Description of the attraction
"The Carrusel Bridge" is the name of one of Rilke's poems. It does not speak of a bridge, but of a blind man standing on it, but without a name it is impossible to understand the tragedy of the plot. Because the blind man stands on the bridge leading to the Louvre, that is, in the very center of Paris, in the center of beauty that he does not see.
Rilke wrote about the old, unreconstructed Carrusel Bridge, but it doesn't matter - the place was almost the same. The crossing opposite the Carrousel Arch was built by the royal decree of Louis-Philippe I of 1831. The construction was entrusted to the engineer Antoine-Rémy Polonso, a man with a passion for innovation and thoughtful risk-taking. At that time, most of the Parisian bridges were hanging, but he installed an arched one, while using a relatively new material - cast iron combined with wood. The pillars of the structure were decorated with large cast-iron rings, which Parisians immediately began to ironically call napkin rings. At each corner of the bridge, on high pedestals, were stone allegorical sculptures in the classical style by Louis Petito - female figures depicting Industry, Abundance, Paris and the Seine.
In 1883, the bridge was closed for six months to renew the wooden elements. Even then, experts recommended replacing them with iron ones, but they did this only in 1906, using reinforced concrete. Despite the restoration, the bridge, too narrow and too low, is obsolete for the twentieth century. It was decided to build a new one by slightly moving it.
The engineers Henri Lange and Jacques Moran, who developed the project, tried to preserve the silhouette of the old bridge, already familiar to the townspeople. In addition, they abandoned the use of metal due to the close proximity of ancient buildings - the Louvre, Pont-Neuf and Pont-Royal. Thus, the three-arch Carrousel Bridge, leading directly to the Louvre gate, does not look modern. Although reinforced concrete, it is faced with stone, and at the entrances to it, the carefully preserved Industry, Abundance, Paris and the Seine still stand on their pedestals.
