Taller than the Eiffel Tower and longer than the Champs Elysee, the Millau viaduct was today unveiled by President Jacques Chirac to acclaim as a marvel of art and architecture.

Its seven slender pillars, the tallest rising to 1,122ft (340 metres), were likened to needles supporting a taut thread in one the many poetic newspaper front pages marking the elegant structure's unveiling to the nation.

The 1.6 mile-long (2.5km) bridge, built in three years at a cost of €394 million (£272 million), is regarded not merely as a gateway to the Riviera above one of the nation's most notorious bottlenecks, but as a shining embodiment of Gallic flair, a majestic marriage of the functional and the aesthetic.

That it is the creation of London-based architect Lord Norman Foster, whose Millennium Bridge across the River Thames was closed for 18 months of repairs a day after it opened, is a tribute to the continuing spirit of Anglo-French co-operation.

Lord Foster was among an audience of more than 1,000 people who gathered to watch M Chirac unveil a plaque as French air force jets swept through the clear skies overhead today.

M Chirac said: "The Millau viaduct takes its place among our most shining works of civil engineering. It brilliantly embodies the verve of our research and technology.

"It 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.

"The French people are rightly proud of the feats accomplished here - feats which speak for France. A modern France, an enterprising, successful France, a France which invests in its future."

The viaduct, a road through the clouds which spans two plateaux in the Massif Central mountain range, is not only the tallest in the world, outstripping the 282-metre (928ft) towers of the Akashi Kaikyo bridge in Japan, it is also the longest multi-span cable-stayed bridge. The Tatara Ohashi bridge in Japan is 1.48km long.

The highest bridge in the world, measured by distance from deck to ground level, remains the Royal Gorge Bridge in Colorado, US which is 320 metres (1,053ft) above the river Arkansas.

The Millau will carry up to 28,000 vehicles a day and, unusually for a French project on such a huge scale, its entire cost was funded by the private sector with construction giant Eiffage getting the right to collect tolls for 75 years in return.

It was commissioned in order to open up a new north-south route across central France and relieve pressure from lorry-drivers and tourists bound for the Mediterranean and Spain in the saturated Rhone valley corridor to the east.

Travellers on the A75 motorway between Clermont-Ferrand and Beziers have been forced to a crawl as they descended to Millau -- best-known recently as the place where anti-globalisation activist Jose Bove smashed a McDonald's restaurant.

From midnight on Friday, motorists will pay a fee of €4.90 (£3.40) to speed above the town. Lorry-drivers will be charged about four times as much.

Eiffage is predicting an average of 10,000 vehicles per day, with a peak of 25,000 during the summer season when tariffs will be increased. If the bridge proves unexpectedly profitable, the French state has the right to take possession from 2044.

Weighing some 36,000 tonnes, the bridge was assembled as much as possible off-site. Large sections were lifted by giant crane and slid onto the pillars, with the two ends meeting in May. It has been built to withstand wind-speeds of up to 250 kilometres per hour.

Charles Bremner, Paris Correspondent for The Times, said: "The word the French papers are using is Titanesque and it is certainly very spectacular.

"Because of its height it is frequently above the cloudline and can be seen rising out of the mist like the Golden Gate. It's quite breathtaking, and the way it has been designed to curve means it is in keeping with the landscape."

No new initiative on this scale is without its detractors however. And as an awestruck nation gazed skyward the inevitable criticism came from an unlikely source below.

After decades of campaigning to save their town from the cars and HGVs, shop-keepers in Millau began to mount a new complaint, that they are losing out on passing trade.

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