Napoleon III called upon Viollet-le-Duc for a wide variety of archeological and architectural tasks. When he wished to put up a monument to mark the Battle of Alesia, where Julius Caesar defeated the Gauls, a battle whose actual site was disputed by historians, he asked Viollet-le-Duc to locate the exact battlefield. Viollet-le-Duc conducted excavations at various purported sites, and finally found vestiges of the walls that Caesar had built. He also designed the metal frame for the six-metre-high statue that would be placed on the site. He later designed a similar frame for a much larger statue, the Statue of Liberty, but died before that statue was finished.