Pont de l'Alma

The bridge carries its name from the Battle of the Alma of 1854, in which the Ottoman, French and British alliance defeated the Russian army during the Crimean War. Work on an arch bridge across the Seine ran from 1854 to 1856, to a design credited to Paul-Martin Gallocher de Lagalisserie and under the direction of the engineer Gariel. The opening had first been intended for the Exposition Universelle of 1855; in the event Napoleon III inaugurated the bridge on 2 April 1856. It links the quai Branly on the left bank, in the seventh arrondissement, to the avenue de New-York on the right bank, in the eighth and sixteenth.

Each of the two piers carried a statue on its upstream and downstream faces, four in all, each standing for one of the regiments that had fought in the Crimea: a Zouave and a grenadier carved by Georges Diébolt, and a chasseur à pied and an artilleryman by Auguste Arnaud.

Parisians turned one of those soldiers into an instrument. The Zouave became the city's popular measure of the Seine in flood: when the water reached his feet the riverside walkways were generally closed, and when it rose to his thighs the river was no longer navigable. This was never the official gauge. The administration took its readings at the Pont de la Tournelle, and from 1868 at the Pont d'Austerlitz. In the great flood of 1910 the water reached the Zouave's shoulders.

For the Exposition Universelle of 1900 the crossing was doubled upstream by a footbridge, the passerelle de l'Alma. By 1960 a full reconstruction was under consideration, because the bridge dammed the river when it rose. It was too narrow for the growing traffic passing over it and beneath it, and the structure had settled by some 80 centimetres. Between 1970 and 1974 it was replaced entirely by a girder bridge, 153 metres long and 42 metres wide.

The new bridge has only one pier, so only the Zouave was kept, and not on the same side as before. The chasseur à pied went to the south wall of the Gravelle redoubt in the Bois de Vincennes; the grenadier to Dijon, the birthplace of its sculptor, on the avenue du Premier-Consul facing the lac Kir, a city that also had the 27th infantry regiment, since disbanded; and the artilleryman was given to La Fère in the Aisne, garrison of the 41st marine artillery regiment until 1993. The Zouave now stands lower than he originally did, so at the same mark on the statue he signals a less serious flood than he once did.

The bridge stands beside the underpass, commonly called the Pont de l'Alma tunnel although it in fact runs between the bridge and the place de l'Alma, where Diana, Princess of Wales, and three others were involved in a fatal car crash on 31 August 1997. They were being chased by paparazzi, and their chauffeur, Henri Paul, was driving under the influence of alcohol when the car lost control and struck a pillar head-on. Dodi Fayed and Paul were pronounced dead at the scene on removal from the wreckage. Diana was critically injured and died afterwards of her injuries in hospital. Their bodyguard, Trevor Rees-Jones, was the only one to survive, with a serious head injury. The tunnel is known as an accident black spot, with eight deaths in the area.

Above the tunnel mouth stands the Flame of Liberty, a full-size replica of the flame of the Statue of Liberty, given by the International Herald Tribune in 1987 to mark Franco-American friendship and to thank France for the restoration of the statue. It was diverted from that purpose and became, spontaneously, a place of remembrance for admirers of the dead princess, without ever being designated one. The ground it occupies is officially named Place Diana.