Monuments move too! The triumphal arch to the glory of the combatants of Haute-Garonne, built between 1923 and 1931 by the architect Léon Jaussely in tribute to the soldiers of the department engaged during the First World War, will thus be moved this Thursday, August 31. The site must be cleared to allow the progress of a vast project: the creation of a new metro line.
Inspired by ancient buildings glorifying the armed forces (plaques recall, in addition to the memory of the soldiers of 14-18, that of those engaged during the Second World War but also in Indochina …), the building is at the center of many ceremonies of remembrance. A flame is regularly lit at his feet to commemorate the sacrifice of fallen fighters.
Its displacement represents a technical feat: this monument weighs almost 1,400 tons. This operation, made necessary by the expansion of the François-Verdier metro station, will not be final. During 2027, the building must return to its original location.
This move was the only possible solution to avoid the felling of 50 plane trees, say the project leaders. The drilling of the neighboring alleys, envisaged for a time, would have led to the uprooting of the trees. Faced with the hostility of local residents, Tisséo, the public establishment which manages public transport in the Toulouse conurbation, preferred to move the monument…
The operation carried out with the Bouygues group was preceded by a scrupulous seven-month feasibility study. Until then accustomed to the renovation of historic buildings, the company Arc
At the end of these studies, the monument was relieved of the four stone trophies surrounding it. These statues have been carefully unsealed. They depict anonymous soldiers, a mountain hunter, an artilleryman, an airman and a sailor, and each weigh seven tons. The plinth and paving were also removed. This reduced the total weight of the structure to 940 tons. The equivalent, all the same, of twenty Airbus A320s.
“The lifting of the monument, completed, a set of nine self-propelled modular platforms will now rotate the triumphal arch along an axis of rotation of 90 degrees,” say the technicians. The building will then be slid onto a special slab. At the maximum speed of 500 m/hour, the operation will last all day Thursday. The area will therefore be closed to traffic from 6 a.m. to 7 p.m. on August 31.
The amount of this move, revealed during a Tisséo union committee last December, is around 7 million euros. An amount to be related to the total budget for the construction of line C of the Toulouse metro, which is around 3 billion euros.