The sculpted allegory invaded public spaces and bourgeois interiors alike from the midnineteenth century onwards. The phenomenon was paradoxical, as statuary and allegory were both discredited at this time. The crisis that affected them was primarily an aesthetic one. Romanticism promoted the symbolic and Baudelaire stigmatised this “art of the Caribbean” that was sculpture. Its disrepute was likewise political. After having triumphed during the Revolution, allegorical statuary seemed unsuited to the embodiment of republican ideals in 1848. A close look at the Saint-Michel fountain allows us to advance the hypothesis that allegory acquired a symbolic function at the start of the Second Empire. Erected in the heart of new Paris upon the ruins of the June 1848 combats, the fountain places both city and nation under the protection of a victorious archangel. He has defeated the devil, an incarnation of the social republic, and he is flanked by the two chimera of the “bogus political systems”. This meaning, as interpreted by Jules Castagnary, would not have been perceived by the crowds of passers-by. The omnipresent allegory became a piece of ornamental merchandise at the forefront of shops or in public squares, one of the “phantasmagoria” described by Walter Benjamin.