Monument aux Girondins
Bronze fountain chariots of rearing seahorses beneath a towering column crowned by Liberty breaking her chains.
Location
About this audio guide
This guide to the Monument aux Girondins in Bordeaux starts with the sea-horse chariots rearing from its fountain and a twist: for nearly four decades they were not actually here. It follows sculptor Alphonse Dumilatre, who spent close to twenty years fighting to get his design built, only for France's occupation-era metal commission to order the bronzes stripped in nineteen forty-two and hauled off to a foundry near Angers to be melted for the German war effort. You'll hear what that foundry actually did with thirty-four crated pieces instead of melting them, and how city officials went looking afterward. Dumilatre himself never learned any of it; he had died in nineteen twenty-eight.
This audio guide was created using AI.
Similar places
Place des Quinconces
Tree-lined square centered on a towering column fountain guarded by rearing bronze horses.
Place de la Bourse
Neoclassical riverside square of twin curved facades, once crowned by a royal statue melted down in revolution.
Place Gambetta
Leafy English-style garden square once cleared of a monumental statue too large for it to hold.
Place du Parlement
Elegant eighteenth-century market square framed by golden stone facades and a neo-rococo fountain.
Porte d'Aquitaine
Triumphal stone arch carved with sea gods and royal arms, raised for an infant Bourbon duke.
Pont de Pierre
Brick nineteenth-century river crossing whose seventeen arches once carried a wired-for-demolition port to the brink of ruin.