Pont Royal | |
---|---|
Coordinates | 48°51′36.35″N02°19′47.56″E / 48.8600972°N 2.3298778°E |
Carries | Motor vehicles, pedestrians, and bicycles |
Crosses | The Seine River |
Locale | Paris, France |
Next upstream | Pont du Carrousel |
Next downstream | Passerelle Léopold -Sédar-Senghor |
Characteristics | |
Design | Arch Bridge |
Total length | 110 m |
Width | 17 m [1] |
History | |
Construction start | 1685 |
Construction end | 1689 |
Statistics | |
Toll | Free both ways |
Location | |
The Pont Royal is a bridge crossing the river Seine in Paris. It is the third oldest bridge in Paris, after the Pont Neuf and the Pont Marie.
The Pont Royal links the Right Bank by the Pavillon de Flore with the Left Bank of Paris between rue du Bac and the rue de Beaune. The bridge is constructed with five elliptical arches en plein cintre. A hydrographic ladder, indicating floods' highest level in Paris, is visible on the last pier nearest each bank.
Located near the Métro station: Tuileries . |
In 1632, the entrepreneur Pierre Pidou directed the construction of a wooden toll-bridge which would be called Pont Sainte-Anne (in deference to Anne of Austria) or Pont Rouge (due to its color). It was designed to replace the Tuileries ferry upon which the rue du Bac (bac meaning ferry in French) owes its name. The ferry had been offering crossings since 1550. Fragile, this bridge of fifteen arches would be repaired for the first time in 1649, completely redone two years later, burnt in 1654, flooded in 1656, completely rebuilt in 1660, propped up in 1673 and finally carried away by a flood in February 1684. Madame de Sévigné reported that this last incident caused the loss of eight of the bridge's arches.
The bridge was finally reconstructed between 25 October 1685 and 13 June 1689, this time with stone, receiving complete financing from King Louis XIV. It was the king who gave it the name Pont Royal. Louvois, director of the Bâtiments du Roi, charged Jacques Gabriel, Jules Hardouin-Mansart and François Romain with the construction project. In the 18th century, the bridge was a popular meeting place for various festivities and celebrations.
At the time of the French Revolution, in the period following the fall of the monarchy on 10 August 1792 and the beginning of the First French Empire in 1804 - the name of Pont Royal was changed to Pont National. During that period, General Napoléon Bonaparte (future Napoléon I, Emperor of the French) had cannons installed on the bridge in order to protect the Convention Nationale and the Committee of Public Safety, housed in the Tuileries Palace.
During the First French Empire (1804-1814), Napoléon I renamed the bridge the Pont des Tuileries, a name that was kept until the Restoration in 1814 when Louis XVIII gave back to the bridge its royal name.
The bridge underwent a last reconstruction in 1850. In 1939, it was classified as a monument historique . [2]
In 2005, the Pont Royal was illuminated by lights at night as one of the Paris Olympic Bid highlights.
Île de la Cité, 22.5 hectares in size, is one of two natural islands in the Seine, in central Paris. In the 4th century, it was the site of the fortress of the area governor for the Roman Empire. In 508, Clovis I, the first King of the Franks, established his palace on the island. In the 12th century, it became an important religious center, the home of Notre-Dame cathedral, and the royal chapel of Sainte-Chapelle, as well as the city hospital, the Hôtel-Dieu. It is also the site of the city's oldest surviving bridge, the Pont Neuf.
The oldest traces of human occupation in Paris are human bones and evidence of an encampment of hunter-gatherers dating from about 8000 BC, during the Mesolithic period.
The Tuileries Palace was a royal and imperial palace in Paris which stood on the right bank of the River Seine, directly in front of the Louvre. It was the usual Parisian residence of most French monarchs, from Henry IV to Napoleon III, until it was burned by the Paris Commune in 1871.
The following is a timeline of the history of the city of Paris, France.
Vernon is a commune in the French department of Eure, administrative region of Normandy, northern France.
The Louvre Palace, often referred to simply as the Louvre, is an iconic French palace located on the Right Bank of the Seine in Paris, occupying a vast expanse of land between the Tuileries Gardens and the church of Saint-Germain l'Auxerrois. Originally a defensive castle, it has served several government-related functions in the past, including intermittently as a royal residence between the 14th and 18th centuries. It is now mostly used by the Louvre Museum, which first opened there in 1793.
The Pont de Sully is a bridge across the Seine in Paris, France.
The Pont du Carrousel is a bridge in Paris, which spans the River Seine between the Quai des Tuileries and the Quai Voltaire.
Pont d'Iéna is a bridge spanning the River Seine in Paris. It links the Eiffel Tower on the Left Bank to the district of Trocadéro on the Right Bank.
The Pavillon de Flore, part of the Louvre Palace in Paris, France, stands at the southwest end of the Louvre, near the Pont Royal. It was originally constructed in 1607–1610, during the reign of Henry IV, as the corner pavilion between the Tuileries Palace to the north and the Louvre's Grande Galerie to the east. The pavilion was entirely redesigned and rebuilt by Hector-Martin Lefuel in 1864–1868 in a highly decorated Second Empire style. Arguably the most famous sculpture on the exterior of the Louvre, Jean-Baptiste Carpeaux's Triumph of Flora, was added below the central pediment of the south façade at this time. The Tuileries Palace was burned by the Paris Commune in 1871, and a north façade, similar to the south façade, was added to the pavilion by Lefuel in 1874–1879. Currently, the Pavillon de Flore is part of the Louvre Museum.
The Rue du Bac is a street in the 7th arrondissement of Paris. The street, which is 1,150 m long, begins at the junction of the quais Voltaire and Anatole-France and ends at the Rue de Sèvres.
The Pont Notre-Dame is a bridge that crosses the Seine in Paris, France linking the quai de Gesvres on the Rive Droite with the quai de la Corse on the Île de la Cité. The bridge is noted for being the "most ancient" in Paris, in the sense that, while the oldest bridge in Paris that is in its original state is undoubtedly the Pont Neuf, a bridge in some form has existed at the site of the Pont Notre-Dame since antiquity; nonetheless, it has been destroyed and reconstructed numerous times, a fact referred to in the Latin inscription on it to honor its Italian architect, Fra Giovanni Giocondo. The bridge once was lined with approximately sixty houses, the weight of which caused a collapse in 1499.
The Pont de la Concorde is an arch bridge across the Seine in Paris connecting the Quai des Tuileries at the Place de la Concorde and the Quai d'Orsay. It has formerly been known as the "Pont Louis XVI", "Pont de la Révolution", "Pont de la Concorde", "Pont Louis XVI" again during the Bourbon Restoration (1814); in 1830, its name was changed again to Pont de la Concorde, the name it has retained to this day. It is served by the Metro stations Assemblée nationale and Concorde.
This article presents the main landmarks in the city of Paris within administrative limits, divided by its 20 arrondissements. Landmarks located in the suburbs of Paris, outside of its administrative limits, while within the metropolitan area are not included in this article.
First Consul Napoleon Bonaparte moved into the Tuileries Palace on 19 February 1800 and immediately began to re-establish calm and order after the years of uncertainty and terror of the Revolution. He made peace with the Catholic Church; masses were held again in the Cathedral of Notre Dame, priests were allowed to wear ecclesiastical clothing again, and churches to ring their bells. To re-establish order in the unruly city, he abolished the elected position of the Mayor of Paris, and replaced it with a Prefect of the Seine and a Prefect of Police, both appointed by him. Each of the twelve arrondissements had its own mayor, but their power was limited to enforcing the decrees of Napoleon's ministers.
During the Restoration of the Bourbon monarchy (1815–1830) that followed the downfall of Napoleon, Paris was ruled by a royal government which tried to reverse many of the changes made to the city during the French Revolution. The city grew in population from 713,966 in 1817 to 785,866 in 1831. During the period Parisians saw the first public transport system, the first gas street lights, and the first uniformed Paris policemen. In July 1830, a popular uprising in the streets of Paris brought down the Bourbon monarchy and began reign of a constitutional monarch, Louis-Philippe.
The expansion of the Louvre under Napoleon III in the 1850s, known at the time and until the 1980s as the Nouveau Louvre or Louvre de Napoléon III, was an iconic project of the Second French Empire and a centerpiece of its ambitious transformation of Paris. Its design was initially produced by Louis Visconti and, after Visconti's death in late 1853, modified and executed by Hector-Martin Lefuel. It represented the completion of a centuries-long project, sometimes referred to as the grand dessein, to connect the old Louvre Palace around the Cour Carrée with the Tuileries Palace to the west. Following the Tuileries' arson at the end of the Paris Commune in 1871 and demolition a decade later, Napoleon III's nouveau Louvre became the eastern end of Paris's axe historique centered on the Champs-Élysées.
The Pavillon de Marsan or Marsan Pavilion was built in the 1660s as the northern end of the Tuileries Palace in Paris, and reconstructed in the 1870s after the Tuileries burned down at the end of the Paris Commune. Following the completion of the joining of the Louvre and the Tuileries in the 1850s and the demolition of the Tuileries' remains in the early 1880s, it is now the northwestern tip of the Louvre Palace. Since 1897 it has been part of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, a separate institution from the Louvre.
This article was mainly derived from the French Article of the same name.