Pessimists Archive Podcast

Author: Pessimists Archive

Real, cynical old articles about new things read aloud. Based on @PessimistsArc.
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Artists Against the Eiffel Tower (1887)
Monday, 15 September, 2025

The Eiffel Tower is as iconic of France as croissants and baguettes, and equally emblematic of Paris as Notre-Dame or the Arc de Triomphe.Yet, before completion for the 1889 World’s Fair - the project was treated by some as an industrialist “Tower of Babel” that was anti-ethical to French taste and culture.A month after construction of the Tower began in 1887, a group of prominent French artists published an open letter titled ‘Artists against the Eiffel Tower’ featured on the front page of Parisian Newspaper ‘Les Temps.’ It began: "We, writers, painters, sculptors, architects, amateurs impassioned with the beauty, until now intact, of Paris, are coming to protest with all our might and all our indignation, in the name of unrecognized French taste, in the name of threatened French art & history, against the erection, in the very heart of our capital, of the useless and monstrous Eiffel Tower…"