FRANCE ran out of superlatives as it joined in rare unison to praise the spectacular new — British-designed — motorway bridge across the Tarn valley at Millau, which was opened by President Chirac yesterday.

With its seven soaring pillars and sail-like stays, the 1.6-mile (2.5km) stretch of the A75 motorway was acclaimed as a work of art and a monument to Gallic engineering prowess.

“The bridge will serve as a symbol of a modern and conquering France,” said M Chirac.

The curving, steel-platformed bridge, designed by Lord Foster of Thamesbank, does not just remove a notorious bottleneck in the autoroute through the southern Massif Central from Paris to the Mediterranean, according to yesterday’s consensus.

In the tradition of the Palace of Versailles, the Eiffel tower and the TGV high-speed trains, the world’s tallest bridge is fresh proof that France has no peer when it comes to the marriage of engineering and art.

This rhapsodic view was taken by M Chirac after he unveiled a plaque on the tallest pillar, with a summit 343m (1,125ft) from the valley floor, 19m more than the Eiffel tower. An air display team flew by trailing tricolour smoke.

“The Millau viaduct is a magnificent example in the long and great French tradition of audacious works of art, a tradition begun at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries by the great Gustave Eiffel,” said the President. The Eiffage construction company, which built and financed the bridge in just three years, was founded by the pioneering civil engineer who built the 1889 Paris tower and a monumental railway viaduct at Garabit, also in the Massif Central.

The bridge makes French history not just because it includes the world’s tallest pillars but because it is the first big civil engineering work financed entirely by private money.

Eiffage provided the finance in return for a 75-year concession. With car tolls varying between £3.20 and £4.60 according to the season, it is expected to start making a profit in a decade. The bridge will open to traffic at midnight on Friday and is expected to carry an average of 10,000 vehicles a day, with peaks of 25,000 during the summer holidays.

Although the message yesterday was that France gets its grand engineering projects right — unlike some of its neighbours — due credit was given to the viaduct’s British designer.

“The bridge is, above all, of colossal elegance, almost as if it improves the aesthetics of the valley that it spans,” said Libération.

“This must flatter our national ego even if the architect is British. No one is perfect.”

Lord Foster, 69, used the words “sculpture in a landscape” for the £300 million structure which was visited by half a million sightseers during its construction.

“A work of man must fuse with nature,” he said yesterday. “The pillars had to look almost organic, like they had grown from the earth. The bridge could not look as if it had been tacked on to the scenery. It had to rise out of the landscape with the delicacy of a butterfly.”

Lord Foster is also the designer of the Millennium Bridge, in London, which swayed alarmingly in high winds when it opened in 2000 and had to be shut down for structural reinforcement after three days. It reopened two years later.

Unusually for such a big project as the Millau viaduct, there were no serious accidents during construction, despite the danger faced by workers hundreds of feet up in strong winds and extreme temperatures.

High lattice guard-rails of steel allow drivers to see the view while giving a sense of security.

Cables between the pillars will prevent daredevil pilots from trying to fly below the deck.

THE MILLAU VIADUCT

• Vehicles will travel at a height of 270m (885ft)
• The entire structure weighs 36,000 tonnes
• The tallest of the bridge’s seven piers is 343 m high
• The top of one of the piers is wide enough for a tennis court
• 154 steel stays stretch down from the piers on to the bridge
• 14,000 metric tonnes of steel were used for the road itself and 205,000 tonnes of concrete for the piers
• There were rarely fewer than 400 workers on site during construction, which took three years

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