Here are the two key events you’re referring to, with the exact years:
1 France gave the United States the Statue of Liberty
◦ The statue was officially presented as a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States on July 4, 1884 in Paris.
◦ It was then disassembled, shipped to the US, and formally dedicated in New York Harbor on October 28, 1886.
So the gift happened in the 1880s (1884–1886).
2 France “asked for their gold” back from the United States
This refers to French President Charles de Gaulle demanding that the United States redeem large amounts of US dollars held by France in actual physical gold instead of keeping dollars under the Bretton Woods system.
◦ France began converting dollars to gold aggressively in the mid-1960s.
◦ The most famous episode was in 1965–1967: de Gaulle openly criticized the dollar’s privileged status and sent French warships to New York to pick up gold from the Federal Reserve.
◦ The pressure continued until President Nixon suspended dollar-to-gold convertibility entirely on August 15, 1971 (the “Nixon Shock”), effectively ending the Bretton Woods gold-exchange standard.
Timeline summary:
• Statue of Liberty gifted: 1884–1886
• France demanded/converted its dollars back into U.S. gold: 1965–1968 (peak pressure)
→ Roughly 80 years apart.
The contrast is often used humorously or critically online: “France gave America the Statue of Liberty in the 1880s… and then in the 1960s basically said ‘Okay, now give us our gold back.’”