Dawn over Paris, and above the grey rooftops, one shape stands out from all the rest. No monument in the world that charges an entrance fee draws more visitors than this one: in a single recent year, nearly 6 million people paid to climb it. For 41 years, it was the tallest structure anyone had ever built. And yet, when it went up, the leading artists of Paris signed a protest against it. They called it useless and monstrous, a gigantic black smokestack looming over their city.
It was never meant to last. Its permit ran for just 20 years, and in 1909 it was due to come down. This is not the only time France has turned against something it would later treasure. A fortress built to hold off an army. A palace built for a single king. An abbey on a rock that spent decades as a prison. A cathedral in flames. And a painter who was thought a failure all his life.
Today, millions travel across the world to stand in front of them. So how did the places France built for war, for kings, or nearly threw away become what the whole world comes to see? To find the answer, we start with the tower itself.
The tower built to be taken down
The tower began as a sketch in 1884. Two engineers at Gustave Eiffel's company, Maurice Koechlin and Émile Nouguier, drew a column of iron 300 metres high. Eiffel himself was not impressed at first, but he let them keep working, and later bought the rights to the design.
Paris was planning a World's Fair for 1889, the Exposition Universelle, marking 100 years since the French Revolution. The tower would be its centrepiece, and it was meant to be temporary. Eiffel's company would run it during the fair and for 20 years after. Then it would pass to the city, which could take it down.
Work on the foundations began in January 1887. Within weeks, the protest came. On 14 February, the newspaper Le Temps printed a petition against the tower. Behind it stood some of the most famous names in France: Charles Garnier, the architect of the Paris Opera; the composer Charles Gounod; the writer Guy de Maupassant. Their committee had 300 members, one for every metre of the tower they opposed. They called it useless and monstrous. They pictured a giddy, ridiculous tower, rising over Paris like a gigantic black smokestack.
Eiffel answered them directly. If the pyramids were admired in Egypt, he asked, why should something like them be hideous and ridiculous in Paris? My tower, he wrote, will be the tallest edifice ever erected by man.
The work went on. About 300 people worked on the site. They joined more than 18,000 iron parts with 2.5 million rivets. By the end of March 1889, a little over two years after it began, the tower was finished.
And the public, it turned out, did not share the artists' disgust. Before the lifts were even running, nearly 30,000 people climbed its stairs. By the time the fair was over, almost 1.9 million had been up. Even its critics came. There is a story told about Maupassant, that he ate lunch in the tower's restaurant every day. The reason, so the story goes, was that it was the one place in Paris where he could not see the tower. No one can say for certain that he really did, but the story is still told today.
The fair ended, and the clock kept running. 1909 was coming, and nothing promised the tower a future. What saved it was not its beauty. It was its height. At 300 metres, it was the perfect mast for a new invention: radio. When the concession ran out, the tower stayed, as a radio station. From 1910, it sent time signals from the Paris Observatory to ships at sea, up to 5,000 kilometres away.
And in the First World War, the tower the artists had called useless went to war. In 1914, its transmitter is said to have jammed German radio as the army advanced on Paris. In 1917, it intercepted a coded message about an agent known as H-21. That message helped lead to the arrest of the dancer Mata Hari.
The tower had survived by making itself useful. Only later did Paris learn to love it for itself. Today it is the symbol of France, known around the world, and the first sight most visitors to Paris go looking for. The tower was saved by being useful. Across the river stands a building that changed its purpose three times.
A fortress for everyone
That building is the Louvre. Today, more people visit it than any other art museum on Earth, 9 million in a single year. But it was never meant to hold paintings. It was built to keep an army out.
In 1190, King Philip II ordered a defensive wall around Paris. Where that wall met the Seine, he built a fortress. It faced the road to Normandy, still held by his English rivals. It had 10 round towers, a water-filled moat, and walls more than 2.5 metres thick. At its heart stood a great round keep, about 30 metres high. The fortress was finished in 1202.
Most of it is gone now, but not all. In the 1980s, excavations uncovered the base of its walls beneath the courtyard. Today, visitors walk along that medieval moat, deep under the museum.
The fortress did not stay a fortress for long. In 1364, Charles V made the Louvre a royal home for the first time. His architect added windows, wings and turrets, and Parisians called it the pretty Louvre. The kings who came after swept the old castle away. In 1528, Francis I had the keep pulled down. In its place rose a Renaissance palace, and its oldest wing still stands today.
And then, one of them walked out. At the start of 1666, Louis XIV left the Louvre and never lived there again. By the late 1670s, the work had stopped. The money was going somewhere else, to a palace outside Paris called Versailles. The great palace in the middle of the capital was left half used, its rooms handed out to others.
Then came the Revolution. The king's collection, built for the eyes of a court, became the property of the nation. On 10 August 1793, the Louvre opened as a public museum. It showed 537 paintings. About three quarters had come from the royal collections; the rest had been taken from the Church and from nobles who had fled. The fortress built to keep enemies out was now open to anyone who walked in.
But the Louvre had one more fight to come. In the 1980s, President François Mitterrand launched a plan called the Grand Louvre. Its architect, I. M. Pei, proposed a new entrance in the courtyard: a pyramid of glass and steel. Many were outraged. Critics said its modern style clashed with the Renaissance palace around it. They called it a vanity project, and mocked it as Pharaoh François' pyramid. One writer called it an Egyptian death symbol in the middle of Paris.
The pyramid opened in 1989, 21.5 metres tall. There is a story that it has exactly 666 panes, the number of the beast. It does not; the Louvre counts 673. And the structure people called an intrusion is now the museum's main entrance and its symbol. A king's palace became the people's museum. A few hundred metres away, the people nearly let their cathedral fall.
The cathedral a novel saved
On an island in the Seine stands Notre-Dame. Before 2019, around 12 million people a year came through its doors, more than any other monument in Paris. It was begun in 1163, and largely finished within a hundred years. It is hard to imagine Paris without it. And yet, Paris very nearly lost it, more than once.
The first blow came with the Revolution. In 1790, the metals of the cathedral were removed to be melted down. In 1793, it was turned into a Temple of Reason. Along the west front stood 28 statues of the kings of Judah. The crowd mistook them for kings of France, and cut off their heads. For a time, the great cathedral was used as a warehouse for food.
Napoleon gave it back to the Church, and in 1804 he was crowned Emperor inside it. But the damage remained. After the Napoleonic Wars, Notre-Dame was in such poor condition that officials considered tearing it down.
What saved it was not a king, or a bishop. It was a novel. In 1831, Victor Hugo published Notre-Dame de Paris; in English, we know it as The Hunchback of Notre-Dame. Hugo wrote it partly to save the building. The book was an enormous success, and suddenly readers everywhere could see how the old cathedral was decaying.
In 1844, King Louis Philippe ordered a restoration. Two architects, Jean-Baptiste Lassus and Eugène Viollet-le-Duc, led the work for 20 years. It cost more than 12 million francs. There was one thing missing from the roof. The cathedral's original spire had been taken down in 1786. Viollet-le-Duc gave Notre-Dame a new one, taller and more ornate than before. For a century and a half, it was the spire the whole world knew.
Then, on the evening of 15 April 2019, a fire broke out in the attic. Under the lead roof lay a dense frame of old oak beams, known as the forest. More than 400 firefighters fought the flames. It would burn for about 15 hours. At ten to eight in the evening, the spire collapsed through the roof. Most of the roof was lost. But the stone vaults beneath it held, and the three medieval rose windows survived. No one was killed.
Two days later, President Emmanuel Macron set a deadline: five years to restore it. Within a week, more than a billion euros had been pledged. By 2021, more than 320,000 donors had given over 800 million euros. There was a long debate about the spire, and whether it should be something new. In the end, it was rebuilt as it had been, in oak, covered in lead. On 7 December 2024, Notre-Dame reopened.
Twice, Paris almost let its cathedral go. Twice, it came back, first through a story, then through millions of donors. Paris rebuilt its cathedral for the people. Just south-west of Paris stands a palace built to keep power far from them.
The king's stage
About 20 kilometres south-west of Paris lies Versailles. It is one of the most famous palaces in the world, with some 2,300 rooms. But it began as something the royal court laughed at. In 1623, Louis XIII built a small hunting lodge here, on a wooded, marshy site. His courtiers thought the place unworthy of a king. They mocked the lodge as a puny château, a house of cards.
His son saw something else. From 1661, Louis XIV took an interest in the old lodge. In 1668, he decided to make it a full royal residence. Rather than tear his father's lodge down, he wrapped it inside a new building, called the envelope. The work went on for decades. In the 1670s, money for the Louvre in Paris dried up, and flowed here instead.
Then, from 6 May 1682, the king, his court and the government of France lived at Versailles. The centre of power had moved out of the capital. At its heart was a long gallery lined with mirrors, built between 1678 and the early 1680s. It became known as the Hall of Mirrors. For more than a century, France was ruled from these rooms.
Paris, meanwhile, was hungry. By 1789, bread was scarce and expensive; most workers spent nearly half their income on it. On the morning of 5 October, women in the markets of Paris began to riot over the price of bread. Thousands gathered outside the City Hall. Then they set off for Versailles, about 21 kilometres away. The march took around six hours, and they reached the palace that evening.
On 6 October 1789, the royal family was forced to leave Versailles and return to Paris. By the time the procession reached the city, it had grown to more than 60,000 people. The king would never live at Versailles again. The palace that had kept power far from Paris had been emptied by the people of Paris.
What happened next is the second irony. In 1793, the royal furniture was sold off at auction, in 17,000 lots. And the empty state apartments of the king were opened to visitors. The people could now walk through the rooms where France had once been ruled. In 1837, King Louis Philippe opened a museum here, devoted to all the glories of France. The palace had become a place to look at, not to rule from.
But the Hall of Mirrors had two more appointments with history. On 18 January 1871, during a war France was losing, the German Empire was proclaimed here: France's defeat, sealed in the most French room of all. Forty-eight years later, in June 1919, the tables were turned. In the same hall, the Treaty of Versailles was signed, ending the First World War: Germany's defeat, sealed in the room where its empire had been born.
In 1979, the palace and its park joined the World Heritage list. The lodge the courtiers laughed at is now a World Heritage Site that the whole world comes to see. Versailles was built to show power. On a rock in the sea off Normandy, power turned an abbey into a prison.
The island prison
On the coast of Normandy, a granite rock rises out of a wide, flat bay. Here the sea moves on a vast scale: between low and high water, the level can change by about 14 metres. When the tide comes in, the sands vanish, and the rock, about a kilometre off the coast, becomes an island.
In the early 8th century, Aubert, Bishop of Avranches, built an oratory here to the Archangel Michael. Over the centuries, an abbey grew on the summit. And the sea that surrounded it also made it very hard to attack. In the Hundred Years' War, Mont-Saint-Michel was fortified, and it was never taken. In 1433, an English force arrived with wrought-iron cannon called bombards. The rock held, and the siege was lifted the following year.
But walls built to keep enemies out can also keep people in. King Louis XI saw what a rock in the sea could be: a prison. For centuries under the old monarchy, the abbey was regularly used as one. By the time of the Revolution, scarcely any monks were left. In 1791 the abbey was closed, and it was turned into a prison of the new republic. Its first inmates were clergy who opposed the republic, up to 300 priests at one point. People came to call it the Bastille of the sea. One of the great buildings of the Middle Ages was now a jail.
And once again, a familiar name joined those who spoke up for it. By 1836, influential figures, Victor Hugo among them, had begun a campaign to restore it. The same writer whose novel had rescued Notre-Dame now helped argue for a national treasure, not a prison. In 1863, Napoleon III ended its use as a prison, and 650 prisoners were moved to other jails. Eleven years later, the mount was declared a historic monument. Today it draws more than 3 million people a year, the most visited sight in France outside Paris.
But there is a second twist, and it comes from the road. In 1879, the old tidal crossing was turned into a raised causeway across the sands. It made the visit easy. It also stopped the tide from scouring the silt away around the rock. Together with farmland reclaimed from the bay and a river forced into a channel, it let the bay slowly fill with silt. The island that had held off an army was being joined to the land by mud.
So France set out to make it an island again. A project of about 200 million euros was announced in 2006. Work on a dam began in 2009. The causeway and its car park were removed, and a new car park was built 2.5 kilometres away. In July 2014, a new bridge opened in place of the causeway.
A fortress built for war, an abbey turned into a prison, rescued by its admirers and set free by its engineers. In the north, France had to rescue its monuments. In the south, it overlooked a painter.
The painter nobody bought
Far to the south, in Provence, the light changes. In February 1888, a Dutch painter arrived in the town of Arles. Vincent van Gogh was unwell, worn down by drink and a smoker's cough. He seems to have hoped to found a colony of artists here. Instead, the countryside and its light gave him a new burst of energy. In May he rented four rooms in a yellow house on a town square, and later he painted the house itself.
In Arles he completed about 200 paintings, and more than 100 drawings and watercolours. Almost nobody wanted them. In early November 1888, near Arles, he painted a vineyard, its leaves turned red. In 1890, the painting was shown at an exhibition in Brussels. A Belgian painter and collector, Anna Boch, bought it for 400 francs. It is the only painting known by name that Van Gogh sold in his lifetime. He wrote to his brother Theo that the Bochs had paid the full price, when a friend's price would have done. It was Theo, an art dealer, who supported him, with money and with encouragement, throughout his life.
In Arles, the strain on Vincent grew. His friendship with the painter Paul Gauguin ended after a confrontation. In a rage, Van Gogh cut off part of his own left ear. In July 1890, at the age of 37, he died in Auvers-sur-Oise, two days after shooting himself. In his lifetime, he was seen as a madman and a failure.
A century later, the world had changed its mind. In 1990, his Portrait of Doctor Gachet sold at auction in New York for 82.5 million dollars. At the time, it was the most expensive painting in the world. And the red vineyard that fetched 400 francs now hangs in the Pushkin Museum in Moscow.
Follow the light east, to the coast, and the story turns again. Until the end of the 18th century, the coast we now call the Riviera was remote and poor. It lived from fishing, from olive groves, and from flowers grown for the perfume makers of Grasse. Then the British discovered its winters. In 1763, the novelist Tobias Smollett stayed in Nice, and his book made its warm winters famous. The coast became a fashionable health resort for the British upper class.
In 1834, Lord Brougham, travelling with his sick daughter, stopped at Cannes. He bought land, built a villa, and other British visitors followed. When the railway reached Nice in 1864, 100,000 visitors came the following year. Tsar Alexander II arrived on a private train, just days after the line opened. Queen Victoria came back again and again, to Menton, to Grasse, to Hyères, and to Cimiez. They came for their health, and they came in winter. In 1887, a writer gave this coast the name it still carries: the Côte d'Azur.
Only after the First World War did the seasons turn around. Americans arrived in growing numbers, and business moguls and celebrities came to outnumber the aristocrats. The fashionable season moved from winter to summer. A luxury train, the Train Bleu, began running in 1922. And after Coco Chanel came home with a tan in 1923, sunbathing became the fashion. The winter refuge of invalids and kings became the summer coast we know.
A tower, a fortress, a cathedral, a palace, a prison, a painter. None of them was made for us.
The answer
How did the places France built for war, for kings, or nearly threw away become what the whole world comes to see? The tower was built for a fair, and it was meant to come down. The Louvre was built to guard a city wall, and then to house a king. Notre-Dame was built for God, then stripped by a revolution and so neglected that the city weighed tearing it down. Versailles was built so that one king could rule from a palace far from his people. Mont-Saint-Michel was built for monks, held through a war, and then used as a prison. And in Arles, a painter worked for almost nothing, for an audience that had not yet arrived.
Not one of them was made for the millions who now come. Each survived because someone found it a new purpose, or refused to let it go. Scientists gave the tower a use. Revolutionaries opened the king's palace and his paintings to the public. A novelist, Victor Hugo, helped rescue a cathedral, and then spoke up for an abbey turned into a prison. Engineers turned a rock back into an island. And the public changed its mind about a tower it had mocked, a pyramid it had hated, a painter it ignored.
That is the answer. France's great sights fascinate us because they outlived the purpose they were built for. Every one of them carries the story of the people who would not let it go. A fortress became a museum. A prison became a postcard. And a temporary tower became the symbol of a nation.
The tower they wanted gone is still standing. And tonight, as every night, it will light up for a city that once called it useless and monstrous.
When you go
When you go, a few things help.
- Eiffel Tower: if you are fit, walk the first two levels and take the lift from there. The queue for the lift from the ground can run for hours, even early in the morning. And whatever the season, stay for nightfall, when the tower lights up.
- Louvre: arrive early in the morning, before the long queues build.
- Versailles: come early too, and leave time for the gardens.
- Mont-Saint-Michel: check the tide times before you go, and watch the sea return around the rock.
- Arles: walk the town with Van Gogh's paintings in mind; the light that inspired him is still there.
- The Riviera: try the winter, the season its first visitors came for.
Sources
- Eiffel Tower (Wikipedia)
- Louvre Palace (Wikipedia)
- Louvre Pyramid (Wikipedia)
- Notre-Dame de Paris (Wikipedia)
- Notre-Dame de Paris fire (Wikipedia)
- Palace of Versailles (Wikipedia)
- Women's March on Versailles (Wikipedia)
- Mont-Saint-Michel (Wikipedia)
- Mont-Saint-Michel Abbey (Wikipedia)
- Vincent van Gogh (Wikipedia)
- The Red Vineyard (Wikipedia)
- French Riviera (Wikipedia)
This article follows the narration of our documentary; every fact was checked against Wikipedia.