PGB 15: Le Petit Pont – The Unluckiest Bridge in Paris

Imagine, if you will, that you’ve just arrived in Paris. Not the city full of bridges we have today, but in the year of our Lord 1207. Notre Dame’s construction site looms over the city; it’s a must-see attraction. After enjoying that modern marvel, you would like to take in the vibe and the energy and the cheap wine of the growing Latin quarter, home to the students of the universities of Paris.
You walk down the new street built for Notre Dame’s construction, hanging a left at the street that clearly leads to the bridge only to discover that the bridge has yet again been washed away in a flood. How will you get to your cheap wine now?
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Welcome to this episode of Paris Gone By, the Parisian History Podcast for the Curious Traveler. I’m Michelle, your host and guide to the Paris of the Past. Today we’re going to take a look at what is quite possibly the unluckiest bridge in Paris, le Petit Pont or the little bridge. It is also the shortest bridge in Paris and is most famous now for this lack of length.
But I feel the more interesting thing is the sheer number of times the poor little bridge has been taken out. Our tale has Romans Vikings, a very vengeful count, an alarming number of floods, and even fire and ice. The little bridge has a big story to tell. But also fair warning, it does include tales of historical violence. If you find such topics disturbing, please do proceed with caution.
Let’s start first with the location of the Petit Pont to help you envision things as we go along. It’s a bridge that connects the Left Bank with the Île de la Cité. And the current version is so plain and so inconspicuous, you almost don’t notice that you’re on a bridge, especially if you’re crossing northbound and your focus is on Notre Dame.
The bridge lines up at the far side of the parvis or courtyard in front of Notre Dame on the side with the entrance to the archeological crypt. If you follow the bridge south across the river, then you end up at that intersection where if you turn left at the touristy restaurants, you end up at Shakespeare and Company, or at least the line to get into Shakespeare and Company. And if you angle right at the touristy restaurants, you head down the narrow medieval street of rue de la Huchette.
Another important thing to note from a geographic and scientific perspective is that the southern arm of the Seine along the islands is much narrower than the northern arm, which creates a much stronger current as the river has to squeeze through that. I think you can see where this is going.
Our story starts with those inveterate builders, the Romans. They built the first definitively known bridge across the southern arm of the Seine, though there may have been a bridge there in pre-Roman times as well. This bridge served to continue what was known as the Cardo Maximus or the main North-South Road in Lutetia or Lutece in French, as Paris was known then.
The Cardo ran straight across the island to the Grand or big pont leading to the right bank. The left bank, and the settlements on the Île de la Cité were the center of Roman Paris. So the Petit Pont, the only bridge connecting the two, would’ve gotten a workout in the Roman period.
The span was longer then to avoid the kind of marshy, swampy areas at the edge of the river. We know from extant archeological evidence that the stairs leading to the Roman port on the island were about 50 meters from where the edge of the island is now. So, you can imagine that the earlier bridges must have had a longer span and thus a higher rate of success than the bridges that came later as the embankments became closer and closer to each other.
We don’t know how many versions of the Roman Bridge there were, but some sources suggest that the last Roman bridge was still up and running until the Vikings decided to attack Paris in the ninth century. Some sources imply, however, that the bridge was long gone between the onslaughts of time and the numerous raids on the city in between. I subscribe to this one since the post-Roman period was not exactly a calm or peaceful period in what we call France now.
It seems most likely that after the Viking siege of 845, and several subsequent sieges in the 860s, that new bridges were built probably each time. Our Petit Pont was likely built in wood in the 860s, but the larger bridge to the right bank on the north side was likely built in stone. This time they were also accompanied by châtelets or defensive towers made in corresponding materials of wood and stone, respectively.
And yes, this is the first version of the châtelet that lives on in the name of the Châtelet-Les Halles transit station, which often feels like you’re navigating a Viking siege instead of a transit station. Or maybe that’s just me, These Viking-era bridges were built very low to prevent the passage of ships and sort of protect the interior of Francia or France.
Surprisingly late in the year, around the end of November 885, the Vikings just showed up in hundreds of ships, demanding, as usual, for a tribute payment or else they would destroy the city. The count of Paris at the time, Odo, declined that offer and the Vikings proceeded to try to take down the larger Northern Stone bridge and tower.
After a few days of basically unqualified failure, they took some time to kind of regroup, but they don’t decide to go after the wooden bridge instead. It’s unclear to me why they wouldn’t go after what is, in my mind, the more vulnerable bridge and tower. The left bank at that time would’ve had settlements on it-more so than the right-which is where the Vikings had made their encampment. But I don’t think it would’ve been that heavily fortified.
My only guess is that because they had settled on the right bank and had set up their weapons building functions, and they had basically made their choice and were just gonna stick with it. The relative width of that part of the river could have also been part of the reason as well. They had a mission and it wasn’t just Paris.
The Vikings were having a rather tough go of it when finally Mother Nature lent a hand. In February of 886, the Seine flooded, as she does in that time of year, and partially destroyed our Petit Pont. Taking advantage of this, the Vikings finally focused on the Petit Châtelet, which was left stranded on the left bank after the bridge collapsed.
Unfortunately, there were 12 soldiers still left inside. And there are several versions of how this played out, but suffice to say, unfortunately, the 12 didn’t make it back to the city.
After that success, part of the Viking horde moved on down to the Loire Valley to do their Viking thing, but parts stayed behind, determined now to take the city . Count Odo and his crew valiantly defended the city and requested assistance from their overlord, the unfortunately named Charles the Fat.
First, Charles sent some troops back with Count Odo, who had gone in person to ask for help from him. Which did go a long way to protecting the city, but did not relieve the siege. Finally in the fall of 886, nearly a year after all of this had begun, Charles rolls up with his army. But instead of doing Paris and Odo a solid, Charles offers the Vikings a ton of cash to instead keep going down the river and deeper into Francia to sack Burgundy, which had been giving him some problems. Needless to say, this did not help Charles’s reputation, and when he died in 888, Odo was elected to take his place as king of West Francia, what we now call France.
After the Vikings, the fate of the Petit Pont is a little fuzzy for a few centuries. And then we arrive at 1111, when Paris was once again sacked; this time by a vassal of the King of France and of the King of England and of the Duke of Normandy. Things were complicated in the 12th century.
Our aggressor this time is the Count Robert de Meulan.
And he is absolutely fascinating. He’s one of the few documented companions of William Duke of Normandy at the Battle of Hastings in 1066-this is where William won the English crown Duke. Robert would then go on to fight at the Battle of Tinchebray in 1106, almost 40 years later, under William’s son Henry. He’s the only person known to have fought at both battles.
But, in addition to his military career, he was also a very savvy courtier and moved his way up the ranks from a very minor nobleman under William to one of the most important political players during the reigns of William’s sons, who served as kings consecutively.
He was considered one of the best and most powerful politicians in Western Europe at that time, and he was a firm believer in what we would basically now call real politik, and was known as a peacekeeper preferring diplomacy over war most of the time. However, he also believed that the ends justified the means. usually.
Just in case all of this wasn’t enough, his county of Meulan wasn’t very big, but held a strategic location on the borderlands, known as the Vexin, between the kingdom, of France and the duchy of Normandy, and he owed the Duke of Normandy fealty for these lands.
And even more, through his service to the King of England, who was also off and on the Duke of Normandy at this time, he held lands in England, eventually earning him the probable title of Earl of Leicester. Though the title isn’t entirely confirmed, his land holdings would equate to that.
And because serving two overlords, King of England and Duke of Normandy, just wasn’t enough, he also held lands in Paris, firmly putting him under the King of France as well.
Robert apparently played this real life version of 4-D chess very, very well. So well, that at about the age of 50, in 1196, he married the 11-year-old cousin of the King, Isabelle of Vermandois. This age difference was a bit surprising even at the time, though they did wait about six years to start having children. Thankfully. Everything was cruising along until 1108. when King Philippe of France died and his son Louis the VI, famously and unfortunately known as Louis the Fat, became king, and who would one day be father-in-law to Eleanor of Aquitaine.
As the new king, he expected Henry, Duke of Normandy to pay homage to him, since technically the Dukes of Normandy owed fealty to the Kings of France. There was an England-shaped problem with this, though: Henry was also the King of England, and there was a very real concern that if the man who was both Duke of Normandy and King of England paid homage to the King of France as the Duke of Normandy, he was also paying de facto homage to the King of France as the King of England. Which would then create a potential loophole where France could claim sovereignty over England, which would simply not do.
So, Robert being Robert, managed, along with Henry, to string Louis along for about a year until Louis had had enough and struck out at the county of Meulan, destroying the castle and the surrounding countryside in 1109.
Robert seemed at first to have taken things fairly calmly. He rebuilt the castle, he continued his political duties. But I think privately Robert had reacted with the medieval equivalent of, “Oh no, you did not,” because two years later, in 1111, with the backing of King / Duke, Henry Robert unleashed on Paris. He destroyed large portions of the Île de la Cité, and he also, of course destroyed the bridges, including our poor little Petit Pont.
This started a two-year war that was finally settled in favor of English King Henry, who received additional French lands from Louis. And he never did pay homage to Louis either. Well played, Robert. Well played,
And what happened to Robert: warrior, politician, land magnet, and defiler of bridges? Well, rumor has it that his young bride left him in about 1115 to be with a former political enemy of his, the Earl of Surrey. Robert died supposedly in shame and possibly unshriven in 1118 at about the age of 72. Sort of a strange and possibly karmic denouement to our powerful count.
Isabelle, it must be said, very quickly remarried her purported lover, the Earl of Surrey, William de Warrene.
Rejoining our Petit Pont, before we continue, it’s worth noting that starting in about this period, the bridges begin having homes and businesses built on them, like we still see with the Ponte Vecchio in Florence today. So every time the bridge is taken out going forward, people’s homes and businesses are destroyed as well. So kind of keep that in mind.
Returning to our story, the bridge destroyed by Robert was rebuilt and held its own until it was yet again wiped out by flooding in 1175. This time, Bishop Maurice de Sully was busy building Notre Dame and took on the bridge project as well.
It seems to have taken over a decade to be finished, though I couldn’t find why this was. Perhaps the funds were tight and Notre Dame was prioritized? The king also died in this period, so maybe that kind of disrupted funds as well. This particular bridge, the Sully Bridge, was taken out 10 years later, in the first of what I’ve unofficially dubbed The Relic Floods.
This flood of 1196 and one a decade later in 1206 were catastrophic floods that prompted similar responses from the city for its salvation. The first of these floods in 1196 seems to have arrived rather suddenly. It wiped out several villages upstream and then managed to trap both Bishop Maurice and King Philippe Auguste on the Île de la Cité. They managed to escape to the Left Bank somehow, with Maurice going to the Abbey of St. Victor, which was just east of the city walls at the time, it’s near the modern buildings of the Sorbonne now. And the king ended up going to the abbey of Ste. Genevieve, which is close to where the Pantheon is now.
The next flood, in 1206, flooded the areas near the river even more: up to the second stories of buildings to the point where people had to be evacuated by boat. This is big time flooding!
In both events to help the waters recede, the religious leaders of the city trotted out the collected relics of the area to help plead for intervention from God and the saints. They would do a procession from the Abbey of Ste. Genevieve, home of Paris’s patron Saint near the Pantheon, and then walk over to Notre Dame, where a mass would be said by the bishop before the relics made their way back to Ste. Genevieve.
The relics included those of Ste. Genevieve’s bones, but also relics from the basilica of St. Denis and the relics held at Notre Dame. Which did include a thorn or perhaps part of the crown of thorns and a piece of the true cross. And also included relics of the parish church of St. Marcel. St. Marcel, who supposedly-I had to look this up-had slain a dragon similar to St. George of England, which kind of makes him the coolest of these saints. If you’re wondering where the crown, the full crown of thorns was, this is before St. Louis had brought back the full crown later in the century, it’s several decades earlier.
The procession of 1206 was especially noteworthy because the Petit Pont had been badly damaged by these floodwaters and was basically teetering in place. But the bridge held on long enough to allow the procession to cross in both directions, only collapsing after Ste. Genevieve’s relics were returned to the abbey.
I mean, between us, did the processions actually work? Well for the first flood, it took a few days for the waters to recede, but recede they did. The second one supposedly retreated immediately following that miraculous procession. I’ll leave you to decide if such miracles were due to Mother Nature or Saintly Intervention.
Yet again, the Petit Pont was rebuilt, but it was also then possibly wiped out in 1212, damaged in 1280, destroyed in 1307, destroyed again around 1326 and maybe destroyed in 1375. This 1375 incident proved in many ways the most important of the research rabbit holes I went down.
It wasn’t consistently listed as a loss, and it wasn’t clearly listed as being rebuilt either. Or sometimes it was listed as not being rebuilt until 20 years or so later. And it was the details associated with these weird delayed rebuilds that I kept seeing mentioned that caught my attention, actually.
So down that rabbit hole I went. While I wasn’t fully able to determine what happened in 1375, I feel like it’s likely that it was either damaged or destroyed and repaired or rebuilt. I wound up following the breadcrumbs to an entirely different story involving the bridge one that I think will resonate today.
The bridge was taken out again, sometime around 1393, during a period of kind of chaos within the government. The king at the time, King Charles VI, The Mad, had started experiencing his bouts of mental illness that would earn him that unfortunate nickname. As a result of the power vacuum that was created by the King’s Madness, several rival factions had formed at court and things were devolving pretty steadily in the government
Add to this, an unstable economy, some civil strife and recurring bouts of the plague, which kept returning, well, like the plague, things were not looking good in France. The only small advantage at this time was that the Hundred Years War was on pause because England was also dealing with a very messy monarchy at the time.
Enter into this mess, in either 1393 or maybe early 1394, the case of the missing converted Jew Denys de Machault or Dennis of Machault. Machault had been a prominent Jew who had converted to Christianity either out of true faith or quite possibly the practical benefits of conversion, an act of which was rewarded by the crown and earned you special protection from the crown as well.
It also meant that the Crown kept a special eye on the converts, lest they show signs of switching teams again. So when Machault suddenly went missing there, was public outcry and an investigation ensued. Who dare harm a Christian? Had he been murdered? Bribed to leave? Or worse, bribed to abjure his new faith?
Out of this investigation, seven prominent members of the Jewish community were found to have had a beef with Machault, and were arrested and possibly tortured. It was discovered that they had met with Machault and had given him money, but it seems like this was their attempt to settle a legal suit that Machault had put against them at the time. Regardless of their likely innocence in harming Machault, they were originally sentenced to be burned alive at the stake.
Cooler heads had prevailed, however, and their sentence was adjusted, possibly several times, finally, landing on public whippings in three city squares and a collective fine of 10,000 livres or what we would call pounds.
Basically 500 of which were earmarked for the Hotel Dieu, the charity hospital next to Notre Dame, and the remaining 9,500 were earmarked for rebuilding of the Petit Pont. Oh, also, they would have their estates confiscated and be forced to remain in prison until Machault materialized, should he ever do so.
It seems that at least some, but maybe not all, of the whippings did take place at Les Halles; la Grève, which is the square in front of the Hôtel de Ville; and the place Maubert on the Left Bank. This adjusted sentence had come down in April of 1394, amid a rapidly increasing antisemitism in France.
By September of the same year, Charles VI, or more likely the Regency Council led by his wife, queen Isabeau of Bavaria, enacted what would be the last expulsion of the Jews from France. Supposedly due to the public strife that the Jews were causing. As always, when times are tough, the easiest targets are often the public scapegoats.
Though this expulsion was less severe than some of the other historic expulsions, this time the Jews were given a window, for example, to prepare and were able to take possessions with them and claim some debts. However, they didn’t return to Paris for several centuries and were not officially allowed to return to France until the French Revolution nearly 400 years later. So this was a very absolute expulsion.
But what happened to our seven supposed co-conspirators? History does not record their fate, but it did record their names. And I apologize for this pronunciation. We have Samuel Levi, Belleville de l’Etoile, Abraham de Savins, Moreau de Laon, Auquin de Boure Raphael and I don’t know the relationship, but Abraham and Joseph Dupont Devaux.
I think it’s likely that they were expelled with the rest of the Jews that fall, assuming they had survived the summer in prison. It’s not clear. It also doesn’t seem like they ever actually paid their fines or if they were even capable of doing so. None of the mentions of the fine that I found ever indicated that it was actually paid.
However, per one record, I found in the following year, 1395, the funds for rebuilding the Petit Pont were finally allocated with the note that the funds had been taken from other already approved civic projects, coming in at a whopping 22,000 livres. More than double what they had been fined. Plus ça change, right? The more things change…
This bridge, which was started in June of 1395, took a whopping 11 and a half years to build, finally being completed in November of 1406.
And then it was promptly wiped out about 14 months later in January of 1408 by a crazy deep freeze that caused ice flows on the Seine. These flows took out our Petit Pont and then the flows and parts of the Petit Pont took out the newish Pont St. Michel, which was just downstream. I feel like at this point there had to have been some sort of running joke about the Petit Pont, right? Like that relationship’s gonna last as long as the Petit Pont, but we don’t know.
However, both bridges seem to have been pretty quickly rebuilt. These hung on throughout the 15th and 16th century. Things move along for the remainder of the medieval period into the early modern and incredibly there don’t seem to be any mentions of misfortune for our bridge during this time.
Then we make it to the reign of Louis XIV, the Sun King, and her good luck ran out. She was taken out by flooding on four separate occasions: in 1649, 1651, 1658, and 1659. Yes, that was four in 10 years. The final incarnation supposedly included an inscription outlining the cost of the bridge’s frequent rebuilding. Which feels very Sun King to me; he wanted you to know how much you owed him.
In 1718, finally, we have the last of the known unlucky events for le Petit Pont. Not flood this time, but fire. I found several versions of the story, but they all generally have the same shape. A woman searching for a lost loved one who she feared had drowned in the river, had either released a floating candle on the river to help find the body-there was a belief that the body would be drawn to the candlelight-or that the candle was stuck to or held at the bow of a small rowboat helping in the search.
Regardless, in addition to the woman and the candle, there was a small barge or supply boat filled with very dry hay, either docked at or floating near the base of the bridge. You can imagine, I think, what happened from there. The candle flame came into contact with the hay and a huge conflagration ensued.
This ended up being the final version of the bridge, by the way, with houses on it.It was replaced the following year in 1719, and that bridge held strong until 1852. It was in this year that President Louis Napoleon, the nephew of the Napoleon, had himself crowned emperor Napoleon III, and he set out to spruce up Paris. It is at this point that the Plain Jane utilitarian bridge that we have now is built, I think in order to improve sort of the vistas that were available.
And she’s held steady, curse seemingly broken, bearing witness to an incredible amount of history in the last 170 odd years, including The Commune, the massive 1910 flood, the Nazi occupation, and more recently, the Notre Dame fire and rebuilding. She was officially renamed the le-Petit-Pont-Cardinal-Lustiger in 2013 after the former Archbishop of Paris and Cardinal; who was born Jewish, but converted to Christianity as a teenager prior to World War II. His mother who remained Jewish, sadly perished at Auschwitz. We tend to forget, I think, that the echoes of history are never fully silenced.
But returning to today, should you find yourself in Paris, I want to recreate a route that dates back to the Romans, it roughly still exists! I recommend starting on the rue Saint-Jacques at the boulevard Saint-Germain. You can start further south on rue Saint-Jacques, but from this corner, roughly one block west, you have the musée de Cluny with both its Medieval mansion and its Roman ruins. We are in the thick of Roman Paris at the spot. So try to imagine what that looked like as you’re standing there on that very busy street corner. You’ll head north a few blocks until you hit the place de Petit Pont and the river, which is where the old Petit Châtelet would’ve been. This is where our brave defenders of Paris fell to the Vikings.
After crossing the Petit Pont and waving at Notre Dame, head up the rue de la Cité. across the Pont Notre Dame, land on the right bank at the rue St. Martin. You’re gonna head north until you reach the tour Saint-Jacques. And voilà! You have just walked part of the ancient Roman Cardo Maximus and 20 centuries of history. You are also just a few blocks east of the old Grand Châtelet and just a few blocks west of the Hôtel-de-Ville, where the supposed Jewish co-conspirators were publicly whipped, and where several centuries before that, the area was controlled by our vengeful count, Robert De Meulan.
I want to end with a quote from the historian James W. Baldwin in his book Paris, 1200. As he’s speaking of Paris and her relationship with the Seine he states, “Astride the Seine on the Île de la Cité and the two banks, the city nonetheless rode a mighty and fickle steed.”
I hope you enjoyed this journey through the history of one rather unlucky bridge and the events that shaped it and Paris over nearly two millennia. It’s been one crazy ride on that fickle steed!
To go deeper into this episode, read the blog and explore more resources, please check out the website at parisgoneby.com. And if you loved what you heard, please do subscribe or leave a comment. It really does help bring PGB to the masses. Thank you so much for listening! À bientôt!

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