Bordeaux in the course of the water
Bordeaux 1743. The bursar Louis-Urbain Aubert, the marquess of Tourny, succeeds the bursar Claude Boucher. The city did not change for several centuries. She has to marry her time and assert her role of prosperous capital of Guyenne.
Congealed behind his ramparts, bristled by arrows and by bell towers, flanked by the massif Castle Trumpet, Bordeaux seen by the river has mediocre look.
Docks swarm with an intense harbour activity where mix the most different goods in front of a flowerbed of workshops of wood or stone and wine storehouses in more or less good state. Only the Royal place, the work of the architects Jacques and Angel Gabriel, asserts, in the heart of the curve, the will to marry its century: that of the Lights.
Tourny, dazzled by the site, gets down very fast to the task and begins one of the vastest construction sites of town planning of the XVIIIth century, in spite of the opposition of numerous Inhabitants of Bordeaux.
Audacious and modern for time, so classic today, the plan of the facade of quays chooses to marry the curve of the river. As a folding screen of fair stones, a succession of buildings in the identical characteristics rises in front of the Garonne, hiding towards the guest the medieval ramparts and the shanties which had clung to it in the course of the years.
Organization, balances, smell of the measure, the beauty of this architecture force, since, the admiration. Cranes, railings and hangars installed afterward have never hindered his image. Bordeaux, since the beginning of the century, masked bit by bit, darkened and neglected its feeder river, to whom she owes nevertheless her wealth, her history and her future.
