After your stroll to the foot (or top!) of the Eiffel Tower, why not take a trip over the Pont d'Iena, just a few meters from Paris's Iron Lady?
The Pont d'Iena, which links the Eiffel Tower to the Trocadero, was built at the instigation of Napoleon Bonaparte between 1808 and 1814. The Emperor, who had just won the Battle of Iena over Prussia two years earlier, wanted to engrave the event in stone and in Parisian memories. Engineer Corneille Lamandé designed a five-arch bridge, 140 meters long and decorated withimperial eagles.
But just one year after the inauguration of the Pont d'Iena, at the fall of the First Empire, Paris was invaded by Prussian troops, and an old acquaintance of Napoleon Bonaparte's was determined not to let it stand... General Blücher, defeated at the Battle of Iena, wants to destroy the bridge in retaliation! Louis XVIII objected, simply renaming the Pont d'Iena Pont de l'Ecole Militaire and removing the imperial eagles from the spandrels.
Under Louis Philippe, the bridge regained its original name, and under the Second Empire, it was once again adorned with imperial eagles sculpted by Jean-François Mouret and four statues, still visible today: a Gallic cavalryman, a Roman cavalryman, a Greek cavalryman and an Arab cavalryman.
As the Pont d'Iena is located at the geographical center of the World's Fairs, it was enlarged over the years, reaching its current width of 35 meters in 1937.
Classified as a historic monument in 1975, the Iena Bridge has lost none of its former glory.
