Past a sloping grass bank on a deserted suburban street in the French commune of Meaux, a few miles from Paris, a blocked-off path leads to a row of corrugated sheds. A clip-art logo scrawled across a fence announces a local agricultural company. Beside it perch a few small mailboxes, a laminated card pasted onto the bottom one: Atelier Missor.
Atelier Missor bills itself as a “classical foundry in Paris, on its way to building a new Rome.” Supposedly the last of its kind in France, the foundry uses ancient techniques to cast busts and statues of historical and mythical figures. Its handful of craftsmen—no women—adhere to a commensurately nostalgic dress code: earth-toned linen button-ups, suspenders, and slacks, with facial hair ranging from wispy mustaches to unruly beards. In the United States, they would be mistaken for Mennonites, or perhaps extras from the Oscar-nominated Train Dreams.
Yet beneath these romantic trappings, and belied by the foundry’s modest digs, lies a reactionary and hypermasculine politics that’s tailor-made for online virality—and undoubtedly familiar to Americans living in the Trump era.
On Missor’s X account of late, amid photos of workers pouring molten metal and AI-generated images of gigantic statues on Mars, there are posts that read as though they’ve been plugged into the internet’s worst language translator (“Harnessing telluric forces and orienting them toward a grandiose future”) or into a Yoda-speak generator (“A very ancient force we are awakening”). The account also spouts stoner philosophy (“We abandoned a cyclical view of time for a linear one”) and hyperbole about statues “as high as skyscrapers”—or even building entire cities.
There’s no mistaking Missor’s worldview, though. They idealize the brawny past (“The dead are greater than us”) while despairing over the wimpy present (“France used to be so great”). “Our civilization,” they declare, “needs a spiritual injection of testosterone.” Thus, as they announced in January, they seek to restore Napoleon as a national hero: “At school, we were taught that he was a monster, when in fact, he was one of the architects of our civilization. We refused to be demoralized. Our way of fighting back was simple: We were going to put statues of Napoleon everywhere.”
But their plans are much grander than rehabilitating Napoleon, and extend well beyond France. Backed by an expanding list of right-wingers, from aristocrats to populist politicians, this very online but old-school foundry now aims to trade off its growing notoriety with its most ambitious project yet: exporting its nationalist aesthetics to the U.S., starting with a new, male Statue of Liberty to dwarf the one in New York Harbor.
Elon Musk, for one, is a fan.
Missor Movahed had spent 12 years living a “dissolute youth” and drifting from one field to another without committing to anything apart from his YouTube channel. His videos from that era have been scrubbed, though traces remain online to give an indication of how his time was then spent: paroxysmal renditions of Radiohead’s “Creep” and histrionic addresses to camera espousing his philosophies.
Then came Movahed’s road to Damascus moment. According to his self-written hagiography—he declined to be interviewed for this story—Movahed became deeply disenchanted with his aimless and dissolute existence. On a whim one day, he entered the Louvre and wandered for hours in a daze. Afterward, he took to the streets and found himself beneath the monument to Austerlitz in Place Vendôme. Here, he claims, he heard the voice of no less than Napoleon speak to him directly: “Who are you to judge centuries, millennia? Who are you to judge civilization?”
Inspired by this, and the works he’d seen in the museum, he saw his destiny clearly: He was to take up sculpture, to preserve the legacy of past generations. With no prior experience, he taught himself how to carve clay and plaster, and enlisted like-minded men to help. In January 2021, at age 30, Missor and his 24-year-old brother, Massoud, established Atelier Missor in Nice, employing a metalwork technique said to be some 6,000 years old: pouring molten bronze into plaster molds made from wax models.
Though the workshop was not as overtly political then as it is today, its mission statement gave a flavor of the tenets that would drive its work. “To honor the great men of our history, to honor them so profoundly that, from wherever they are watching us, they cannot hear the noise of these fools and ingrates, who so quickly forget those who built their homes.”
Early versions of the workshop’s website give an indication of who these “fools and ingrates” are. Seeming to refer to Black Lives Matter protesters, Movahed writes that around the time he was beginning to take up sculpture, he was “shocked to see ignorant people tearing down statues.… These ungrateful people who had never done anything in their lives and who, in their arrogance, thought they could do better than everyone else.”
At first, the workshop produced busts featuring just two subjects: Nietzsche and
Napoleon. Movahed began promoting
his work on his YouTube channel, with a video from January 2020 announcing his
career pivot garnering tens of thousands of views. Orders soon started flying
in. Among the patrons were Julien Rochedy, the far-right National Rally politician, and Yasmine Murat, who gifted a sculpture of Napoleon—an
ancestor of her husband, Prince Joachim Murat—to Brigitte Macron.
Encouraged by its early success, Atelier Missor expanded its product line to include busts of Dostoevsky and Chopin. It also offered a contemporary addition: For 400 euros, customers could acquire a bust of the Canadian provocateur Jordan Peterson. “Have you ever wondered … what if Peterson lived in your room?” read the product description. “From now on, he’s watching over you. Feel his disappointment when you open a private browsing window.” That Peterson qualified for the foundry’s pantheon was a harbinger of the foundry’s eventual courtship of America’s right-wing manosphere.
Despite healthy sales, Atelier Missor in its early days paid little attention to production costs and soon fell heavily into debt, a struggle discussed candidly on the foundry’s YouTube channel, including in a 2024 documentary-esque video titled “Story of a Bankruptcy.”
In August 2023, just as Atelier Missor was on the verge of insolvency, Movahed’s project was thrown a lifeline: a 170,000 euro commission from the city of Nice to create a public sculpture of Joan of Arc. Unveiled in November 2024, the statue and its base stood 15 feet tall, weighed nine tons, and featured the gold-plated warrior saint on horseback, gripping a sword by its blade. Bold and formidable, the statue was somewhat incongruous with its setting: It was unveiled at the inauguration of a new car park.
Nevertheless, it was a triumph for Atelier Missor, and garnered significant media coverage. But then began the controversy that catapulted the foundry to fame in France, and eventually beyond: Less than a month after the unveiling, an administrative court ordered the statue’s removal, after discovering the city had awarded the contract without permitting other artists to bid for it. The foundry, in a post on X that drew more than a million views, dismissed the ruling as textbook bureaucratic obstructionism, declaring, “Our civilization is dying.”
Right-wing politicians rallied to the sculpture’s defense. Among them were Gaël Nofri, Nice’s deputy mayor and former adviser to Marine Le Pen, and Philippe Vardon, an ex–National Rally member and former leader of the ethnonationalist Identitarian Bloc. Emboldened by this high-ranking support, the city poured concrete around the statue’s base to prevent its removal.
The initial court ruling was eventually overturned, but the French Interior Ministry is contesting it and the case has been brought to the Council of State, the highest court in the land. An opposition councillor in Nice has also filed a criminal complaint against the conservative-run city, triggering an investigation that remains ongoing.
It was amid this imbroglio, and the lucrative publicity that attended it, that the foundry upped its ambitions. In October 2023, shortly after the commission came in, Atelier Missor had moved its operations to Paris, and after the furor it began leaning further into the political sensitivities of the supporter base that so readily took up its cause.
Across its
social media channels, Atelier Missor’s workers began using language couched in
the rhetoric of Western cultural erasure and civilizational decline. There were
notable imperatives about reviving “the Flame of the West,” as well as dog
whistles to extremist causes. One of the foundry’s YouTube videos
bore the title “Jeanne, au secours” (“Joan, help!”): the
slogan of Comités Jeanne, a political party founded by Jean-Marie Le
Pen after his expulsion from the National Front (before it rebranded as the
National Rally).
The incident in Nice also put the Atelier on the qui vive for similar opportunities to shoehorn its agenda into the news cycle. The next major breakthrough came around the time its supporters were pouring concrete: French Member of Parliament Raphaël Glucksmann, of the small left-wing party Place Publique, called for the return of the Statue of Liberty over the Trump administration’s decision “to side with the tyrants” against Ukraine.
Atelier Missor seized the moment. “To our fellow Americans: We are the last sculpture foundry in France, and we have a message for you,” they wrote on X. “Keep the Statue of Liberty; it’s rightfully yours. But get ready for another one. A New Statue of Liberty, much bigger, made out of titanium to withstand millions of years. We, the French people, are going to make it again!”
This was accompanied by an AI-generated image of a male Statue of Liberty towering over the Manhattan skyline, with a lion by its side. The post went viral, drawing more than five million views and even catching the attention of Elon Musk. “Looks cool,” wrote the world’s richest man with characteristic brevity.
Since then, the foundry’s efforts to woo Musk have deepened. In May 2025, it announced plans for a large-scale Prometheus sculpture—the Greek titan condemned to have his liver plucked for eternity, for giving humanity fire—for the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. It said it aimed to complete it in under four months. Closer to a year on, the Atelier’s X account indicates construction has now begun: In January, it posted one of its sculptors posing beside a giant plated head.
“We can build the rest and bring it to Starbase,” the post announced, tagging Musk. This time, their supplication went unanswered, seeming to imply a lack of certainty around the future of the statue—whether it will ever make its way to Texas, or even whether the commission to produce it has been secured. Starbase did not respond to my questions.
But Atelier Missor plowed ahead nonetheless, taking its pitch on the road to—where else?—Silicon Valley.
“We’re coming to SF …” the Atelier posted on X in mid-June last year. “Hoping to meet builders, facilitators, investors, dreamers.… Let’s reclaim that forgotten dream of the West!”
The
sculptors thanked 1517, a venture capital fund in Telluride,
Colorado, that is linked to Peter Thiel through the Thiel Fellowship,
for bringing them to the U.S. In a slew of other posts, Missor and Massoud
Movahed posed with a miniature version of their Prometheus sculpture in a
number of popular tourist spots: in front of the Golden Gate Bridge and on the manicured lawn of Stanford
University’s Main Quad.
While in town, as well as giving public talks, the sculptors were busy attracting interest from potential new investors: Their trip was welcomed by 8VC Partner and Palantir alum Sebastian Caliri. The foundry also says that during their trip they secured backing from venture capital fund Founders, Inc. On their return, the sculptors immediately announced they were looking for lawyers who specialize in visa procurement, “to help us move our foundry to SF.”
Off the back of what appears to have been a successful trip, in October the Atelier announced its next grandiose plan: It would seek to make a sculpture for the nation itself, on its 250th anniversary. The foundry calls it The Guardian of Liberty: a monument of Atlas bearing the world on his shoulders, intended as a metaphor for American global leadership. It is a meretricious choice, on multiple fronts: Atlas carries the heavens, not the earth, and does so as punishment for leading a war against the Olympian gods—who won.
Although the foundry has won plaudits from its ever-swelling ranks of social media followers, there is again no indication that it can deliver on its promise—to build, in just a year, what it modestly claims will be “the tallest statue in the West”—or that the U.S. government even wants this gift. Neither the State Department’s protocol gift officer nor the General Services Administration—the departments most likely to be responsible for handling such a foreign gift—responded to requests for comment.
Presumably in order to be closer to their new target customer base, the craftsmen now plan to relocate to the United States. They’re torn between California and Texas, the nation’s two tech hubs, though both prospects seem distant. While they claim “many people have offered to fund” The Guardian of Liberty, the “real challenge,” they confessed on X, is one familiar to many would-be foreign visitors during the second Trump administration: obtaining a visa.
Despite the noise and bluster on Atelier Missor’s social media about its ties to U.S. companies and deep-pocketed supporters, there’s little evidence that the foundry’s cash-strapped days are behind it. The foundry has been deliberately vague about exactly how much funding it has received, but the Morningstar website PitchBook lists just one investor: Founders, Inc., the venture capital firm in San Francisco that, according to its website, writes checks up to $250,000. That’s paltry, given the cost of the Atelier’s work. Earlier this year, responding to supposedly high demand, the sculptors disclosed that a seven-meter-tall (just under 23 feet) bronze statue costs them $500,000 to produce. Even at the highest end of Founders, Inc.’s range, the investment the foundry received would finance it to the tune of half a Napoleon (or perhaps a dismounted Joan of Arc?).
That is, of course, not to mention the difficulties thrown up by the new medium that Atelier Missor proposes to work in. The post announcing its Guardian of Liberty statue was the first time the foundry proposed working in titanium, but since then it has made copious references to this plan. In July 2025, it even outlined a proposed method for using explosives to create “thousands of gigantic titanium sculptures” at pace.
So far, there’s little to suggest the foundry has ever produced anything in titanium beyond the garish AI images it puts out. Titanium is a stronger metal than bronze, and much more difficult to work with, requiring specialist tools and high-tech machinery. Given the Atelier’s difficulties even working with bronze—Atelier Missor’s methods have in the past proved unable to cater to high volumes of orders, leading to missed deliveries—it is difficult to see how it would suddenly master a material orders of magnitude more complex.
And yet, the foundry is pressing ahead. The busts have quietly disappeared from its website, and the foundry’s website is no longer accepting commercial orders, which seems to signal that the Atelier is going all in on large-scale monuments. Whether this represents strategic ambition or simple necessity is unclear. But it’s clear that given the foundry’s legal disputes, financial precarity, and administrative obstacles, it won’t be able to deliver on its grand ambitions.
The distance between Atelier Missor’s rhetoric and its material capacities is impossible to ignore. The foundry casts itself as the heir to an ancient civilizational tradition, yet operates more like a content studio than a serious workshop. Burrow down into its social media feeds, and the whole operation starts to seem little more than a carefully staged performance of cultural revival, the anachronisms of the workers’ garb and sculptural subjects being merely a form of cosplay. For now, at least, that is their most successful, truly grandiose creation.
