Pont de Bir-Hakeim

Listen first. Somewhere above your head, steel wheels are rolling over steel rails. A green-and-white Métro train is passing overhead, and the sound drops down through the iron columns around you. Below your feet, cars and cyclists move along the road deck. Below them, the Seine runs grey-green toward the west. Three layers of movement, stacked one on top of another. Welcome to the Pont de Bir-Hakeim.

This is a double-decker bridge. That is the first thing to understand about it. The lower level carries cars, bicycles and people on foot. The upper level is a viaduct for Line 6 of the Paris Métro. Here the train comes up out of the ground and runs in the open air. For a few seconds, passengers get one of the best free views of the Eiffel Tower in the whole city.

The bridge went up in the first years of the twentieth century, roughly between 1903 and 1905. It replaced an older footbridge at this spot. The engineer was Louis Biette, and the architect was Jean-Camille Formigé. Formigé designed a good deal of the elevated Métro in that period. His job was to make heavy industrial steel look graceful enough for a wealthy, elegant part of Paris. Look at the curved brackets and the decorated ironwork, and you can judge whether he succeeded.

For its first decades, the bridge had a different name. It was called the Pont de Passy, after the neighbourhood on the Right Bank. Passy was once a separate village of country houses and vineyards above the river. Paris absorbed it in the nineteenth century, but the old name stayed on maps, on streets... and on this bridge.

The name changed in 1949. Bir Hakeim is not a place in France at all. It is a remote desert position in Libya, in North Africa. In 1942, during the Second World War, a force of Free French soldiers under General Marie-Pierre Koenig held out there against German and Italian troops led by Erwin Rommel. They held on for about two weeks before they broke out. For a country still under occupation, it was a moment of pride. Paris chose to honour it here, on a bridge in the heart of the capital.

Now walk along the central promenade, under the viaduct. This is the part people remember. Rows of dark green cast-iron columns hold up the Métro deck. They run in long lines, one after another, so the walkway feels like a covered gallery or the aisle of a church. On a bright day, sunlight comes through in strips between the columns. Shadows lie across the paving stones in a steady rhythm.

If that view feels familiar, there is a good reason. Film-makers love this walkway. Bernardo Bertolucci used the bridge in his 1972 film Last Tango in Paris. Christopher Nolan used it in Inception, in 2010. In that film, mirrors make the columns repeat into infinity. Since then, a steady stream of visitors has come here just to stand between the pillars and take that photograph.

You will probably see some of them right now. Look for couples in wedding clothes, fashion shoots with reflectors, and people waiting patiently for an empty gap between walkers. The bridge has become one of the most popular backdrops in Paris for this kind of photography. The reason is simple. You get the repeating columns, the iron detail and the Eiffel Tower, all in a single frame.

Here is a detail many visitors miss. Look up at the stone piers that carry the viaduct across the river. There are four large cast-iron statues up there, sitting high above the water. They are allegories, figures that stand for ideas. They represent Science, Labour, Electricity and Commerce. Two were made by the sculptor Gustave Michel, and two by Jules-Félix Coutan. Together they celebrate the confident, industrial optimism of the early twentieth century, the same spirit that built the Métro itself.

Now find the middle of the bridge. Here, the structure rests on a narrow strip of land in the river called the Île aux Cygnes, the Isle of Swans. This is not a natural island. It is an artificial embankment, built in the nineteenth century. A long, tree-lined path runs down its spine. Stairs lead down from the bridge, so you can leave the traffic behind and walk along the island in the shade.

At this point, just at the edge of the bridge, a bronze rider on horseback looks out over the river. The statue is called La France Renaissante, which means France Reborn. It shows a young woman holding a sword aloft. The Danish sculptor Holger Wederkinch made it, and the Danish community in Paris gave it to the city. It is a quiet reminder that this bridge carries memories of war and recovery as well as trains.

If you have time, walk to the far end of the Île aux Cygnes, toward the next bridge downstream. There you will find a small replica of the Statue of Liberty, looking west along the Seine. It surprises many visitors. The original statue in New York was a gift from France to the United States, and this copy echoes that friendship. It is a pleasant twenty-minute walk under the trees, with river barges sliding past on both sides.

Before you go, stand still for a moment at the rail. To one side rises the Eiffel Tower, close enough to see its rivets on a clear day. Upstream and downstream, other bridges cross the river, each in a different style. Overhead, another train is probably arriving, and the columns will hum faintly as it passes. When you walk away, listen for that sound once more. It is the bridge doing exactly what it was built to do, more than a century later.