On September 18, 1994, when the Minister of Culture at the time, Jacques Toubon, inaugurated with great fanfare the gondola of the Martrou metal bridge which connects the two banks of the Charente, between Rochefort and Échillais, without hindering the navigation of cargo ships serving the commercial port of Rochefort and that of Tonnay-Charente, one name was conspicuous by its absence in the official speeches: that of Jacques Lamare (1925-2000).
On the same subject
The fabulous story of the Rochefort transporter bridge in pictures
PORTFOLIO – 30 years ago, on September 18, 1994, the former Minister of Culture Jacques Toublon inaugurated the gondola of the Martrou transporter bridge, reopened to the public after an initial renovation. The opportunity to (re)discover this work of art in Charente-Maritime inaugurated on July 29, 1900 and classified as a historical monument on April 30, 1976
Inauguration of the Martrou transporter bridge in Rochefort, July 20, 1900.
Departmental archives of Charente-Maritime
> Find all our archives on Jacques Lamare in our search engine
The great battle of the Martrou bridge
Aerial view from 1991 of the three bridges spanning the Charente at Rochefort, including the transporter bridge on the right, the lifting bridge destroyed in 2004 (in the center) and the Martrou viaduct (on the left).
South West Archives / Tadeusz Kluba
Aerial view of the Martrou transporter bridge in Rochefort on the Charente, July 12, 2014.
Pascal Couillaud / South West Archives
Its second restoration, begun in 1996, was completed in 2020: the most beautiful birthday present to celebrate the 120th anniversary of the work of art and its reopening to the public, after five years of closure.
The lifting bridge was replaced in 1991 by a third bridge, the Martrou road viaduct (or Charente estuary viaduct), before being destroyed in 2004. Today, only the base of the four reinforced concrete piers remains.
Jacques Lamare (1925 – 2000), a name that has remained forgotten.
South West Archives
To learn more about Jacques Lamare
A notice published on the website of the Departmental archives of Charente-Maritime, tells us that Jacques Lamare, born in Pont-l’Abbé-d’Arnoult in 1925 to a father of Breton origin and a pharmacist, died in Royan in 2000. He began his studies at the Saint-Louis boarding school in his town and continued them at the Notre-Dame de Recouvrance institution in Saintes in 1934, the year he was orphaned. After the Second World War, he worked as an electronics engineer for 25 years. Attracted to the arts, Jacques Lamare then chose to embark on a literary career oriented towards regionalism. In 1975, he founded the “Saintonge littéraire”. He wrote around fifteen works including “Sites monumentaux des Charentes et de Gironde” which was awarded a prize by the Académie française. He was behind the classification of the Rochefort ferry as a historic monument and worked to save the Tonnay-Charente suspension bridge.
