“She showed a great deal of political opportunism,” Mr. Alphand said. “The Eiffel Tower was not built to hang everything on it.”
Paris 2024 vowed to make the Olympics the “greenest ever,” convincing the French public to go ahead with the games by making use of mostly existing infrastructure for sustainability purposes and to ensure costs didn’t get out of control. Many of the temporary venues were built in the city center, so iconic monuments such as the Eiffel Tower could form part of the backdrop for events like the opening ceremony and beach volleyball.
Once the Olympics are over, these temporary structures will be demolished and central Paris should return to almost exactly the way it was before.
Hidalgo’s camp has so far dismissed the criticism as typical complaints from Parisians, who are famously averse to any change in the French capital. I.M. Pei’s pyramid outside the Louvre was panned after it was installed in the 1980s, and the tower itself, built by engineer Gustave Eiffel for the 1889 World’s Fair, was initially opposed by architects and residents. Novelist Guy de Maupassant called it a “huge, ungainly skeleton” and is said to have liked to lunch here because it was the only place in Paris where it couldn’t be seen.
More than a century later, the Eiffel Tower is a nearly universally beloved symbol of France and many people, including Eiffel’s descendants, would like to see it remain intact.
“The ring completely ruins the design of the monument and shows no respect for the work of my ancestors,” Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, Gustave Eiffel’s great-great-grandson, told Politico. Berthelot-Eiffel is president of the Association of Eiffel’s Descendants and opposes Hidalgo’s move.