A book of bridges

by Walter Shaw Sparrow

Students are tested and judged by their attitude to controversies. Common sense should keep them from partisanship; and when they feel tempted to look on as mere spectators, they should remember that crowds at boxing matches are very apt to form wrong opinions. It is better by far to laugh at both sides by caricaturing the weak points of a discussion. In a few days a student will learn which side is the more difficult to caricature, and this knowledge will help him to sift all rubbish from a controversy and to form a judgment of his own on facts and on inferences. As Sir Thomas Browne said, a man should be something that all men are not, and individual in somewhat beside his person and his name.

The bridges at Albi and Espalion have caused some men to break old friendships over a simple question, namely: “When were pointed arches used for the first time in French bridges? At what date were they brought from the East?” As the pointed arch was copied by Europeans, not invented by them, the precise date of the mimicry ought not to excite a pontist; it is a thing for antiquaries to be flurried about. If the question ran in another form: “Was the pointed arch in French bridges an independent discovery?” then a battle and some exploded reputations would be worth while. But no such hypothesis has been put forward by either side in a warm dispute. One party declares that as early as the time of Charlemagne, towards the end of the eighth century, or the beginning of the ninth (768-814), a French builder seems to have played the part of the sedulous ape to Eastern architecture, cribbing the pointed arch, and using it without much skill in the bridge of Espalion, whose construction (as documents prove incontestably) was ordered by Charlemagne himself. In this bald statement there is no challenge, no provocation; it is nothing more than a conjecture supported by a documented fact.

If Charlemagne had been a weak ruler, like Louis the Indolent, it would be fair to suppose that his commands were neglected more often than obeyed; then we could not accept his character as a fact of greater value in a controversy than a command of his mentioned in authentic documents. Let us say that the Black Prince or his father ordered a bridge to be built at a given place; we have documents to prove this, and at the place named in the documents a very old bridge is extant. Should we not read these documents by the light of the reputation won by the Black Prince or by his father? Myself, I should say at once, “His orders were obeyed.” And so, too, in the case of Charlemagne. I accept his character as a guarantee that he was obeyed at Espalion; and in this I am supported by Charlemagne’s general attitude to roads and bridges. It was he who made many an effort to keep the highways in repair, trying to rescue them from the great disorder into which their administration had been thrown by the decline and fall of the Romans. He created the right to exact tolls, and sanctioned on the roads the use of statute labour and of fatigue duty done by soldiers. During his reign of forty-six years he restored much Roman work and set in movement a system that did not overtax the poor finances of his Empire; but after his death the Empire was divided and continual wars put an end to civil advancement.

As Charlemagne needed a bridge at Espalion we may believe that a bridge was built there between the years 768 and 814. Does the bridge still exist, or was it rebuilt in the twelfth century, or later? There is no evidence on these points; hence the controversy. Those who think it possible, if not probable, that the bridge as it is now, apart from periodical repairs, belongs to Charlemagne’s reign, draw arguments from the uncouth workmanship; and even their opponents admit that the bridge is “une œuvre barbare n’offrant absolument aucun intérêt: a barbaric work without any interest at all”[23] (as architecture). Why, then, should any Frenchman wish to assign this barbaric bridge to a much later century than the eighth? Ah! Here we touch once again the influence of conventions. A belief current among antiquaries has connected the pointed arch with the first Crusade, and so with the last decade of the eleventh century (1095) and the first years of the twelfth. Godfrey of Bouillon, on July 15, 1099, was made King of Jerusalem, and before this date many Crusaders had returned home. M. Degrand says: “At this time, about the year 1100, Crusaders returned to France after their stay in the East, notably at Antioch, where monuments of Persian origin must have been numerous; and without doubt they brought home with them sufficient knowledge to introduce the pointed vault into the national architecture. Thus it is easy to understand why the twelfth century has been chosen as the date for the earliest work done in France with the pointed style. We conjecture, then, that the bridges at Espalion and Albi, in their present state, have not the antiquity which supposition has given to them; and that they must have been rebuilt (ils ont dû être reconstruits) after the periods from which their first construction dates.”

FAMOUS BRIDGE AT ESPALION IN FRANCE
SAID TO DATE FROM THE EIGHTH CENTURY

This argument has a tongue and no legs. Even Nature in the Pont d’Arc at Ardèche had given a pointed arch to France;[24] and how can we dare to suppose that no traveller from the East in the time of Charlemagne could have brought with him to Espalion any knowledge of pointed arches? Was this knowledge guarded so carefully that nothing less than a Crusade could bring it to France? Intelligent soldiers would certainly note the details of Eastern architecture, and when they returned home their talk and their tales would be listened to with eagerness by French craftsmen. More than this we have no right to believe. It is mere hollow claptrap to argue that no French architect or builder could have received earlier news of the pointed arches. But claptrap—is it not the drum of controversy? It makes a great noise, and gives men heart to fight for poor beliefs.

So irrational has this controversy become that even M. Degrand, a most thoughtful pontist as a rule, includes the bridge at Albi in his defective argument, though it cannot be older than the year 1035, because at this date its construction was arranged at a great public meeting held by the Seigneur of Albi and the clergy. Not even then was it possible for a Frenchman to know that pointed arches were common in the East! M. Degrand accepts the date 1035, and thinks it probable that the building was “begun” then or a few years later; “but,” he adds, “we have no proof that the bridge existed before 1178, in which year, according to a contemporary document, a body of troops used it to cross the Tarn.” If M. Degrand were able to prove that Albi Bridge was new in the year 1178, then we should forget his conventional belief in the first Crusade; a fact would be very welcome after his parade of idle suppositions. Further, the meeting of 1035 must guide us until we know that its decision was not carried into action. It is a policy of evasion to argue as follows: “In the Middle Ages building projects were often delayed, as in the case of the noble brick bridge at Montauban;[25] so we cannot attach any importance to the meeting of 1035 at Albi. Though the desire to have a bridge was approved then by the Seigneur, by the clergy and by the people, yet a hundred and one things may have intervened between the project and its realisation. In 1178 a bridge at Albi was strong enough to be used without risk by troops, but why connect it with the meeting of 1035? To do so would be rash indeed, since our aim is to add a pointed arch to the cross worn by the Crusaders.”

So we turn to the evidence of workmanship; and here again we can shoot at M. Degrand with his own bullets. To show that Albi Bridge is a clumsy structure without art is to prove it unworthy of the year 1178, when the Pontist Friars were active in France, and when at Avignon the genius of Saint Bénézet was planning a wonderful achievement. The more just fault we can find with Albi Bridge as a piece of building, the more fit we make it for the year 1035. Yet M. Degrand, passing from wayward controversy into art-criticism, gives himself away in an excess of fault-finding. He forgets that the bridge, a bad model as architecture, is uncommonly picturesque, and he writes as follows: “There are seven pointed arches, and their spans vary—without order or regulation—from 9 m. 75 c. to 16 m.; the piers in bulk are variable also, some of them being 6 m. 50 c. thick, that is to say, two-thirds of the adjacent voids; they are badly aligned and the spandrils belong almost all to different planes. The breakwaters jut out too far, and meet the current with angles of even less than forty-five degrees; while the buttresses behind, on the down-stream side, are rectangular and almost without projection. Last of all, there is no ornament to dress the nude spandrils and to set them apart from the parapets. C’est là, en fait, une œuvre barbare....”