The Metamorphosis of Eiffel’s Paris
Gustave Eiffel witnessed Paris transformed over the course of his career. Construction of the Eiffel Tower in 1889 marked the city’s emergence as a modern metropolis.
Gustave Eiffel’s 300 meter iron tower stands at the center of Paris. Built in 1889 as the centerpiece of a world’s fair, the Exposition Universelle, it quickly became one of the world’s most famous structures. Today, the Eiffel Tower is widely recognized as the symbol of Paris. Its distinctive profile is endlessly reproduced; two strokes of a pen or brush evoke the mystery and élan of Paris. For many, the Eiffel Tower is Paris.
Eiffel called his tower a triumphal arch dedicated to “the glory of modern science, and for the greatest honor of French industry,” comparing recent achievement to military victories like those celebrated by the Arc de Triumphe.[1] However, the tower held a simpler meaning for most people. For its first visitors, the Eiffel Tower offered tangible evidence of the promise of progress, something they could touch and thrill to the possibilities of the future.
Today, the association of the Eiffel Tower with innovation and progress is long forgotten, but Paris is still regarded as a center for progress and innovation. Paris consistently ranks among the top ten world-class cities. At the beginning of the 20th century, Paris proclaimed itself the “Capital of Modernity” with a mission to civilize the world. Today, Paris is leading the transition to sustainable city design. In the wake of the 2015 COP25 conference that produced the international Paris Climate Accords, Paris aspires to be the world’s greenest city.
Here is the story of how Paris became the model for cities in the 20th century. The Eiffel Tower was the crowning achievement of Gustave Eiffel’s distinguished career as an engineer and builder. Over a course of a 40-year career as an engineer and builder, a period in which revolutions in science and technology changed the world, Eiffel witnessed the transition of Paris from a medieval city into a modern metropolis. In the beginning, Paris aspired to achieve the past grandeur of ancient Athens and Rome. In the end Paris emerged as the city of the future.
Gustave Eiffel arrived in Paris in October 1850, almost exactly halfway through the eventful 19th century. There, he surrendered himself to the masters of the College of Saint-Barbe, where he would spend the next two years only a few steps away from the Pantheon and within sight of Notre Dame Cathedral. He was eighteen years old, the threshold of adulthood. Eiffel had come to Paris, leaving his childhood home in Dijon, a small provincial center, to build a life.
Since its founding in medieval times, a period of over 800 years, prominent families had launched their sons into the world by sending them to the College of Saint-Barbe. Within its walls, the school’s masters guided their students through studies in Latin, theology, philosophy, law, medicine, and the arts to prepare them for careers in law, government, and the church. Outside, one of the world’s greatest cities beckoned. Its narrow, winding streets lined with theaters, clubs, bars, and cafes offering the students a different kind of education.
All of this was changing in the middle of the 19th century. The industrial revolution, coming on top of the French Revolution (1789) and the Napoleonic Wars (1799–1815) in the first decade of the century, upended a political and social order that had prevailed for centuries. Math and science were now taught to students at the College of Saint-Barbe, subjects rarely taught in schools before the French Revolution. More and more, the students came from the bourgeoisie, middle class families made prosperous by the industrial revolution, and many sought to join the industrial revolution as engineers.
Gustave Eiffel aspired to become an engineer. He was a child of the industrial revolution. Eiffel’s mother and father prospered by selling coal; an uncle owned a chemical factory. After preparatory studies at the College of Saint-Barbe, Eiffel enrolled at the prestigious Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures to study engineering. He remained in Paris to pursue a career, and eventually he opened his own metalworks factory in a northern suburb, Levallois-Perrot. Eiffel rose to prominence, constructing large bridges for the railroads and other notable structures in Paris, Europe, and around the world. He designed the framework for the Statue of Liberty. By the 1880s, for his talents, Eiffel was know as the “Magician of Iron.”
During this same period Paris experienced a metamorphosis. Industrialization and an influx of economic refugees from rural France strained the old city’s infrastructure past its limits. In the second half of the 19th century Baron Haussmann and a team of engineers directed vast urban renewal projects. Blocks of tenement buildings in the old city center were torn down and replaced. Streets were laid open to install the vital organs of a modern city — sewers, water mains, gas pipes, pneumatic tubes, and the first lines of the Paris Metro. Posh, new neighborhoods were added, expanding the city westward.
Eiffel saw Paris disemboweled and rebuilt anew. The city that emerged was unlike any other. Not only was Paris rebuilt from the inside, French engineers and industrialists placed it at the center of new networks of transportation and communication that encompassed the entire world. Travelers on the Orient Express, running on railroads built by French engineers, could cross the continent of Europe from Paris to Constantinople, a distance of 2,740 kilometers, in comfort in a mere 80 hours. The same trip by stagecoach would take more than a month. French engineers dug the Suez Canal, linking the Mediterranean and Red seas, cutting more than a week off the travel time between Europe and south Asia by ship. And, French engineers had begun building a similar link between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans across Central America, the Panama Canal.
Eiffel’s triumphal tower, by far the tallest structure ever built, celebrated these achievements and more. London, the seat of the British Empire, could claim to rule the world. Paris was changing it.
At the beginning of the 21st century, Paris has set out to transform itself again, this time into a green city. This metamorphosis began in earnest in 2015, the year the world gathered in Paris to formulate a response to climate change — the Paris Climate Accords. Already, remarkable changes have been achieved. Automobiles have been removed from many streets, in favor of cyclists, pedestrians, and nature. In 2020 Paris set the goal to plant 170,000 trees by 2026, increasing the total number of trees in the city by one third. And, air and water quality are improving — people are able to swim in the Seine for the first time in nearly 200 years.
Paris owes its success as a world-class city and center for innovation to its geology and geographic setting. The fertile soils of the Paris Basin and its moderate climate were amenable to settlement early in human history. Geographically, Paris is located at a natural crossroads for long-distance travel. An ancient route for travel overland between the Low Countries and the Iberian peninsula crosses the Seine, a trade route for moving tin mined in southwest England to the Mediterranean. These factors fostered the development of a culture that is both self sufficient and open to new ideas imported from foreign cultures.
New ideas are disruptive by nature. The social and political upheaval that beset Paris in the 19th century were triggered by radical new ideas that arrived during the period of the Enlightenment in the 18th century. Their impact is reflected in the writings of Victor Hugo, the most famous French author of the 19th century. Hugo was part of a generation whose lives were battered by divisive politics, economic disruption wrought by the arrival of new technologies, and a deadly pandemic. Paris was Hugo’s muse.
Hugo wrote Les Miserables to make sense of life during these turbulent times. This epic novel is his most popular work. The story is set against a backdrop of unending social conflict, as was Hugo’s life. It is autobiographical in many respects. Jean Valjean, the novel’s protagonist, and Inspector Javert, its main antagonist, mirror conflicting sides of Hugo’s personality. The issues Hugo writes about are universal and still resonate — the exploitation and rights of women, intergenerational conflict, cruelties of the police and the justice system, and failure of societies institutions in general.
Les Miserables provides a window into this turbulent period in the history of France. It is a book about progress, as Hugo informs his readers, “from one end to the other, as a whole and in detail.”[2] The last half of the 19th century was known as the Age of Progress. Emperor Louis Napoleon ruled the Second Empire of France (1852-1870) under the banner of progress. He rebuilt Paris to be a showcase of Second Empire France, hosting international expositions there in 1855 and 1867. However, the sweeping boulevards that were a defining feature of the renewed Paris were also designed to make it easier for the authorities to maintain control during periods of civil unrest.
Hugo’s view of progress was more expansive. “The collective stride of the human race is called Progress,” he wrote. Progress is the journey toward an ideal world. It is foremost a moral journey. Hugo championed the causes of the disadvantaged and the working classes, both as a writer and, later in life, as a political figure. The triumph of efforts to improve the common good over the tyranny of the status quo is a theme that runs through Les Miserables.
Hugo also recognized the importance of the material progress achieved through the renewal of Paris, which improved the comfort and security of the working classes as well as the well-to-do. Hugo identifies engineers as the champions of progress. He devotes entire chapters in Les Miserables to explaining the design, and operation of the Paris sewer system. The modern ideal will be realized through the application of science and technology, he wrote. Engineers had a special role to play in the metamorphosis of Paris. In fact, the metamorphosis of Paris started with its engineers.
Engineers look at the world in a particular way. The word “engineer” derives from words that meant devious or clever device. Harvard professor Antoin Picon, who studies the history of engineers, finds that all engineers share certain habits of mind no matter what their area of expertise or the work that they do.[3] Engineers value rationality above all else. They solve complex problems by breaking them down into their component parts. The engineering method relies on experience, empirical knowledge, and the tried and true process of trial and error, which has been an important tool for builders and inventors since before there have been engineers.[4]
However, in the 19th century French engineers stood apart from other engineers. Gustave Eiffel and his colleagues were pioneers of a new approach to engineering that accelerated innovation. For example, the industrial revolution made iron and steel available for the first time at low cost and in sufficient quantity to be useful as building materials. Engineers in France quickly acquired a reputation for the innovative use of iron and steel in the construction of buildings. Eventually, this new approach would be taken up elsewhere and transform the profession.
Eiffel identified two factors that gave French engineers an advantage in the innovative use of iron and steel for structural design: knowledge of scientific theory, and skill at mathematical analysis. While other engineers, especially engineers working in England, relied primarily on experience and proven methods for design and construction, French engineers based their work on mathematical calculations. This allowed French engineers to quickly determine the feasibility of novel building designs that were unlike anything that had been built before.[5]
Reliance on theory and mathematical calculation to supplement empirical knowledge revolutionized all areas of engineering practice, not only in building design. Training in science and mathematics was first introduced as the foundation of an engineer’s education at the first engineering school established in France in 1748, the École royale du génie de Mézières. The Ecole Polytechnique adopted an updated version of the curriculum developed at Mézières when it opened in Paris in 1794 to provide all types of engineers entering service with the state with a foundation in math and sciences.
The transformation of Paris into a modern metropolis not only relied on the work of engineers, but it coincided with the emergence, in Paris, of the modern engineer. The Ecole Centrale des Arts et Manufactures, Eiffel’s alma mater, adopted the polytechnic curriculum when it opened in 1829 to train engineers headed for work in industry, as did other engineering schools in Europe and in the United States. Today, science and mathematics form the core of the education for engineers everywhere in the world.
Metamorphosis — a radical change in form or structure — was inevitable for Paris in the 19th century. Its population quadrupled in the 19th century, increasing from around 550,000 people in 1800 to 2.7 million in 1900. And, Paris was one of the cities most affected by the revolutionary fervor that affected all of Europe during 1848/49. But, the metamorphosis of Paris was also driven by the political struggle for control after the 1848 revolution. Within France, the governments of first the Second Empire, and then the Third Republic bought political support by spending on large public works aimed at improving the common good. On the international stage, France presented itself as a civilizing force in the world, with Paris not only the capital of France but of all of Europe as well.
The Exposition Universelle d’Art et d’Industrie, held in Paris in 1867, gave the world a glimpse of the new Paris as it was taking shape. The exposition of 1867 was Louis Napoleon’s answer to London’s Great Exhibition of 1851, which launched the Age of Progress. More than 10 million people attended. Officially, the aim was to cast industry as a beneficent force improving the lives of all people. The introduction to the official guidebook, written by Victor Hugo, proclaimed that the exposition marked the beginning of an era of peace and harmony for the human race.[6] Unofficially, the exposition was an exercise in power and control by Louis-Napoleon’s Second Empire intended to show that France could hold her own against England on the world stage.
The exposition presented Paris as the technologically-advanced capital of a new world linked by networks of transportation and communication. Visitors could travel to Paris from anywhere in the civilized world by railroad and steamship. Those who could not attend could follow day-to-day events in Paris communicated through a world-wide telegraph network linked by undersea cables. Exhibits included a model of the Suez Canal, which was then under construction. The main exhibition hall, built out of iron and glass on the Champs de Mars, was itself a notable achievement. Eiffel designed the roof trusses for the immense gallery where industrial machines were on display.
In 1867 the rebuilding of Paris had been underway for thirteen years, long enough to put into place the main architectural elements of the new city. The chic Rue de Rivoli had been extended east, piercing the warren of medieval streets in the Marais district. Broad new avenues, lined by handsome new apartment blocks built to a standard design, opened circulation to the north, Boulevards Sebastopol and Strasbourg, and south, Boulevard Saint-Michel.
Visitors to the exposition were treated to sights of the renovated 12th-century Notre Dame Cathedral and new buildings of glass, iron and steel built in an early-modern style — the Les Halles market and monumental train stations. New parks, the Bois de Boulogne and the Parc des Buttes Chaumont, built in the English style, added green space for public recreation. Visitors could even take a tour of the newly installed sewers by making arrangements beforehand, which many did.[7]
Ultimately, the metamorphosis of Paris was made possible by a desire for change. These words by Victor Hugo capture the spirit of a people and an era:
If you wish to know what Revolution is, call it Progress; and if you wish to know what Progress is, call it the Future. — Victor Hugo, Les Miserables
The turbulent history of 19th century created an acceptance of change that grew into a thirst for progress, and on occasion, as in 1848, an assault on the status quo. Paris was at the center of the most radical changes of the century. Fueled by Enlightenment ideals, the French Revolution instilled in people the idea that a different world, a better world, was possible. As an engineer, Gustave Eiffel was one of many who devoted their lives to this end. They transformed Paris and the world.
Notes
[1] Comments by G. Eiffel reported in: E. Monod, L’Exposition Universelle de 1889, Libraire de la Société des Gens de Lettres, Paris, 1890.
[2] Hugo, V., Les Miserables, Volume 5 Book 1 Chapter 20 (Translated by I.F. Hapgood, 1887. Thomas Y. Crowell & Co., New York)
[3] Picon, A., 2004. Engineers and Engineering History: Problems and Perspectives. History and Technology 20:4, pp. 421–436.
[4] Vincenti, W., 1990. What Engineers Know and How They Know It. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
[5] Eiffel, G., 1888. Les grandes construction métalliques. Extracts of comments at Association française pour l’avancement des sciences : conférences de Paris. 17, Compte-rendu de la 17e session, March 10, 1888. [online: http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/CadresFenetre?O=NUMM-201168&I=191&M=tdm; accessed 2 Jul 2023.]
[6] Hugo, V. 1867. Paris: Introduction au livre Paris-Guide.
https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k6439743z/f1.item.r=progr%C3%A8s
[7] Martin, L., 1902. Encyclopédie municipale de la ville de Paris, Volume 1, Part 1, page 1085. https://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k37013m
