Colby, Napoleon, and the Lion of Lucerne

Colby was founded in a stormy and polarized international context, in the midst of a struggle between opposing ideas about politics, education, and religion. Katz Professor of History Raffael Scheck will explore how these tensions affected the foundation and early history of Colby. He will focus on contradictory meanings of the Lion of Lucerne sculpture: the original glorified an anti-revolutionary stance and has become a rallying point of Swiss radical right-wing parties,
quite at odds with its meaning in Colby’s history.