Pont des Arts

The bridge of Arts (or the footbridge of Arts ) is a Pont located at Paris and crossing the the Seine. It connects the Institut of France and the square court of the palate of the Louvre (which was called “palate of Arts” under the First Empire).

History

Between 1802 and 1804, a footbridge of nine arches in cast iron reserved to the pedestrians is built with the site of the current bridge of Arts: it is the first metallic bridge of Paris. This innovation is due to the first consul Napoleon Bonaparte, according to an English realization. The engineers Louis-Alexandre de Cessart and Jacques Dillon design this footbridge to resemble a hanging garden, with shrubs, vats of flowers and benches. In 1852, following the widening of the Quay Conti, the two arches of left bank become only one arch.

In 1976, the general inspector of the Bridges and Chaussées brings back the brittleness of the work, mainly due to the bombardments of 1918 and 1944 and to several collisions of boats in 1961 and 1970. The bridge will be closed with circulation in 1977 and will crumble indeed on 60 m in 1979 at the time of a last shock with a barge.

Bridge current has be rebuilt between 1981 and 1984 “with identical” according to plans of Louis Arretche, which decreased the number of the arches (seven instead of nine), which allows their alignment on those of the New Pont, while taking again the aspect of the old footbridge. The footbridge was inaugurated by Jacques Chirac - then mayor of Paris - the June 27th 1984.

Being used sometimes as place of exposure, it is today a place attracting the painters, Dessinateur S and Photographe S (for his single point of view), but also the amateurs of Pique-nique S lasting the summer.

Film

the Bridge of Arts is also a French film carried out by Eugene Green, with Natacha Régnier and Denis Podalydès.

He reports an impossible history of love between two young people who never meet. The action proceeds in Paris between 1979 and 1980, i.e. at the time of the collapse of the footbridge. The film was presented in 2004 to the 57e International festival of film of Locarno, Cinéastes section of the present.

Quotation

“I am on the bridge of Arts in Paris. On a side of the Seine one sees the harmonious and sober frontage of the Institute, built about 1670 to be a college. On other bank, Louvre, built since the Middle Ages until the nineteenth century: a top of the classical architecture, splendid and balanced. Upstream one sees the top of Notre-Dame who is perhaps not the cathedral more attracting, but surely the frontage most rigorously intellectual of all the Gothic art. The houses which skirt the quays of the river show also in a rational way and human what should be the architecture of the cities. Opposite these houses, under the trees, the boxes of the secondhand booksellers are aligned where generations of amateurs gave free course to this pastime of cultivated man: to collect the books. For a hundred and fifty years, the pupils of the Art schools have passed on this bridge to go to study chief-of works of Louvre; return in their workshops, they discuss and dream to do something which is worthy of the great tradition. And on this bridge, since Henry James, how much pilgrims from America they stopped to breathe the perfume of a culture to the remote roots, conscious of feeling in the center even civilization. ”

Kenneth Clark, Civilization , (1969), transl. france Hermann, 1974.

Song

Georges Brassens in his song the Wind (on the album in love ones with the public benches in 1954) referred to the wind which blows on the bridge:

If, by chance

On the bridge of Arts

You cross the wind, the wind rascal

Prudenc', take guard with your underskirt

If, by chance

On the bridge of Arts

You cross the wind, the wind maraud

Prudent, take guard with your hat

External bonds

Site of the town hall of Paris
Insecula
Bridge of Arts on Structurae

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