The Eiffel Tower wasn't always a beloved icon
[Ms. Jonnes is the author of "Eiffel's Tower" just out from Viking Press.]
On May 15, the Eiffel Tower, the world's most celebrated monument and the iconic symbol of Paris, celebrates its 120th anniversary. Strikingly, the fame and allure of this improbable wrought-iron masterpiece have only grown with the passing decades. The tower, built by railway-bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, has become a ubiquitous global image connoting modernity and glamour, while visitors who experience it firsthand are still amazed by the tower's potent mixture of spare elegance, immensity and complexity. And when the Eiffel Tower opens to its adoring public each day, the structure comes to life as crowds gaily clamber up and down its stairs, eating, drinking and flirting on the three platforms high in the sky. Open to the elements, enveloped in Eiffel's distinctive design, visitors can see and touch parts of the 18,038 pieces of iron (welded together with 2.5 million rivets) as they ascend heavenward.
The tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. (One of the losing entries was a gigantic working guillotine!) Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France's greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the "odious column of bolted metal." What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this "dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass"? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that "the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris."
Gustave Eiffel, a self-made millionaire whose firm constructed much-admired bridges all over the world, happily twitted his critics: "They begin by declaring that my tower is not French. It is big enough and clumsy enough for the English or Americans, but it is not our style, they say. We are more occupied by little artistic bibelots. . . . Why should we not show the world what we can do in the way of great engineering projects?"
In fact, Eiffel was actually erecting what ambitious English and American engineers had only dreamed of for decades: a thousand-foot tower....
Read entire article at Jill Jonnes in the WSJ
On May 15, the Eiffel Tower, the world's most celebrated monument and the iconic symbol of Paris, celebrates its 120th anniversary. Strikingly, the fame and allure of this improbable wrought-iron masterpiece have only grown with the passing decades. The tower, built by railway-bridge engineer Gustave Eiffel, has become a ubiquitous global image connoting modernity and glamour, while visitors who experience it firsthand are still amazed by the tower's potent mixture of spare elegance, immensity and complexity. And when the Eiffel Tower opens to its adoring public each day, the structure comes to life as crowds gaily clamber up and down its stairs, eating, drinking and flirting on the three platforms high in the sky. Open to the elements, enveloped in Eiffel's distinctive design, visitors can see and touch parts of the 18,038 pieces of iron (welded together with 2.5 million rivets) as they ascend heavenward.
The tower is so beloved that few today remember the storm of vitriol, mockery and lawsuits provoked by its selection as the startling centerpiece of the 1889 Paris Exposition Universelle. (One of the losing entries was a gigantic working guillotine!) Even as Eiffel was breaking ground by the Seine River in February 1887, 47 of France's greatest names decried in a letter to Le Temps the "odious column of bolted metal." What person of good taste, this flock of intellectuals asked, could endure the thought of this "dizzily ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a black and gigantic factory chimney, crushing [all] beneath its barbarous mass"? The revered painters Ernest Meissonier and William-Adolphe Bouguereau, writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas fils, composer Charles Gounod and architect Charles Garnier all signed this epistolary call to arms, stating that "the Eiffel Tower, which even commercial America would not have, is without a doubt the dishonor of Paris."
Gustave Eiffel, a self-made millionaire whose firm constructed much-admired bridges all over the world, happily twitted his critics: "They begin by declaring that my tower is not French. It is big enough and clumsy enough for the English or Americans, but it is not our style, they say. We are more occupied by little artistic bibelots. . . . Why should we not show the world what we can do in the way of great engineering projects?"
In fact, Eiffel was actually erecting what ambitious English and American engineers had only dreamed of for decades: a thousand-foot tower....