What is the Eiffel Tower? An interloper, a monument of iron in a city of stone. A capital letter, the A in Paris. An ideogram, a sigil, a rune, a totem, a signpost, a secular spire; and, obviously, an icon. It’s the manmade structure par excellence, as familiar and distinctive as any ever built, including the pyramid of Cheops; even a portion is instantly recognisable.
Come to think of it, who is the Eiffel Tower? A she? Grammatically, yes: la Tour Eiffel. Its curves suggest femininity, and there have been countless quips about its ‘skirts’ (which, if one wants to labour the point, are see-through). And its longstanding nickname is la Dame de Fer (also la Grande Dame), which seems to settle the matter. Apollinaire saw it as a shepherdess watching over a flock of bleating bridges: “Bergère ô tour Eiffel le troupeau des ponts bêle ce matin”. But the tower is also unavoidably phallic, and has been tagged as such from the start: the notorious 1887 ‘Protestation des artistes’ leadenly insinuated that its érection should be seen as a rape of the city. Certainly the whole project was an emphatically male endeavour in an emphatically male age, and to hammer that home, all 72 scientists and engineers named in gold leaf on the four sides of the tower’s first floor were men; likewise all the protesting artists.
Its Twitter account speaks in the first person, the I in Paris. The tower as personality, celebrity, deity.
The tower is a creature of myth as much as maths, but what kind of creature is it? A centaur? It’s a quadruped, after all.
The tower is a product of teamwork that bears the name of one extremely wealthy man. Its shape exactly expresses this, the wide base narrowing to a point. Three parts: the lowest for the men who dug the ore, loaded it, transported it, unloaded it, smelted the iron, loaded it, transported it, unloaded it, machined it, loaded the components, transported them, unloaded them and did the digging and riveting to assemble them; the second for Eiffel’s largely unsung lieutenants Maurice Koechlin, Emile Nouguier and Stephen Sauvestre; and the third and final, tallest section for Eiffel himself, complete with a private apartment at the top. It’s capitalism’s most perfect architectural expression. (As a posthumous sop to the tower’s workforce, an area below it was named Esplanade des Ouvriers de la Tour Eiffel in October 2021.)
Roland Barthes’s superb, oft-quoted essay ‘La Tour Eiffel’ is stylish and penetratingly shrewd, but one aspect he doesn’t discuss is the tower’s sheer scale, its gigantism. (He does write about its inescapability, its évidence.) Also worth remembering is its transparency, its gauziness, its lightness – and, by extension, its playfulness. It’s alive in a way the stone buildings around it are not: grounded, but also inherently of the air. It expands and contracts in heatwaves and frost, waves madly in the wind. It’s not a stuffy monument; she ain’t heavy.
A personal memory. La Défense, twelve fifty-nine AM, 34 storeys up. The Bois de Boulogne in the middle distance, a well of darkness; beyond that, the great city in all its glitter and gold. Sacré-Coeur and the Arc de Triomphe must be on the same circuit, for at one on the dot they go dark together; but the Eiffel Tower, like a watchman, is last to turn out the lights, half a minute or so later, in three sections from the bottom up: blink-blink-blink. It’s bewitching, and night after night I stay awake to see it.
NOTES
The line by Apollinaire is from his poem ‘Zone’, part of the collection Alcools; read it here. The Eiffel Tower also features on a page from his collection Calligrammes, viewable here.
Addressed to the city’s head planner Adolphe Alphand and signed by some four dozen cultural worthies, notably Maupassant and the architect of the Paris opera house Charles Garnier, the ‘Protestation des artistes’ was published in daily newspaper Le Temps on 14th February 1887. To oppose a monument of iron, the artistes drafted a monument of whining and bad faith, countering girders with slurs and engineering with special pleading and self-importance. It must be one of the most ludicrous public notices of the nineteenth century, and can have done the standing of the arts no good at all; to read it, click here. Eiffel’s dignified reply contained significantly more good sense – and artistic insight.
The 72 savants – engineers, scientists and mathematicians – whose names appear in large gilt capitals on the tower’s first floor are listed here.
Since September 2022, in line with the Mairie de Paris’s drive for sobriété énergétique, the tower has switched off its lights at 11.45pm. More information about the energy-saving measures here; more about the illumination of the tower here.