The Eiffel Tower

Vanessa Schwartz

These postcards of the Eiffel Tower are only some of many, many views of the monument that has become the
Figure 1
Figure 2universal currency for a graphically simple way to denote Paris — a city with no shortage of landmarks, monuments and important and historically meaningful buildings (see Figures 1-3). The Tower is repeatedly represented in any number of postcards, cinematic establishing shots, cheap souvenir items such as key chains, snowglobes, necklaces, salt and pepper shakers and more high-end porcelain trinkets. It has provided a model for the creation of what might be considered the world's best 'kitsch' (see Figures 4-8).[1]

But I want to
Figure 4
Figure 3underscore the centrality of the postcard of Paris as an ideal type and as an historical object because it allows us to grasp the particular way the Eiffel Tower came not only to represent Paris but also to provide what appears to be the founding object in the history of 'modern urban icons'. In fact, the history of the postcard and the history of the Tower go hand in hand as it is generally thought that the first picture postcards were produced by the newspaper, Le Figaro, and sold and mailed on the spot at the tower's base when it opened during the Exposition in 1889.[2]

Figure 5
Figure 6Paris in the late nineteenth century was the most visited city in the world. The exhibitionary culture that lured tourists to visit drew on and created a visual culture of city promotion as well as an impulse and even need to summarize the city through graphically simple representation in the form of 'icons'. Although tourist imagery may have been created to satisfy the demands of visitors, of course, this does preclude the very same imagery from informing the natives' sense of the city as well. Sometimes we come to see ourselves as others see us. This 'post-card' Paris also shaped and played an important role as a particular commercial visual culture emerged in the late nineteenth century: postcards, posters and, finally, the movies.

Figure 7Over the years, many cultural observers — poets,
Figure 8 painters, filmmakers, critics, have self-consciously tried to interpret the meaning of the Tower and in so doing have contributed to both its significance and signification, helping create the Tower's identity as a symbol and a lieux de mémoire.[3] It is my contention here, however, that the Tower's particular building history and the context into which it was 'born' and developed in its early years did not just define the Tower as a French symbol. Rather, the Eiffel Tower powerfully came to define what we mean by an 'urban icon' and helped determine what would become the process of 'iconization' in other cities around the world. This also helps explain why Paris and its Tower form such a fundamental crossroads for the history of visual culture and urban history.

Finally, the Eiffel Tower denotes a place in a time: Paris in its 'Belle Epoque'; the golden age of all city golden ages.[4] Although this image is of Paris as frozen in time, it is paradoxically stuck as a beacon of a modernity that may never be a fully that of a 'by-gone' era, at least as long as we live in a world in which cities are identified with novelty and icons serve as a fundamental element of urban visual culture.

The History of the Tower

First proposed in 1884 as a major feature of the Exposition of 1889, approved in 1887 and opened in late March 1889, the Eiffel Tower caused a sensation in its own time as the tallest structure in the world and as a milestone in iron construction. Although the idea to build a 1,000-foot tower (or its European measure equivalent of 300 metres) had circulated earlier in the century, several short-term factors facilitated the realization of Eiffel's project. First, the Expositions held in Europe and America from the mid-century forward created the context for spectacular and symbolic architectural construction. Second, the snail-paced construction of the granite Washington Monument, begun in 1848 and only completed in 1885, taught the French a lesson. They decided that building with new materials and doing much of the building 'off-site' by using prefabricated iron would make it possible to build quickly. Third, as the newly solidified Third French Republic prepared for the Exposition of 1889, it embraced the notion that the construction in iron capped a century devoted to rationality and scientific progress. As the editor of a popular scientific magazine put it, it would be the 'arc de Triumph of science and industry'.[5] The Tower would transform Republican ideology into a monumental display.[6] The fact that the Tower was also part of the celebrations for the Centennial of the French Revolution immediately embedded it in the larger field of national 'symbolization' as France sought to commemorate one of the world's great events while underscoring that it all began in Paris.

The Tower inevitably had its initial critics, including a cranky group of well-respected mainstream French artists, writers and intellectuals who complained in 1887 that it would be a monstrous symbol of the craven machine age that would destroy both the values and image of the world's most important city. Yet, it was the engineer, Gustave Eiffel, whose vision prevailed.
Figure 9Eiffel not only oversaw a complex manufacturing and building project that was without peer at the time, but his business skills contributed to the Tower's notoriety. While the government paid him a commission, he raised the construction money by selling stocks to investors; his stake would come in the form of a 20-year guarantee to the profits from the various Tower concessions (restaurants, a theatre, souvenir stands). This arrangement also assured that the Tower would not be razed for at least 20 years without a lawsuit from its builder. Eiffel also managed a brilliant publicity campaign during the Tower's erection that included the taking of many photographs of the building in progress.

Upon its opening, two major elements contributed to the Tower's becoming an icon:
Figure 10its size and shape and its identity as a purpose-built tourist attraction. While there may have been other towers built before, until the mid-nineteenth century, most architecture that reached skyward had devoted itself to God. By the turn of the twentieth century, the skyscraper race raged in the United States. The Eiffel Tower's construction anticipated that climb. If the size of the Eiffel Tower could be said to have contributed to its singularity when it was built, by 1931 the Empire State Building had surpassed it in height. By 1931, however, the singularity of the Eiffel Tower's size hardly seemed its most salient characteristic. Yet, its form: its wide base and narrow tip, its open lattice-work of iron to stabilize it against wind cannot be considered a prototype for any other building form. In that way, it is not the 'first' skyscraper. While it has been 'copied' in places such as Tokyo, it remains a singular form rather than a model of a building type, which has contributed to its iconization.

Although Eiffel proposed that it would be used for scientific experimentation and in more practical domains such as telegraphic communication and for observations concerning the weather and the stars as well as a great lighting beacon, the Tower had little purpose other than to be seen and visited. In that way, it heralded the era of 'if you build it they will come' tourism. Almost 2 million Exposition visitors climbed the Tower between May and November 1889 and all of the visitors to the Exposition had to have seen it. The quality of the facilities on the Tower made the ascent worthwhile. The Tower had elevators as well as stairs and a number of restaurants, toilets, souvenir stands, even a theatre, mailboxes and its own 'newspaper' Le Figaro de la Tour. The Tower offered itself as a destination, look-out and spectacular object to see.

When more than 50 million people attended the Universal Exposition held in Paris 11 years later in 1900, Paris surely cemented its place as the most visited city in the world and the Tower became the most visited site in Paris.[7] A city with no shortage of centuries-old buildings to visit, it may seem surprising how many people wanted to view or visit a recent and strikingly contemporary tribute to the wonders of science and engineering. Although visits have ebbed and flowed over the years, the Tower has held its place as the most visited site in France for at least 40 years; half of all visitors to Paris actually climb the Tower and the most popular souvenir bought in Paris is some likeness of the Tower.[8]

Representing the Tower: The Age of the Urban Icon

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 and thus has come to represent the time in which it was built: the Belle Epoque. This identification of the object with its moment of origin has lasted because of its positive association as a time when Paris played a leading role in creating a certain kind of modern, leisure-oriented spectacular urban culture. Its enduring significance as an icon highlights the great tension between the positive French embrace of progress and a more nostalgic feeling for a time when France really was at the cutting edge of technology and engineering which the Tower represents. During the inter-war years, avant-garde artists such as Robert Delaunay and poets such as Guillaume Apollinaire dedicated works on the subject of the Tower but it is the continuous mundane circulation of images and the acceleration of city representation in the twentieth century that has given the Eiffel Tower its staying power. The Tower, like Parisian modernity itself, is deeply implicated in the project of modern urbanism and its connection to commercial visual culture.

Because the Tower's opening coincided temporally with the development of tourism on a large scale with its postcards and the mass
Figure 11 production of 'souvenirs' the Tower's image was massively disseminated with the patina of the novelty. That moment has been so seminal to contemporary
Figure 12 mass visual culture and its media such as photography and its modes of representation such as graphic simplification (logos), that the Eiffel Tower symbolizes tourism, modern urban culture, mass reproduction as much as its actual achievement as an engineering feat. As mentioned earlier, the first picture postcards from Paris, like this one, featured the Tower (see Figure 11) (this image is c. 1910, according to eBay seller). Another postcard of the Eiffel Tower (date unknown), 'stamped' with multiple images of the Tower, suggest the variety of Eiffel Towers that have and still do appear on postcards and stamps (see Figure 12).

The Tower's simple structure was also easily reproduced in three dimensions: some pilings, an arch and a vertical shaft with a suitable number of crisscrossed girders conveyed its essence and thus it easily could be rendered as a simple souvenir, miniaturized in sugar, in key chains, as charms or free-standing desk and mantle display objects.[9] When the Eiffel Tower was new, so were postcards and mass-produced souvenirs. This contributed to its iconization.

The Tower as a representation is also simultaneous with the development of two late nineteenth-century mechanisms of visualization and illumination: cinema and electrical lighting. Such new technologies as film and electrical lighting were both like urban life in their emphasis on vision and motion and rehearsed and familiarized urban dwellers with new sources of modern stimulation. The Tower was not lighted itself until 1900 when the widespread use of electricity at the Universal Exposition gave the Tower a new lease on life. In 1889, it had been lit with spotlights but in 1900, electric lights would light the tower itself. The history of electric illumination, especially its early exploitation at World Fairs, facilitated the fairs' identification as 'magic' cities. Electric lighting dematerialized the built environment into enchanting visions.[10] Night lighting had the power to emphasize pattern and design and the Eiffel Tower's illumination has contributed significantly to its iconicity. Between 1925 and 1937 (another two Exposition dates) the car manufacturer, Andr' Citro'n, used the Tower as the world's largest billboard.

Film's emergence trailed the Eiffel Tower's opening by only six years; by the time of the 1900 Universal Exposition, it entertained audiences in a variety of forms and spaces on the fairgrounds. Newsreels of the Exposition featured the Eiffel Tower, establishing the great tradition of the Eiffel Tower as Parisian establishing shot. While there have been films that seriously contemplate the Eiffel Tower such as Rene Clair's Paris Qui Dort, or the 1949 Man on the Eiffel Tower, the incessant depiction of the Tower as the proof of 'Paris' has contributed to the Tower's becoming an 'icon'. If the modern city produced the cinema, cinema has reinforced the importance of icons in urban representation.[11]

Figure 13The Eiffel Tower signifies the emergence of visuality as the quintessential modern urban experience whether in Paris or other metropolises. Seeing the city and seeing in the city characterizes modern city life. Vision is the most reciprocal of the senses; people glance at each other and the city became their common object of vision. As Roland Barthes said of the Tower: 'it will be there, connecting me above Paris to each of my friends that I know are seeing it'.[12]

Anything as important as
Figure 14the Eiffel Tower, however, has multiple meanings, of course. The Tower stands for Paris but also relies on a system of signification in which Paris stands for France. It validates the notion that whatever happens in the reordering of world power, France will 'always have Paris'. Or, if they do not have it, standing in front of the Tower becomes the evidence of that condition.

Of all the interpretations of the Tower, the most interesting is Roland Barthes', written in 1964, the year Andr' Malraux's Ministry of Culture added the Tower to the list of historical monuments. Barthes' interpretation of the Tower is important because it helps us understand how and why the Eiffel Tower has functioned in urban history as the defining object for a consideration of urban icons. Like many that came before and since, Barthes suggested that the Tower represented Paris. "The Tower is also present to the entire world. First of all as a universal symbol of Paris' it is everywhere on the globe where Paris is to be stated as an image."[13] In fact, because visiting the tower became part of visits to Paris, the tower contributed to its elision with Paris: "the Eiffel Tower was nothing but a place to visit. Its very emptiness marked it as a symbol, and the first symbol that it called to mind, by logical association, was inevitably that which one 'visited' at the same time as the tower, namely, the city of Paris: the tower became Paris by metonymy."[14] But Barthes' Tower is Paris as an image. He stressed that the Tower was constantly engaged in staging its own visibility. He recounts the anecdote of writer Guy de Maupassant having dined in the Tower's restaurant just to escape having to see it. Yet Barthes invokes the Tower in a mutual encounter of looking: 'There is no Parisian glance it fails to touch', here evoking although probably with no consciousness of it, the traditional practice of looking at icons who were thought to look back with a tactile gaze.

The Tower was more than an unavoidable sight, however. It was both lookout and object to be seen. The Tower's visibility led Barthes to link it to Hugo's 'View from Notre Dame' that preceded it and the view from an airplane that came after. The panoramic visibility it offered of the city facilitated the apprehension of Paris as an image. Although the bird's eye view and the cityscape seem as old as the earliest prints and maps associated with early modern urban representation, visuality and imageability changed after photography which reinforced the notion of the objective eye that surveys from above.[15]

For Barthes, the Tower's visibility was of interest because it crystallized central issues relating to modern form and its analysis. He noted that the Tower 'permits us to transcend sensation and to see things in their structure'. [16] He believed that this led to intellection and the experience of seeing 'concrete abstraction' or seeing things in their structure. For Barthes then, the experience of the tower is virtually a pretext for a sort of structuralist semiotics. Walter Benjamin also considered the tower as instructive in relation to questions of modern form. In the arcades Project (in the convolute on Iron Construction) and in the draft of an essay about iron written in 1929, he called the 12,000 metal fittings and 2 and a half million rivets montage in architectural form.[17] Benjamin, of course, wrote extensively about montage in modernity's visual culture (by considering photos, catalogues and film) as the foundation for a new sort of philosophy of history based in images. In these less than obvious ways, the Tower is connected to modern forms of apprehension and representation. For Barthes and Benjamin, it guided their thought about modern systems of representation. I would suggest that it also interjected those systems of representation into urban life in the twentieth century as cities sought consciously to imitate Paris not simply by building big and important landmarks but by stressing visuality, visibility and the circulation of these objects as images that would represent the city in graphically simplified terms.

The Eiffel Tower's initiation in the moment of increasingly image-driven urban culture, and as part of a broader society whose representations moved increasingly toward the iconic as its mode, can help us understand the Eiffel Tower's rise as the definitive Parisian icon and possibly the point of departure for all other urban icons since. While the Eiffel Tower remains singular in its form, there is only one genuine Eiffel Tower; it is nevertheless a prototype. It is not only an icon of Paris but also the prototypical urban icon.

[1] Jean-Michel Normand, Kitsch (Paris, 1999), 7.

[2] Naomi Schor, 'Cartes postales: representing Paris 1900', Critical Inquiry, 18, (Winter 1992), 188- 245.

[3] See essay by Henri Loyrette, 'The Eiffel Tower', in Pierre, ed., Realms of Memory, vol. III (New York, 1998), 349-76. English language edition edited by Lawrence Kritzman and trans. by Arthur Goldhammer which treats it as a site of national signification bypassing its role in the history of Paris in relation to the history of urban signification more broadly defined.

[4] Peter Hall, Cities in Civilization (New York, 1998), 3-24.

[5] Gaston Tissandier, La Tour Eiffel de 300 mètres (Paris, 1889), 78. (l'arc de triomphe de la science et de l''industrie').

[6] See Deborah Silverman, 'The Paris Exhibition of 1889: architecture and the crisis of individualism', Oppositions, 8 (Spring 1977), 71-91, and also Art nouveau in fin-de-siècle France (Berkeley, 1989).

[7] For information on number of visits to Eiffel Tower since its opening, see http://www.tour-eiffel.fr.

[8] Speech by M. Jacques Chirac, Mayor of Paris, 23 Sep. 1982, on the occasion of the opening of the renovated first floor of the Eiffel Tower in Actualités Anciennes, 'Eiffel Tower'. Bibliothèque historique de la Ville de Paris.

[9] See Romi, 'L'art populaire de la Tour Eiffel', La Renaissance, (22 Jun. 1939), 36-42. See also Loyrette, 'The Eiffel Tower', in Nora (ed.) Realms of Memory vol. III, 349-376.

[10] David Nye, Electrifying America. Social Meanings of a New Technology (1880-1940) (Cambridge, MA, 1990), and Joachim Schlör, Nights in the Big City (London, 1998).

[11] There is a growing literature on 'the cinema and the city'. See, for example, MarK Shiel and Tony Fitzmaurice, Screening the City (London, 2003).

[12] Roland Barthes, The Eiffel Tower and Other Mythologies, trans. Richard Howard (Berkeley, 1997; orig. publ. 1979), 3.

[13] Ibid., 3

[14] Barthes as cited by Loyrette, 'The Eiffel Tower', 73.

[15] See a variety of selections in Vanessa R. Schwartz and Jeannene M. Przyblyski, The Nineteenth Century Visual Culture Reader (London, 2004).

[16] Barthes, The Eiffel Tower, 9.

[17] Susan Buck-Morss, The Dialectics of Seeing (Cambridge, MA, 1989), 74, and Walter Benjamin, The Arcades Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin, prepared on the basis of the German edited volume by Rolf Tiedman (Cambridge, MA, 1999), 161.