A tourist’s look at the Eiffel Tower

Finding a subject for a tourist’s look at the Eiffel Tower doesn’t require much effort. Since I’ve remained one in my own city, I’m probably the ideal man to talk about it. I chose to focus on the Eiffel Tower area. Curves are everywhere here. This is where sports fan zones are usually set up, and in 2024 it hosted the temporary Olympic Games site, not to mention the countless tourists who have flocked here in even greater numbers since that event. The Eiffel Tower, since that’s today’s topic, is the epitome of curves.

A tourist’s look at the Eiffel Tower and its neighbourhood

A tourist's look at the Eiffel Tower

Industry, beautiful and elegant

Back then, industrial architecture knew how to be beautiful and elegant. What a feast for the eyes! Personally, I never tire of it. And since the Tower happens to be on my way to the office…

People often forget that many intellectuals signed a petition demanding the Tower be dismantled. Among them were Charles Garnier, Charles Gounod, and even Émile Zola! Which goes to show that one can be both a modernist and a conservative at the same time.

An epigraph in curves

A tourist's look at the Eiffel Tower

Behind the Eiffel Tower stands the Trocadéro and its Palais de Chaillot, built in the 1930s. More curves, all curves. On this particular bend, this beguiling architectural epigraph I dote on reading:

IT DEPENDS ON HE WHO PASSES
WHETHER I BE TOMB OR TREASURE
WHETHER I SPEAK OR REMAIN SILENT
THIS RESTS WITH YOU ALONE
FRIEND, DO NOT ENTER WITHOUT DESIRE

Thanks to my favourite AI search tool, I tracked down the origin of this verse. It’s a poem by Paul Valéry. Facing the Eiffel Tower, this work, “taken from Charmes (1922), invites the visitor to engage actively with the place and the culture it houses,” my learned tool informs me. This building is home to the Musée de l’Homme and the Cité de l’Architecture. And yet people claim technology only serves to dumb down the masses. But as with museums, what you take away depends on those who “enter with desire”.

Question: do the tourists standing in front of the museum taking selfies show any desire to learn?

My research also taught me that the statue in the foreground is Henri Bouchard’s Apollo Musagetes (leader of the Muses), holding his lyre, and not a work by Bourdelle. However, Bouchard succeeded Bourdelle as an guest member of the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp in 1930. So there is indeed some resemblance between these two sculptors, even if they weren’t formally affiliated with the same school.

A tourist's look at the Eiffel Tower
A tourist’s look at the Eiffel Tower area: a Guimard entrance at Dauphine metro station

A little further north, you reach Dauphine metro station. It was designed by Hector Guimard and is a gem of Parisian Art Nouveau. Its vegetal interlacing in cast iron has become one of the capital’s symbols, alongside the metro entrances at Denfert Rochereau, Abbesses (relocated in earlier times), and Arts et Métiers.

Still a tourist after all these years

I’ve lived in Paris for decades, yet I remain a provincial at heart. A tourist, really. I’ve never lost that capacity for wonder at what born-and-bred Parisians no longer even notice. The Eiffel Tower at dawn, the swirls of a Guimard metro entrance, the majestic curves of the Trocadéro: each time feels like I’m discovering them for the first time. True Parisians walk past without looking up. I still stop, camera in hand, looking up in the air. Perhaps that’s my privilege as a provincial man: keeping intact one’s sense of wonder at this city that never stops putting on a show – a city every Frenchman or woman loves to hate, forgetting just how beautiful it is.

Yann Gourvennec
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20 Comments

  4. Paris is a very curvaceous city, through you lens! (Perhaps this is why I often refer to Paris as my “mistress.” Ha ha.) That first image of the Eiffel Tower is a triumph, though — because it is completely original. Among the many thousands of images I’ve seen of la tour Eiffel, only yours has seen it from that angle. Well done.

    Reply

      • Ah, Yann … it was a sincere compliment, so you don’t owe me a thing — but I will be delighted to meet you over a beer nonetheless.

  7. Amazing Yann ! Photograph of the Eiffel’s base arches is beautiful. It perfectly captures the grandeur and scale of this steel structure. 🙂

    I feel old styles and structures were beautiful and rhythmic. Modern structures are flat, orthogonal and dry :\

    Reply

    • Thanks! Some modern structures are stunning too. Some aren’t. Don’t forget that intellectuals in the late 19th century petitioned to have the Eiffel Tower taken down. Guimard, who is the architect of the few remaining Art Nouveau “Style Nouille” metro station wasn’t much liked either. A lot of his metro stations were taken down because the public didn’t like it at all. Art Nouveau was, by and large, despised. And Art Deco, similarly. 1950s architecture and the Bauhaus were hated by all, and Le Corbusier’s famous Villa Savoye in Poissy left to rot for 30 off years before it was restored and is now a permanent museum dedicated to architecture. We live in a 1970s building and we hate this architecture. But our young ones love it. Etc. etc.

      Reply

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