Les Invalides
Les Invalides, formally the Hôtel national des Invalides, or as Hôtel des Invalides, is a complex of buildings in the 7th arrondissement of Paris, containing museums and monuments, all relating to the military history of France, as well as a hospital and a retirement home for war veterans, the building's original purpose. The buildings house the Musée de l'Armée, the military museum of the Army of France, the Musée des Plans-Reliefs, the Musée d'Histoire Contemporaine, as well as the Dôme des Invalides, a large church, the tallest in Paris at a height of 107 meters, with the tombs of some of France's war heroes, most notably Napoleon. Louis XIV initiated the project by an order dated 24 November 1670, as a home and hospital for aged and unwell soldiers: the name is a shortened form of hôpital des invalides; the architect of Les Invalides was Libéral Bruant. The selected site was in the suburban plain of Grenelle. By the time the enlarged project was completed in 1676, the river front measured 196 metres and the complex had fifteen courtyards, the largest being the cour d'honneur for military parades.
It was felt that the veterans required a chapel. Jules Hardouin-Mansart assisted the aged Bruant, the chapel was finished in 1679 to Bruant's designs after the elder architect's death; this chapel was known as Église Saint-Louis des Invalides, daily attendance of the veterans in the church services was required. Shortly after the veterans' chapel was completed, Louis XIV commissioned Mansart to construct a separate private royal chapel referred to as the Église du Dôme from its most striking feature; the domed chapel was finished in 1708. Because of its location and significance, the Invalides served as the scene for several key events in French history. On 14 July 1789 it was stormed by Parisian rioters who seized the cannons and muskets stored in its cellars to use against the Bastille the same day. Napoleon was entombed under the dome of the Invalides with great ceremony in 1840. In December 1894 the degradation of Captain Alfred Dreyfus was held before the main building, while his subsequent rehabilitation ceremony took place in a courtyard of the complex in 1906.
The building retained its primary function of a retirement home and hospital for military veterans until the early twentieth century. In 1872 the musée d'artillerie was located within the building to be joined by the musée historique des armées in 1896; the two institutions were merged to form the present musée de l'armée in 1905. At the same time the veterans in residence were dispersed to smaller centres outside Paris; the reason was that the adoption of a conscript army, after 1872, meant a substantial reduction in the numbers of veterans having the twenty or more years of military service required to enter the Hôpital des Invalides. The building accordingly became too large for its original purpose; the modern complex does however still include the facilities detailed below for about a hundred elderly or incapacitated former soldiers. On the north front of Les Invalides, Hardouin-Mansart's chapel dome is large enough to dominate the long façade, yet harmonizes with Bruant's door under an arched pediment.
To the north, the courtyard is extended by a wide public esplanade where the embassies of Austria and Finland are neighbors of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, all forming one of the grand open spaces in the heart of Paris. At its far end, the Pont Alexandre III links this grand urbanistic axis with the Petit Palais and the Grand Palais; the Pont des Invalides is downstream the Seine river. The buildings still comprise the Institution Nationale des Invalides, a national institution for disabled war veterans; the institution comprises: a retirement home a medical and surgical centre a centre for external medical consultations. In 1676, Jules Hardouin-Mansart was commissioned to construct a place of worship on the site, he designed a building. In this way, the King and his soldiers could attend mass while entering the place of worship though different entrances, as prescribed by court etiquette; this separation was reinforced in the 19th century with the erection of the tomb of Napoleon I, the creation of the two separate altars and with the construction of a glass wall between the two chapels.
When the Army Museum at Les Invalides was founded in 1905, the veterans' chapel was placed under its administrative control. It is now the cathedral of the Diocese of the French Armed Forces known as Cathédrale Saint-Louis-des-Invalides; the Dôme des Invalides is a large former church in the centre of the Les Invalides complex, 107 metres high. The dôme was designated to become Napoleon's funeral place by a law dated 10 June 1840. Ousted in 1815 by the allied armies, Napoleon had stayed so popular in France that Louis-Philippe, the King of France from 1830 to 1848, returned his "ashes" in 1840; the excavation and erection of the crypt, which modified the interior of the domed church, took twenty years to complete and was finished in 1861. Inspired by St. Peter's Basilica in Rome, the original for all baroque domes, the Dôme des Invalides is one of the triumphs of French Baroque architecture. Mansart raised its drum with an attic storey over its main cornice, employed the paired columns motif in his more complicated rhythmic theme.
The ge
Sorbonne
The Sorbonne is a building in the Latin Quarter of Paris, the historical house of the former University of Paris. Today, it houses part or all of several higher education and research institutions such as Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Sorbonne Nouvelle University, Paris Descartes University, École pratique des hautes études, Sorbonne University; the name is derived from the Collège de Sorbonne, founded in 1257 by the eponymous Robert de Sorbon as one of the first significant colleges of the medieval University of Paris. The library was among the first to arrange items alphabetically according to title; the university predates the college by about a century, minor colleges had been founded during the late 12th century. During the 16th century, the Sorbonne became involved with the intellectual struggle between Catholics and Protestants; the University served as a major stronghold of Catholic conservative attitudes and, as such, conducted a struggle against King Francis I's policy of relative tolerance towards the French Protestants, except for a brief period during 1533 when the University was placed under Protestant control.
The Collège de Sorbonne was suppressed during the French Revolution, reopened by Napoleon in 1808 and closed in 1882. This was only one of the many colleges of the University of Paris that existed until the French revolution. Hastings Rashdall, in The Universities of Europe in the Middle Ages, still a standard reference on the topic, lists some 70 colleges of the university from the Middle Ages alone. With time, the college came to be the main French institution for theological studies and "Sorbonne" was used as a synonym for the Paris Faculty of Theology despite being only one of many colleges of the university. After months of conflicts between students and authorities at the University of Paris at Nanterre, the administration closed that university on May 2, 1968. Students at the Sorbonne campus in Paris met on May 3 to protest against the closure and the threatened expulsion of several students at Nanterre. On May 6, the national student union, the Union Nationale des Étudiants de France — still the largest student union in France today — and the union of university teachers called a march to protest against the police invasion of Sorbonne.
More than 20,000 students and other supporters marched towards the Sorbonne, still sealed off by the police, who charged, wielding their batons, as soon as the marchers approached. While the crowd dispersed, some began to make barricades out of whatever was at hand, while others threw paving stones, forcing the police to retreat for a time; the police responded with tear gas and charged the crowd again. Hundreds of students were arrested. May 10 marked the "Night of Barricades," where students used cars and cobblestones to barricade the streets of the Latin Quarter. Brutal street fighting ensued between students and riot police, most notably on Rue Gay-Lussac. Early the next morning, as the fighting disbanded, Daniel Cohn-Bendit sent out a radio broadcast calling for a general strike. On Monday, 13 May, more than one million workers went on strike and the students declared that the Sorbonne was "open to the public". Negotiations ended, students returned to their campuses after a false report that the government had agreed to reopen them, only to discover police still occupying the schools.
When the Sorbonne reopened, students occupied it and declared it an autonomous "People's University". During the weeks that followed 401 popular action committees were established in Paris and elsewhere to document grievances against the government and French society, including the Occupation Committee of the Sorbonne. In 1970, the University of Paris was divided into thirteen universities, managed by a common rectorate, the Chancellerie des Universités de Paris, with offices in the Sorbonne. Three of those universities maintain facilities in the historical building of the Sorbonne, thus have the word in their name: Panthéon-Sorbonne University, Sorbonne Nouvelle University and Paris-Sorbonne University. Paris Descartes University uses the Sorbonne building; the building houses the École Nationale des Chartes, the École pratique des hautes études, the Cours de Civilisation Française de la Sorbonne and the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne. The Sorbonne Chapel was classified as a French historic monument in 1887.
The amphitheatre and the entire building complex became monuments in 1975. Despite being a valued brand, the Sorbonne universities did not register their names as trademarks until the 1990s. Over the following years, they established partnerships, merging projects and associated institutions with the name Sorbonne, sometimes triggering conflicts over the usage and ownership of the name. Listing of the works of Alexandre Falguière List of works by Henri Chapu La Sorbonne
Statue of Liberty
The Statue of Liberty is a colossal neoclassical sculpture on Liberty Island in New York Harbor in New York, in the United States. The copper statue, a gift from the people of France to the people of the United States, was designed by French sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi and its metal framework was built by Gustave Eiffel; the statue was dedicated on October 28, 1886. The Statue of Liberty is a figure of a robed Roman liberty goddess, she holds a torch above her head with her right hand, in her left hand carries a tabula ansata inscribed in Roman numerals with "JULY IV MDCCLXXVI", the date of the U. S. Declaration of Independence. A broken chain lies at her feet; the statue became an icon of freedom and of the United States, a national park tourism destination. It is a welcoming sight to immigrants arriving from abroad. Bartholdi was inspired by a French law professor and politician, Édouard René de Laboulaye, said to have commented in 1865 that any monument raised to U. S. independence would properly be a joint project of the French and U.
S. peoples. Because of the post-war instability in France, work on the statue did not commence until the early 1870s. In 1875, Laboulaye proposed that the French finance the statue and the U. S. build the pedestal. Bartholdi completed the head and the torch-bearing arm before the statue was designed, these pieces were exhibited for publicity at international expositions; the torch-bearing arm was displayed at the Centennial Exposition in Philadelphia in 1876, in Madison Square Park in Manhattan from 1876 to 1882. Fundraising proved difficult for the Americans, by 1885 work on the pedestal was threatened by lack of funds. Publisher Joseph Pulitzer, of the New York World, started a drive for donations to finish the project and attracted more than 120,000 contributors, most of whom gave less than a dollar; the statue was built in France, shipped overseas in crates, assembled on the completed pedestal on what was called Bedloe's Island. The statue's completion was marked by New York's first ticker-tape parade and a dedication ceremony presided over by President Grover Cleveland.
The statue was administered by the United States Lighthouse Board until 1901 and by the Department of War. Public access to the balcony around the torch has been barred since 1916. According to the National Park Service, the idea of a monument presented by the French people to the United States was first proposed by Édouard René de Laboulaye, president of the French Anti-Slavery Society and a prominent and important political thinker of his time; the project is traced to a mid-1865 conversation between de Laboulaye, a staunch abolitionist, Frédéric Bartholdi, a sculptor. In after-dinner conversation at his home near Versailles, Laboulaye, an ardent supporter of the Union in the American Civil War, is supposed to have said: "If a monument should rise in the United States, as a memorial to their independence, I should think it only natural if it were built by united effort—a common work of both our nations." The National Park Service, in a 2000 report, deemed this a legend traced to an 1885 fundraising pamphlet, that the statue was most conceived in 1870.
In another essay on their website, the Park Service suggested that Laboulaye was minded to honor the Union victory and its consequences, "With the abolition of slavery and the Union's victory in the Civil War in 1865, Laboulaye's wishes of freedom and democracy were turning into a reality in the United States. In order to honor these achievements, Laboulaye proposed that a gift be built for the United States on behalf of France. Laboulaye hoped that by calling attention to the recent achievements of the United States, the French people would be inspired to call for their own democracy in the face of a repressive monarchy." According to sculptor Frédéric Auguste Bartholdi, who recounted the story, Laboulaye's alleged comment was not intended as a proposal, but it inspired Bartholdi. Given the repressive nature of the regime of Napoleon III, Bartholdi took no immediate action on the idea except to discuss it with Laboulaye. Bartholdi was in any event busy with other possible projects. Sketches and models were made of the proposed work.
There was a classical precedent for the Suez proposal, the Colossus of Rhodes: an ancient bronze statue of the Greek god of the sun, Helios. This statue is believed to have been over 100 feet high, it stood at a harbor entrance and carried a light to guide ships. Both the khedive and Lesseps declined the proposed statue from Bartholdi; the Port Said Lighthouse was built instead, by François Coignet in 1869. Any large project was further delayed by the Franco-Prussian War, in which Bartholdi served as a major of militia. In the war, Napoleon III was deposed. Bartholdi's home province of Alsace was lost to the Prussians, a more liberal republic was installed in France; as Bartholdi had been planning a trip to the United States, he and Laboulaye decided the time was right to discuss the idea with influential Americans. In June 1871, Bartholdi crossed the Atlantic, with letters of introduction signed by Laboulaye. Arriving at New York Harbor, Bartholdi focused on Bedloe's Island as a site for the statu
Pont de l'Alma
Pont de l'Alma is a road bridge in Paris, France across the Seine. It was named to commemorate the Battle of Alma during the Crimean War, in which the Ottoman-Franco-British alliance achieved victory over the Russian army, on 20 September 1854. Construction of an arch bridge took place between 1854 and 1856, it was designed by Paul-Martin Gallocher de Lagalisserie and was inaugurated by Napoleon III on 2 April 1856. Each side of both of the two piers was decorated with a statue of military nature: a Zouave and a grenadier by Georges Diébolt, a skirmisher and an artilleryman by Arnaud; the general public took the original bridge as a measuring instrument for water levels in times of flooding on the Seine: access to the footpaths by the river embankments was closed when the Seine's level reached the feet of The Zouave. During the great flood of the Seine in 1910, the level reached his shoulders; the French Civil Service used the Pont de la Tournelle, not the Pont de l'Alma, to gauge flood levels, since 1868 uses the Pont d'Austerlitz.
The bridge underwent complete reconstruction as a girder bridge between 1970 and 1974, as it had been too narrow to accommodate the increasing traffic both on and below it. Only the statue of the Zouave was retained: the Skirmisher was relocated to the Gravelle Stronghold in Vincennes, the Grenadier to Dijon, the Artilleryman to La Fère; the bridge is close to the Pont de l'Alma tunnel where Diana, Princess of Wales and four others were involved in a fatal car crash on 31 August 1997. They were being chased by paparazzi, their chauffeur was driving under the influence of alcohol; the Flame of Liberty, at the bridge's north end has become an unofficial memorial to Diana. Pont de l'Alma has a width of 42 meters; the Metro station Alma - Marceau is near the north end of the bridge, RER station Pont de l'Alma near the south end. Pictures of the old and the new bridge Bridge history
Landmarks in Paris
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; the 1st arrondissement forms much of the historic centre of Paris. Place Vendôme is famous for its deluxe hotels such as Hôtel Ritz, The Westin Paris – Vendôme, Hôtel de Toulouse, Hôtel du Petit-Bourbon, Hôtel Meurice, Hôtel Regina Les Halles were Paris's central meat and produce market, since the late 1970s, are a major shopping centre; the old Halles were replaced by the Forum des Halles. The central market of Paris, the biggest wholesale food market in the world, was transferred to Rungis, in the southern suburbs; the Axe historique, is a line of monuments which begins in the first arrondissement at the center of the Louvre with equestrian statue of Louis XIV and continues through the 8th toward the west through the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, the Tuileries Gardens, the Luxor Obelisk erected in the centre of Place de la Concorde, the Champs-Élysées, the Arc de Triomphe, centred in the Place de l'Étoile circus, the Avenue de la Grande Armée, ends at the Grande Arche de la Défense outside of Paris.
The former Conciergerie prison held some prominent Ancien Régime members before their deaths during the French Revolution. Of note in the 1st arrondissement are the theatres Théâtre du Châtelet, Théâtre du Palais-Royal, squares such as Place des Pyramides, Place Dauphine, Place des Victoires and Place du Châtelet, the Comédie-Française, Galerie nationale du Jeu de Paume, the Palais de Justice and Palais-Royal; the 2nd arrondissement of Paris lies to the north of the 1st. The Boulevard des Capucines, Boulevard Montmartre, Boulevard des Italiens, Rue de Richelieu and Rue Saint-Denis are major roads running through the district; the 2nd arrondissement is the theatre district of Paris, overlapping into the 3rd, contains the Théâtre des Capucines and Théâtre-Musée des Capucines, Opéra-Comique, Théâtre des Variétés, Théâtre des Bouffes-Parisiens, Théâtre du Vaudeville and Théâtre Feydeau. Of note are the Académie Julian, Bibliothèque nationale de France, Café Anglais and Galerie Vivienne; the 3rd arrondissement is located to the northeast of the 1st.
Le Marais is a trendy district spanning the 4th arrondissements. It is architecturally well preserved, some of the oldest houses and buildings of Paris can be found there, it is a culturally open place, known for its Chinese and gay communities. The Place des Vosges, established in 1612 to celebrate the wedding of Louis XIII to Anne of Austria lies at the border of the 3rd and 4th arrondissements and is the oldest planned square in Paris, the Place de la République was named after the constitutional change in France; the 3rd arrondissement is noted for its museums such as Museum of French History, Musée Picasso, Musée de la Chasse et de la Nature, Musée Cognacq-Jay, Musée d'Art et d'Histoire du Judaïsme, Musée de la Poupée, Musée des Arts et Métiers and the Carnavalet Museum, theatres such as Théâtre Déjazet, Théâtre de la Gaîté, Théâtre du Marais. Several hotels are located in this district including Hôtel de Soubise; the 4th arrondissement is located to the east of the 1st. Place de la Bastille is a district of great historical significance, for not just Paris, but all of France.
Because of its symbolic value, the square has been a site of political demonstrations, it has a tall column commemorating the final resting place of the revolutionaries killed in 1830 and 1848. Bibliothèque de l'Arsenal, La Force Prison, Centre Georges Pompidou and Lycée Charlemagne are notable institutions here; the 12th-century cathedral Notre Dame de Paris on the Île de la Cité is one of the best-known landmarks of the 4th arrondissement, there are the Gothic 13th-century Sainte-Chapelle palace chapel, Notre-Dame-des-Blancs-Manteaux, Saint-Louis-en-l'Île, Saint-Merri, Saint-Paul-Saint-Louis, St-Gervais-et-St-Protais, Temple du Marais. Roads running through the 4th arrondissement include Rue Charlemagne, Rue de Rivoli, Rue des Francs-Bourgeois, Rue des Rosiers. There are a number of notable hotels in the district, including Hôtel de Beauvais, Hôtel de Sully, Hôtel de Sens, Hôtel de Ville, Hôtel Lambert, Hôtel Saint-Pol, a significant number of bridges, including Pont au Change, Pont au Double, Pont de Sully, Pont Louis-Philippe, Pont Marie, Pont Notre-Dame, Pont Saint-Louis, Pont Saint-Michel.
Quartier Latin is a 12th Century scholastic centre stretching between the "Left Bank's" Place Maubert and the Sorbonne campus of the University of Paris, is the oldest and one of the most famous colleges in Europe and the World. It is known for many bistros. Various higher-education establishments, such as Collège de France, Collège Sainte-Barbe, Collège international de philosophie, Sciences Po Paris, the École Normale Supérieure, Mines ParisTech, the Jussieu university campus, make it a major educational centre in Paris; the Panthéon church is where many of France's illustrious women are buried. Of note is the Arab World Institute, Musée Curie, Hotel des Trois Colleges, Jardin des Plantes, Musée national du Moyen Âge, Muséum national d'histoire naturelle Paris Mosque, Paris Observatory, Sainte-Geneviève Library, Théâtre de la Huchette; the 6th arrondissement, to the south of the centre and Seine has numerous hotels and restaurants and educational institutions. Hotels located in the district include Hôtel Au Manoir Saint Germai
Paris Métro
The Paris Métro is a rapid transit system in the Paris metropolitan area, France. A symbol of the city, it is known for its density within the city limits, uniform architecture and unique entrances influenced by Art Nouveau, it is underground and 214 kilometres long. It has 302 stations. There are 16 lines, numbered 1 to 14 with two lines, 3bis and 7bis, which are named because they started out as branches of lines 3 and 7. Lines are identified on maps by number and colour, direction of travel is indicated by the terminus, it is the second busiest metro system in Europe, after the Moscow Metro, the tenth-busiest in the world. It carried 1.520 billion passengers in 2015, 4.16 million passengers a day, which amounts to 20% of the overall traffic in Paris. It is one of the densest metro systems in the world, with 245 stations within the 86.9 km2 of the city of Paris. Châtelet – Les Halles, with five Métro lines, three RER commuter rail and platforms up to 800 m apart, is one of the world's largest metro stations.
However, the system has poor disabled accessibility, because most stations were built well before this became a consideration. The first line opened without ceremony on 19 July 1900, during the World's Fair; the system expanded until the First World War and the core was complete by the 1920s. Extensions into suburbs and Line 11 were built in the 1930s; the network reached saturation after World War II with new trains to allow higher traffic, but further improvements have been limited by the design of the network and in particular the short distances between stations. Besides the Métro, central Paris and its urban area are served by the RER, developed beginning in the 1960s, several tramway lines, Transilien suburban trains and two VAL lines, serving Charles De Gaulle and Orly airports. In the late 1990s, the automated line 14 was built to relieve RER line A. Métro is the abbreviated name of the company that operated most of the network: La Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain de Paris, shortened to "Le Métropolitain".
It was abbreviated to métro, which became a common word to designate all rapid transit systems in France and in many cities elsewhere. The Métro is operated by the Régie autonome des transports parisiens, a public transport authority that operates part of the RER network, bus services, light rail lines and many bus routes; the name métro was adopted in many languages, making it the most used word for a urban transit system. It is possible that "Compagnie du chemin de fer métropolitain" was copied from the name of London's pioneering underground railway company, the Metropolitan Railway, in business for 40 years prior to the inauguration of Paris's first line. By 1845, Paris and the railway companies were thinking about an urban railway system to link inner districts of the city; the railway companies and the French government wanted to extend main-line railways into a new underground network, whereas the Parisians favoured a new and independent network and feared national takeover of any system it built.
The disagreement lasted from 1856 to 1890. Meanwhile, the population became traffic congestion grew massively; the deadlock gave the city the chance to enforce its vision. Prior to 1845, the urban transport network consisted of a large number of omnibus lines, consolidated by the French government into a regulated system with fixed and unconflicting routes and schedules; the first concrete proposal for an urban rail system in Paris was put forward by civil engineer Florence de Kérizouet. This plan called for a surface cable car system. In 1855, civil engineers Edouard Brame and Eugène Flachat proposed an underground freight urban railroad, due to the high rate of accidents on surface rail lines. On 19 November 1871 the General Council of the Seine commissioned a team of 40 engineers to plan an urban rail network; this team proposed a network with a pattern of routes "resembling a cross enclosed in a circle" with axial routes following large boulevards. On 11 May 1872 the Council endorsed the plan.
After this point, a serious debate occurred over whether the new system should consist of elevated lines or of underground lines. The underground option emerged as the preferred solution because of the high cost of buying land for rights-of-way in central Paris required for elevated lines, estimated at 70,000 francs per metre of line for a 20-metre-wide railroad; the last remaining hurdle was the city's concern about national interference in its urban rail system. The city commissioned renowned engineer Jean-Baptiste Berlier, who designed Paris' postal network of pneumatic tubes, to design and plan its rail system in the early 1890s. Berlier recommended a special track gauge of 1,300 mm to protect the system from national takeover, which inflamed the issue substantially; the issue was settled when the Minister of Public Works begrudgingly recognized the city's right to build a local system on 22 November 1895, by the city's secret designing of the trains and tunnels to be too narrow for main-line trains, while adopting standard gauge as a compromise with the state.
On 20 April 1896, Par
Porte Saint-Denis
The Porte Saint-Denis is a Parisian monument located in the 10th arrondissement, at the site of one of the gates of the Wall of Charles V, one of Paris' former city walls. It is located at the crossing of the Rue Saint-Denis continued by the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Denis, with the Boulevard de Bonne-Nouvelle and the Boulevard Saint-Denis; the Porte Saint-Denis was a gateway through the Wall of Charles V, built between 1356 and 1383 to protect the Right Bank of Paris. The medieval fortification was surmounted with four towers. Additional portcullises defended the outer gate along with a rock-cut ditch. However, with the advent of gunpowder and the development of cannons and bombards, the walls were partly torn down in the 1640s to make way for the larger and more fortified Louis XIII Wall. In the 1670s, the remaining walls of Charles V were demolished when Paris spread beyond the confines of its medieval boundaries. To replace the old gateway of Porte Saint-Denis, Louis XIV commanded architect François Blondel and the sculptor Michel Anguier to build him a monumental archway that would honor the capture of Franche-Comté in 1668 and the victories on the Rhine during the Franco-Dutch War.
Work was paid for by the city of Paris. A monument defining the official art of its epoque, the Porte Saint-Denis provided the subject of the engraved frontispiece to Blondel's influential Cours d'architecture, 1698, it was restored in 1988. The Porte Saint-Denis was the first of four triumphal arches to be built in Paris; the three others are the Arc de Triomphe du Carrousel, Porte Saint-Martin, Arc de Triomphe. The Porte Saint-Denis is a triumphal arch inspired by the Arch of Titus in Rome; the monument is 24.65 m high, 25 m wide, 5 m deep. The arch itself is 15.35 m high in the center and 8 m across. The main arch is flanked by obelisks applied to the wall face bearing sculptural groups of trophies of arms. Above the main arch, the southern face carries a sculptural group by Michel Anguier of "The Passage of the Rhine" in a sunk panel, while the north face carries allegorical figures of the Rhine and the Netherlands; the entablature bears the gilded bronze inscription LUDOVICO MAGNO, "To Louis the Great".
Two smaller pedestrian walkways were built through the obelisk pedestals but they have now been closed. The arch is decorated with a variety of sculptures and friezes Porte Saint-Martin Insecula - Porte Saint-Denis
.svg)
.svg)
