Queer temporalities of the Eiffel Tower
The Question
Did you know that the Eiffel Tower was a giant antenna?
Neither did I.
To be honest I’d never really thought about the Eiffel Tower too much before.
Sure, I’d visited it and seen Paris from the top as a teenager.
The Eiffel Tower was just a generic symbol of Paris, an icon for a souvenir-shop keychain.
But now that I'm thinking about it and really looking at it, before even understanding how it became a giant antenna used by the military, it’s interesting to consider its original construction as a symbol of the machine age, which it was built to represent.
After all, it’s a large pylon or wire truss that, for some reason, has come to signify romance. I’m no architect, but three minutes into the first episode of Robert Hughes's documentary series on modern art, the form of this tower fascinated me.
Divorced from all romantic associations, I couldn’t quite decide whether, in fact, the Eiffel Tower was rather ugly.
Perhaps it was no more beautiful than the roof of a train station built in the same era, and it was just a historical accident that it came to represent an entire nation.
For the first time, I started to really look at its physical form, which Hughes describes in his delicious 1980s BBC script as “a colossus with spread legs, planted in the middle of Paris.”
It was built for the Exposition Universelle in 1889, but I don't think I'd ever thought about that, if I'd even known.
As I started to explore the structure and tried to understand how I felt about it as an aesthetic object, I began to learn fascinating things about the tower and the Parisian modernity it sought to represent.
The Design
The Eiffel Tower is a decidedly 19th-century form, with an industrial shape reminiscent of an electricity pylon.
But with some light digging, I learned that Gustave Eiffel, the civil engineer behind the tower, took his inspiration from a different source.
The Eiffel Tower is, in fact, two halves of a bridge laid back to back.
That is the entire inspiration for its shape and design—the shape of the bridge of the industrial revolution.
Once I learned this, I couldn’t unsee it.
Gustave Eiffel had already built plenty of bridges, including the one above in Portugal.
You can see this bridge-like structure if you divide the tower down the middle into two halves. Below is an image of the Eiffel Tower divided down the middle and laid horizontally to meet in the middle.
Voilà! A bridge.
Put those two halves back together spine to spine, and you have the Eiffel tower. The Eiffel Tower is a bridge stacked atop itself.
Gustave Eiffel's idea— of a "vertical bridge" on the banks of the Seine—was met with a lot of praise, and he was lauded as a genius.
It wasn't a bridge in a symbolic sense either, like some metaphoric representation of a bridge between the past and the future.
It was just a bridge. It was a literal bridge. It was like, literally, a bridge.
Because Gustave Eiffel was familiar with building bridges.
Eiffel and his team were able to engineer this “vertical bridge” successfully, because the mathematics required for it to withstand the lateral and vertical forces that it would need to withstand once erected, were quite similar those required for a horizontal bridge.
And he and his team were familiar with building bridges.
Perhaps the Eiffel tower is aesthetic the way that bridges can be aesthetic? A feat of engineering and metalwork. An infrastructural sublime.
But it's fair to say that the Eiffel Tower was not trying to be beautiful. It was not meant to be.
This structure was intended to celebrate technology over craft, and the engineer over the artisan.
It was twice the height of the next tallest building in the world at the time. It was big, it was bold.
It was quite literally high tech.
The Reception
It was intended as a tribute to the methods that created it, to the accomplishments of industrial production and the Machine Age in France. The medium was the message.
At the time of its construction it was hotly contested, and even seen as an act of aggression by many Parisian residents.
For one, it was hugely expensive for the period, especially considering that it was only supposed to stand for 20 years before being dismantled.
It also caused a safety concern for many. People worried that it was dangerous, given its enormous size and temporary nature.
Aside from these concerns, it was also considered to be too ugly and too brutishly industrial in a city of beautiful ornate architecture.
Variously described as an eyesore, a "giant black smokestack" and "useless and monstrous," it even provoked a letter of protest to be published on the front page of Le Temps on Valentine's Day, of all days, in 1887.
Any nostalgic notion of Parisians being united by a common love for the Tour Eiffel, or celebrating behind the display of French national greatness, is pure fiction. The atmosphere may even have been comparable to that of the 2024 Olympics.
Parisian society was, as it is to this day, incredibly divided.
Aside from tensions in Paris, it was kind of a weird time for French national identity too.
France's self-definition and ego as a superpower had been wounded when it lost the 1870 war with Prussia, and with it, lost territory.
- Apollinaire (1880-1918)
There was a sense that the Exposition Universelle of 1889, for which the Eiffel Tower was being built, would help France regain some of the status that it had lost in the eyes of the world upon losing the war.
The Exhibition
The Eiffel Tower, and the Exposition Universelle were also intended to show the world how technologically advanced and modern France really was.
At its core though, this display operated on an idea of modernity that was deeply ideological and imperialist. Chrononormativity at its worst.
Modernity, defined by the European men organizing the Exhibition, was understood as a universal and global fact.
These men saw themselves as the epitome of civilization, the apex of modernity. Europe owned the timeline—it was linear, white, straight, able-bodied, and male. Everything else was a perversion.
The Modern was future-oriented, it was technology.
It was railroads and bridges for transporting ill-gotten gains. It was mapping and dividing another's territory. It was mass-producing weapons.
This Modern was the opposite of tradition. Tradition was for the erotically charged Native. Tradition was the 'pre-modern,' it was the past.
This totalizing Eurocentric rhetoric was evident in the Exposition Universelle of 1889.
The World Exhibition Fairs of the 19th and 20th centuries were opportunities for nation-states to impress others with their technology and imperial accomplishments. They were, in a sense, an Olympics of technology and Empire. The Eiffel Tower was built because in 1889, it was France's turn. As an added historical curio, parts of the Eiffel tower were used to form the medals for the 2024 Olympics in Paris.
The organisers of Exposition Universelle decided that they wanted to represent "all of human history," that visitors could view before viewing the Exhibition itself.
There was an Egyptian Exhibit as part of it that was described by the Egyptian visitors as having been created to resemble Cairo, and that "even the paint on the buildings was made dirty."
These Egyptian visitors themselves were then put on display for European curiosity as part of "all of human history." They were represented as objects for display.
Knowing all of this, it's certainly possible that this 19th century tower might no longer be seen as beautiful, no?
Learning about the systems and rhetoric surrounding the Eiffel Tower tower has ruined the chances of that somewhat.
And this was even before I learned that the Eiffel tower was also used as a giant radio antenna for the military.
The Antenna
Premiere liaison TSF 1898
The original plan was for the tower to be dismantled 20 years after the Exposition.
Accounts vary as to whether Gustave Eiffel initiated military involvement himself, in an effort to keep the tower standing, or whether the idea first came from the military's side.
Either way, the only reason that we have the Eiffel Tower today, is because the military were able to use its giant iron structure as a broadcast antenna.
Experiments in wireless telegraphy (TSF) were conducted from the tower in the years after the Exposition at the request of the French military.
These experiments proved successful and demonstrated that the Eiffel tower could in fact serve as an effective communication device!
The first communications transmitted with the Eiffel Tower as antenna, were between Paris and the Pantheon 4km away.
Eventually, the Eiffel Tower was successfully used to broadcast communications across France and North Africa and Washington, D.C. and even helped to intercept German messages in 1918.
The tower's utility for military communication is what secured its place as a permanent fixture in Paris.
Without this military role, the tower would have been dismantled as intended.
Without the army, there would be no Eiffel Tower for the French Capital, and that feels like an interesting thought experiment.
What would symbolise Paris if there were no Eiffel Tower?
Vive La Revolución
What started as an exploration of the physical form of the Eiffel tower, has ended up down a rabbit hole of postcolonial and anti-hegemonic histories of technology and the machineries of representation.
Rather than a symbol of Romance, the Tower has taken shape as a symbol of colonial violence and military technology, which is not very romantic, let's be frank.
But perhaps simply inviting the hauntologies and the queer temporalities of the Eiffel tower into our understanding is the most important meaning that the tower can ever have?
This giant colossus with spread legs in the middle of Paris.
And perhaps that gives it a kind of beauty after all.
But, mostly, Vive la Revolución!