The Eiffel Tower was controversial because it put a 300 metre iron structure, designed by engineers, in the middle of a city that judged buildings by the stone traditions of the academy. In February 1887 leading artists called it "useless and monstrous" in Le Temps. Its success at the 1889 Exposition Universelle reversed public opinion.
The fight began before the first rivet went in, involved some of the most famous names in French culture, reached the courts, and returned twice before the tower was finally safe in 1910. Why people objected, and what changed their minds, says a lot about how new materials win acceptance in architecture.
What Was the 1889 Exposition Universelle?
The tower was built as the centrepiece of the 1889 Exposition Universelle, the Paris world's fair held to mark the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. According to the official Eiffel Tower site's account of the 1889 fair, the exhibition opened on 15 May 1889, ran until 6 November, and welcomed more than 32 million visitors over six months. It also celebrated French industrial strength while European monarchies boycotted the event.
The government wanted a landmark that would prove what French engineering could do. On 1 May 1886, Minister of Commerce Edouard Lockroy launched a competition that asked entrants to "study the possibility of building a 1000-foot iron tower with a square base with sides of 410 feet." The brief read almost as if it had been written for one team.
The rival stone tower
Gustave Eiffel's main rival was Jules Bourdais, architect of the Palais du Trocadéro for the 1878 fair, who proposed a 1,200 foot Sun Tower in granite and porphyry, topped with a powerful beacon. It was stone against iron, architect against engineer. Lockroy backed Eiffel, who promised a realistic schedule, a controlled cost, and private financing in return for the operating contract.
The project by Eiffel, his engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier, and the architect Stephen Sauvestre was selected from 107 entries. Many architects were outraged that an engineer had won the fair's most prominent commission.
Why Did Artists Protest Against the Eiffel Tower?
Artists protested because they believed an exposed iron tower would disfigure the historic skyline of Paris and insult French taste. On 14 February 1887, a few weeks after digging had started, the "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel" appeared on the front page of Le Temps. The original issue of Le Temps is digitised on Gallica, the Bibliothèque nationale de France's library.
The letter was addressed to Alphand, the director of works for the exhibition, and asked him to stop the project. The official history of the controversy quotes its opening line:
"We come, we writers, painters, sculptors, architects, lovers of the beauty of Paris which was until now intact, to protest with all our strength and all our indignation, in the name of the underestimated taste of the French, in the name of French art and history under threat, against the erection in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower."
The letter went further. It imagined "a vertiginously ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black factory chimney" and warned that for twenty years the city would see "the hateful shadow of this hateful column of bolted sheet metal" spreading like an ink stain.
Who signed the protest?
The official tower site counts around 40 signatories. The best known were the composer Charles Gounod, the writers Guy de Maupassant and Alexandre Dumas (son), the poets François Coppée, Leconte de Lisle and Sully Prudhomme, the painters William Bouguereau and Ernest Meissonier, the playwright Victorien Sardou, and Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opéra. His Opéra was the high point of the academic style of the École des Beaux-Arts, covered in our guide to Beaux-Arts architecture.
🎓 Expert Insight
"I believe, for my part, that the Tower will have its own beauty. Because we are engineers, does one assume that beauty does not concern us in our constructions?", Gustave Eiffel, reply in Le Temps, 1887
Eiffel did not claim classical beauty. He argued that structural logic could produce a beauty of its own, which is close to the case modernist architects would make decades later.
Why the criticism was so personal
The protest was really an argument about who had the right to shape the city. For the signatories, monuments belonged to trained architects working in stone. An iron lattice made in a factory looked like industry invading the space of art. The insults in print make this clear: Paul Verlaine called it "this belfry skeleton," Léon Bloy "this truly tragic street lamp," and Joris-Karl Huysmans "a hole-riddled suppository."
Not every objection was aesthetic. Residents of the Champ de Mars feared the tower could fall on their homes, and a Paris City Council member living nearby sued Eiffel. To keep the work going, Eiffel declared he would personally assume all risks and compensate neighbours if there were an accident.
How Did Eiffel Answer His Critics?
Eiffel replied immediately, in the same newspaper, and he chose engineering as his argument. "Now, what condition did I have to consider above all in the Tower? Resistance to wind," he wrote. He claimed that the curves of the four edges, as calculated, would "produce a strong impression of strength and beauty," and that the colossal has "a unique attraction and charm."
Instead of decorating the tower to please his critics, Eiffel told them the shape came from calculation, and that this was what made it beautiful. He also compared his tower to the pyramids of Egypt, which he described as "after all only artificial mounds of dirt."
📌 Did You Know?
Guy de Maupassant, one of the protest's signatories, kept up his dislike after the tower opened. According to the official Eiffel Tower site, he said he often had lunch on the first floor because it was "the only place in the city where I won't see it."
The Engineering Behind the Controversy
In June 1884, Eiffel's chief engineers Nouguier and Koechlin sketched a very tall pylon made of four lattice girder columns, separated at the base and meeting at the top. On 18 September 1884, Eiffel registered a patent for a configuration that would allow metal supports and pylons to exceed 300 metres. The official construction history sets out the figures that follow.
The engineers expected resistance, so they brought in Sauvestre to work on the tower's appearance. He proposed stone pedestals, monumental arches at the first level, glass halls and a bulb-shaped top. Most of this was dropped, but the large arches at the base survived.
Wind as the design driver
The curve of the legs was mathematically determined to resist wind as efficiently as possible. Eiffel explained that "all the cutting force of the wind passes into the interior of the leading edge uprights," so the legs seem to rise out of the ground "shaped by the action of the wind." The open lattice also avoids exposing large solid surfaces to storms. Our explainer on how skyscrapers stay up covers lateral loads in modern towers, and our guide to truss types shows how triangulated members carry force.
Factory precision on a construction site
Each of the 18,038 parts was drawn to a tenth of a millimetre and pre-assembled at Eiffel's Levallois-Perret factory. Of the 2,500,000 rivets, only a third were driven on site, each by a team of four men: one to heat it, one to hold it, one to shape the head and one to strike it with a sledgehammer.
💡 Pro Tip
If you study the tower in a sketchbook, draw one leg in side view and trace a tangent line to its outer edge at several heights. Watching those lines change angle shows why Eiffel called the profile shaped by wind. Good sketching tools make this kind of analytical drawing faster.
Construction timeline and key figures
Speed was part of Eiffel's answer to his critics. Figures come from the official Eiffel Tower website.
| Date or item | Milestone or figure |
|---|---|
| 26 January 1887 | Foundation works begin |
| 14 February 1887 | Artists' protest published in Le Temps |
| 1 July 1887 | Assembly of the metal pillars begins |
| 1 April 1888 | First floor completed |
| 14 August 1888 | Second floor completed |
| 31 March 1889 | Top completed, 2 years, 2 months and 5 days after works began |
| Materials | 7,300 tonnes of iron, 2,500,000 rivets, 18,038 parts |
| Height in 1889 | 300 m, a little over 312 m with the flagpole |
How Did Public Opinion Change?
Opinion changed because the public loved the finished tower. It opened to visitors on 15 May 1889 and, according to the official site, close to two million people climbed it during the fair, even though the climb cost five francs on top of the one franc entry to the exhibition. Some of its critics even apologised publicly. In the words of the official history, the criticism "burnt itself out in the presence of the completed masterpiece, and in the light of the enormous popular success with which it was greeted."
As the world's tallest tower, it gave Parisians something to be proud of. As the Chicago School of architecture was showing at the same time, metal could produce landmarks, not only factories and train sheds.
🏗️ Real-World Example
Galerie des Machines (Paris, 1889): The tower's companion at the fair was a hall measuring 420 by 110 metres with no internal supports, then the largest building in the world. Both structures were meant to outlive the exhibition, yet the City decided in 1906 to destroy the Galerie because no lasting use had been found for it. The tower survived largely because Eiffel worked hard to give it one.
Why Was the Eiffel Tower Almost Demolished?
The tower was almost demolished because Eiffel's concession only ran for 20 years. Under the agreement he signed with the State and the City of Paris in January 1887, the site and the operating rights were his until 31 December 1909, after which the tower would pass to the City. In 1894, a call for projects for the 1900 fair, partly drafted by Garnier, even invited entrants to modify or destroy it. In 1903, with visitor numbers falling, the City Council seriously considered demolition to redevelop the Champ de Mars.
Eiffel's defence was science. He financed and promoted experiments in meteorology, aerodynamics, falling bodies and, above all, wireless telegraphy. As the official account of how radio saved the tower explains, Eugène Ducretet made the first radio contact in Morse code between the tower and the Panthéon, four kilometres away, on 5 November 1898. Captain Gustave Ferrié then used the tower for military transmissions, reaching a range of 6,000 kilometres in 1908. The concession was extended for 70 years from 1 January 1910.
From eyesore to emblem
The tower that was supposed to vanish after 20 years has kept growing. Broadcast antennas have raised it to 330 metres since 15 March 2022. It also sits within the UNESCO World Heritage site Paris, Banks of the Seine, whose description traces the city's history "from the Louvre to the Eiffel Tower." The "black factory chimney" of 1887 is now part of the historic Paris it was accused of spoiling. For another public fight that ended in affection, read why the Sydney Opera House took so long to build.
Frequently Asked Questions
When was the protest against the Eiffel Tower published?
The "Protest against the Tower of Monsieur Eiffel" was published on the front page of Le Temps on 14 February 1887. It was addressed to Alphand, director of works for the 1889 exhibition, and asked him to halt construction.
Who actually designed the Eiffel Tower?
Engineers Maurice Koechlin and Emile Nouguier drew the first concept in June 1884, architect Stephen Sauvestre refined its look, and Gustave Eiffel patented and championed it.
How long did it take to build the Eiffel Tower?
Works began on 26 January 1887 and the tower was completed on 31 March 1889, a total of 2 years, 2 months and 5 days. The foundations took five months and the metal assembly took 21 months.
Was the Eiffel Tower meant to be temporary?
Eiffel held the site for only 20 years, until the end of 1909. Its use for wireless telegraphy proved strategically valuable, and his concession was renewed for 70 years from 1 January 1910.
Sketching a structure like the tower is a good way to understand it; our Concept Sketching for Architecture and Design course can help.
Putting It All Together
The 1887 protest is usually told as artists getting it wrong. More fairly, they saw how much the tower would change Paris and judged that change by older rules. What saved the tower was not a better argument about beauty but a working building that people wanted to climb and a radio antenna an army wanted to keep. For anyone designing something new in a historic setting, that is the lasting lesson: public opinion tends to follow use, not manifestos.
Cover photo: Jorge Royan, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
Comments (0)
Back to Architecture and Design Blog