Raymond Rudorff, Belle Epoque,
The Eiffel Tower
IN JANUARY 1889, the highest metal structure in the world was nearing completion in Paris as the city prepared to celebrate a turbulent century of great achievements with a gigantic international exhibition. The occasion was also intended as a celebration of France's Republican system of government but, despite the optimism of the organisers, it looked to many people as if their country's Third Republic was doomed eighteen years after its birth. A few months later, the Universal Exposition was attracting hundreds of thousands of visitors and impressing them with its lavish display of the fruits of French genius. Paris was en fête and it was easy to forget politics amid the many, varied pleasures the capital had to offer. By the end of the year, the Republic had survived its crisis and all that was left of the Exposition was Paris's newest and most conspicuous landmark: the 984-feet-high Eiffel Tower. It remained as a striking symbol for the new age that began for the city as it celebrated its past hundred years.
The Eiffel Tower was specially designed for the 1889 Exposition and, like the exhibition, symbolised the creativity, vigour and brilliance of France's builders, engineers, scientists, artists and industrialists. It was a sign of French faith in the new scientific age of progress which Jules Verne had forecast and which was fast becoming a reality. Some people could also see the tower as a symbol for the Republic and France's resurgence after her many sufferings. Of all Parisian landmarks, it was the tower which became the symbol of the city all over the world. It soared above the old roofs of the capital like some huge, inverted exclamation mark, a punctuation mark that signified a new phase in Paris's history. In past centuries, the city's poets, writers, architects, painters and scholars had sent French 'culture radiating outwards
throughout the civilised world. Now, the world's tallest tower stood like a beacon in the midst of the great city whose charm, beauty and genius had survived a century of wars, revolutions, coups d'etat, civil war and a siege. It seemed to invite the rest of the world to come to Paris and there take part in the magnificent new era which was about to begin and of which it was the spectacular herald.
To many Parisians, the Tower was simply a monstrosity. They protested that it was an ugly, vulgar and unprecedented commercial desecration of their beloved city. A professor of mathe matics calculated that the tower would inevitably collapse were it to rise any higher than 700 feet. Fear that the iron structure would fall on their heads as well as aesthetic considerations drew strong objections from the inhabitants near the area where the tower was to be built. Gustave Eiffel, the builder, replied by personally guaranteeing indemnity in case of any accident. It was a bold step for the engineer to take and a magnificent expression of self-confidence. Eiffel was France's leading architect in metal. Since 1858, he had been building bridges and viaducts across Europe, composing symphonies of iron like his famous viaduct at Garabit in southern France which have since been recognised as masterpieces of modern design. There was no one better qualified to carry out the project. The idea of a "thousand-feet high" tower had already been proposed earlier in the century. When the government had decided to hold an exhibition in Paris in 1889; they had invited designs for such a tower and Eiffel's had been the one accepted. It was the spectacular climax to his career and it perpetuated his name.
It was decided that the tower should stand in the middle of the Exhibition, in the Champ-de-Mars near the Seine, between the Trocadéro on the Right Bank and the 18th-century Ecole Militaire on the Left Bank. Work started in January 1887 and, a few days later, a manifesto signed by many of the leading artists and writers of the day was sent to Alphand, the Director of Works for the Exhibition. In what was called the Protestation des Artistes they protested against such a "vertiginously ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black, gigantic factory chimney, its barbaric mass crushing Notre-Dame, the Sainte-Chapelle, the Tour Saint-Jacques, and the Louvre". Its signatories included the painters Meissonier, Bonnat and Bouguereau, the playwright Sardou, the poet Sully-Prudhomme, and the novelist Guy de Maupassant. The protest was rejected. Work went on and by April 1, 1888, the first of the tower's three platforms wascompleted. The second was ready by July 14 the same year, and by March 30, 1889, the tower was finished in time for the exhibition despite a last-minute strike, and without a single life having been lost during its building. The next day it was "inaugurated". Eiffel gave a party for his workers and invited the municipal councillors of the City of Paris and some fifty notabilities to visit his tower. Since the lifts were not yet working, he led them up the stairs himself. Forty of the dignitaries managed to make the climb up to the first platform, 190 feet above the ground, and only twenty succeeded in reaching the little round balcony at the top where Eiffel solemnly hoisted the French tricolour flag bearing the letters R.F. in gold and offered a champagne toast while a twentyone-shot firework salute was let off from the second platform. The Tower had come to stay and to become identified, more than any other single feature, with the city it overlooked.