted by most people in France and as such, the French state did not need history to justify itself, using Marianne as the unifying symbol of the republic. The only historical event that was regularly honored in France was Bastille Day, as the storming of the Bastille in 1789 was the revolutionary occurrence that appealed to most of the French, and the rest of the events of the revolution were not officially honored in order to keep the memory of the revolution as harmonious as possible. It was the strategy of the republican leaders to use symbols and the memory of history in such a way to create as wide a national consensus as possible in favor of the republic, which was why Marianne became such a prominent symbol of the republic. By contrast, the newly unified German Reich had too many historical traditions to draw upon, reflecting the histories of the various German states, none of which could appeal to everybody, leading to a situation where the British historian Eric Hobsbawm noted: "Like many another liberated 'people', 'Germany' was more easily defined by what it was against than in any other way." Hobsbawm argued for this reason, that unlike Marianne who was a symbol of the republic and freedom in general, her German counterpart, Deutscher Michel "...seems to have been essentially an anti-foreign image". The Hôtel de Ville in Paris (city hall) displayed a statue of "Marianne" wearing a Phrygian cap in 1880, and was quickly followed by the other French cities. In Paris, where the Radicals had a strong presence, a contest was launched for the statue of Place de la République. It was won by the Morice brothers (with Léopold Morice producing the sculpture and the architect François-Charles Morice designing the pedestal), in 1879, with an academical Marianne, with an arm lifted towards the sky and a Phrygian cap, but with her breasts covered. Aimé-Jules Dalou lost the contest against the Morice brothers, but the City of Paris decided to build his monument on the Place de la Nation, inaugurated for the centenary of the French Revolution, in 1889, with a plaster version covered in bronze. Dalou's Marianne had the lictor's fasces, the Phrygian cap, a bare breast, and was accompanied by a Blacksmith representing Work, and allegories