Rajeev's World: A Rendezvous With La Dame de Fer...

Monday, July 27, 2015

A Rendezvous With La Dame de Fer...

After enjoying a sampling of delectable and traditional, rustic French cuisine as we cruised along the Seine, we headed to Palais de Chaillot at the Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, where we were to meet an Irishman who was to show us places to get the best views of the La Dame de Fer.

Heading to Palais de Chaillot...

We joined our group at the very historic Palais de Chaillot, which was built in 1937 as one of the highlights of the 1937 Paris International Exhibition, which was the stage of a prestige showdown between the USSR and Nazi Germany. Palais de Chaillot became the first headquarters of the United Nations in 1946, upto 1951. It was here that the United Nations General Assembly adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights on December 10, 1948.

Palais de Chaillot is located at a square called the Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre. The place was named in honour of the Battle of Trocadero of 1823, in which the fortified Isla del Trocadero, in southern Spain, was captured by French forces.

Today the square is officially named Place du Trocadéro et du 11 Novembre, although it is usually simply called the Place du Trocadéro. The "11 Novembre" part of the name comes from the Armistice of November 11, 1918, signifying the end of the First World War between the Allies and Germany. Interestingly, the armistice came into effect at 11 a.m. Paris time on 11 November 1918 ("the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month")!

The statue of Marshall Foch, a French First World War hero...

The Big Bus...

The EU flag...

Dusk...

Souvenir de Paris...

Walking towards the La Dame de Fer, through the Jardins du Trocadéro...

The tower is named after the engineer Gustave Eiffel, whose company designed and built the tower. Eiffel was a bridge engineer of German ethnicity...

The Eiffel Tower was designed by two engineers - Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, who were working for Gustave Eiffel's company, the Compagnie des Établissements Eiffel. This design was to be the the company's entry for a design contest for a suitable centrepiece for the Exposition Universelle of 1889, a world's fair that would celebrate the centennial of the French Revolution.

The initial sketch for the tower was made by Koechlin in May 1884, while working at home, Koechlin. He described it as a "a great pylon, consisting of four lattice girders standing apart at the base and coming together at the top, joined together by metal trusses at regular intervals".

Eiffel initially showed little enthusiasm for the design, but he did approve further study, and the two engineers then asked Stephen Sauvestre, the head of company's architectural department, to contribute to the design. Sauvestre added decorative arches to the base of the tower and a glass pavilion to the first level.

By autumn of 1884, Eiffel was actively canvassing for the design to be selected and he bought the rights to the patent on the design which Koechlin, Nougier, In March 1885, Eiffel presented the design plans to the Société des Ingénieurs Civils. He said that the tower would symbolise "...not only the art of the modern engineer, but also the century of Industry and Science in which we are living, and for which the way was prepared by the great scientific movement of the eighteenth century and by the Revolution of 1789, to which this monument will be built as an expression of France's gratitude."

Little progress was made until 1886, when the budget for the exposition was passed and, in May 1886, an alteration to the terms of the open competition being held for a centerpiece to the exposition was made. The alteration effectively made the selection of Eiffel's design a foregone conclusion, as entries had to include a study for a 300 metre four-sided, dismantle-able metal tower on the Champ de Mars.

A commission was set up to examine Eiffel's design and its rivals, which, a month later, decided that all the proposals except Eiffel's were either impractical or lacking in details. Clearly, this was an example of crony-capitalism...

Eiffel signed the contract to construct the tower on January 8, 1887, in his personal capacity. The government granted him 1.5 million Francs toward the construction costs. This was less than a quarter of the estimated 6.5 million Francs. But Eiffel retained the lucrative right to receive all income from the commercial exploitation of the tower during the exhibition and for the next 20 years. He later established a separate company to manage the tower, putting up half the necessary capital himself.

Indeed Gustave Eiffel was an astute businessman. He realised the future income potential of the Eiffel Tower was much much more than the foregone construction grant...

The tower drewing criticism from the intelligentsia believe it was not feasible or who objected to it on artistic grounds. A petition called "Artists against the Eiffel Tower" was sent to the government in February 1887, saying "We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects and passionate devotees of the hitherto untouched beauty of Paris, protest with all our strength, with all our indignation in the name of slighted French taste, against the erection [...] of this useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower [...] To bring our arguments home, imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk. Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of Les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years [...] we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal."

The artists really hated it, even after it was completed. In fact, the famous writer, Guy de Maupassant supposedly ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day because it was the one place in Paris where the tower was not visible! He must given the restaurant a hell of a business. Hate too comes at a price.

Gustave Eiffel responded to these criticisms by comparing his tower to the Egyptian pyramids: "My tower will be the tallest edifice ever erected by man. Will it not also be grandiose in its way? And why would something admirable in Egypt become hideous and ridiculous in Paris?"

Given that the artists view of the Eiffel was so wrong, makes me feel that artists are many a times quite straitjacketed and it is business and science that can take humanity forward into the next orbit. This is not to discount the role artists play. There is a fine balance society has to keep between the utopian dreamers and the practical thinkers and doers...

Work on the tower started in January 1887 and was completed at the end of March 1889. Eiffel constructed his apartment at the top of the tower. From there, he carried out meteorological observations and also used the tower to perform experiments on the action of air resistance on falling bodies...

Eiffel had a permit for the tower to stand for only 20 years. It had to be dismantled in 1909, when its ownership would revert to the City of Paris. The City had planned to tear it down but since the tower proved to be valuable for communication purposes, it was allowed to stand after the expiry of the permit...

The Pont d'Iéna and the Eiffel beyond it...

The Eiffel has inspired quite a few replicas to come up all over the world. Notable among those is the 332.9 metre tall Tokyo Tower, a communications and observation tower located in the Shiba-koen district. I had heard that its similarity with the Eiffel led to a diplomatic dispute between the French and the Japanese. It all died down with the Japanese conceded that the Eiffel was the original and further agreed not to promote the Tokyo Tower as a tourist attraction. I am not sure if this story is credible.

The Seine...

On the first level of the Eiffel Tower, names of 72 French scientists, engineers, and mathematicians are engraved in recognition of their contributions. The list includes only one woman - Sophie Germain, a noted mathematician whose work on the theory of elasticity was crucial to the construction of the tower.

Eiffel chose this "invocation of science" to counter the vociferous protests against the tower by the artists.

Over the years, Parisians and the French fell in love with the tower. During the Second World War, when the German occupied Paris in 1940, it was rumored that the Germans wanted to fly their flag from the top of the tower and Hitler wanted to get to the top.

To prevent that, the lift cables were cut by the French and could not be repaired by the Germans. German soldiers had to climb all the way up to the top of the tower to hoist the swastika, but the flag was so large it blew away just a few hours later, and was replaced by a smaller one. When visiting Paris, Hitler chose to stay on the ground rather than climb up to the top.

In August 1944, as the Allies were nearing Paris, Hitler ordered General Dietrich von Choltitz, the military governor of Paris, to demolish the tower along with the rest of the city. Von Choltitz disobeyed the order. It is amazingly how the lifts were miraculously repaired within hours of the fall of the Germans in the city.