The Pont St-Michel we see to-day was built in 1857. The first bridge there, joining the mainland to the island on the Seine, was constructed towards the close of the fourteenth century. That bridge and two successive ones were destroyed by fire.
Pont-au-Change, the Money-changers’ Bridge, was in olden days a wooden construction which went by the names Pont de la Marchandise and Pont-aux-Oiseaux. Jewellers as well as money-changers plied their trade along its planks, perhaps also bird merchants. It was a little higher up the river in its early twelfth century days and was often flooded. It was badly burnt, too, more than once; then in the seventeenth century was entirely rebuilt of stone, and bronze statues of the royal family, Louis XIII, Louis XIV as a child, and Anne d’Autriche, set up there. In the century following the houses upon it were all cleared away and in 1858 it was again rebuilt.
The Petit-Pont joins the Île to the left bank at the very same spot where the Romans made a bridge across the river, one of two which spanned the Seine in their day, and on beyond. Like all town bridges of the Middle Ages it was made of wood and each side thickly built upon by houses and shops; windmills, too, stood on this ancient bridge, grinding corn for the citizens around. And where we now see the Place du Petit-Pont there stood a wooden tower, la Tour de Bois, erected to protect the bridge against the invading Normans. At the Musée Carnavalet an ancient inscription may be seen, recording the names of twelve warriors who fought here to defend their city, led by Gozlin, bishop of Paris, in 886. In the twelfth century Maurice de Sully, the builder of Notre-Dame, rebuilt the bridge in stone, but flood and fire laid it in ruins time after time. The last destructive fire was in the spring of 1718. It was then rebuilt minus its wooden houses. The present structure dates from 1853. The place was built in 1782, when the Petit Châtelet, which had succeeded the Tour de Bois, was razed. In Rue du Petit-Pont we see some old houses on the odd number side. Many were demolished when the street was widened a few years ago.
The other bridge of Roman times, succeeding no doubt a rude primitive bridge, stretched where the Pont Notre-Dame now spans the river. The Roman bridge, built on staves, was overthrown by the Normans in 861. Rebuilt as Pont Notre-Dame in 1413, it crashed to pieces some eighty years later, carrying down with it the house of a famous printer of the day. It was alternatively destroyed and rebuilt several times till its last reconstruction in 1853. Its houses were the first in France to be numbered (1507). There were sixty-eight of them and the numbering was done in gold or gilded ciphers. All these old houses were pulled down in 1786. Pont Notre-Dame was the “bridge of honour.” Sovereigns coming to Paris in state crossed it to enter the city. Close up to it stood for nearly two hundred years—1670 to 1856—the Pompe Notre-Dame, from which all the fountains of the district were supplied with water.
Pont d’Arcole, built as we now see it in 1854, succeeded a wooden bridge erected in 1828 with the name Pont de la Grève, commonly called Pont de la Balance. It gained its present name, recalling Napoléon’s victory of 1796, in the Revolution of 1830, when a youth at the head of a band of insurgents rushed upon the bridge waving the tricolor and shouting: “If I die, remember my name is Arcole.”
Pont-au-Double, so called because to cross it passengers paid a double toll for the benefit of the Hôtel-Dieu, is a nineteenth-century construction, replacing the original bridge of the name built in the sixteenth century, a little higher up the river.
Pont de l’Archevêché dates from 1828. Pont St-Louis, joining l’Île de la Cité to l’Île St-Louis, was built in 1614 as a wooden bridge painted red and called, therefore, Pont-Rouge. Like all wooden erections of the age, it was damaged by fire, and in the eighteenth century at the time of the Revolution, “icebergs” on the Seine knocked it over. An iron footbridge was put up in its place and remained till 1862, when the bridge we see was built.
Pont Louis-Philippe was built in the same year to replace a suspension bridge paying toll.
Pont de la Tournelle, built as we see it in 1851, began as a wooden bridge of fourteenth-century erection.[I]
Pont Marie was not, as one might suppose, named in honour of the Virgin, nor after Marie de’ Medici, who laid its first stone. It simply records the name of its constructor, who was “Entrepreneur-Général des Ponts de France” at the time. Fifty houses were built upon it. Some were destroyed by floods a few years later, others razed in 1788. The two Ponts de Sully are, except Pont de Tolbiac, the most modern of Paris bridges, built some years after the Franco-Prussian war, replacing two older bridges of slight importance. Pont d’Austerlitz dates from 1806, the year of the great battle. When the Emperor fell the Allies demanded the suppression of the name, and the French Government of the day called the bridge Pont du Jardin du Roi, referring to the Jardin des Plantes in its vicinity (see [p. 155]). The name did not catch on. The people would have none of it. It has remained a reminder of Napoléon’s victory. It has been enlarged more than once, the last time in 1885. Pont de Bercy was built in 1835, rebuilt 1864. Pont de Tolbiac, in 1895. Pont National, a footbridge, in 1853.