Why Maupassant Ate Lunch Inside the Eiffel Tower He Hated

Travel & Food

Maupassant's lunch in the tower

Every day, so the story goes, the writer Maupassant sat down to lunch in a restaurant inside the Eiffel Tower. Why would a man who disliked the tower spend so much time in it? Because it was the one place in Paris where he couldn't see it. Today, that sounds almost funny.

The tower is the symbol of France, and in 2022, nearly 6 million people visited it. But in the 1880s, many Parisians were horrified

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Eiffel Tower

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The Eiffel Tower from below

Building the tower for 1889

Engineer Eiffel's company was building it for the World's Fair of 1889, which marked 100 years since the French Revolution. Nothing that tall had ever been built. 300 meters of iron, rising over the Champ de Mars. Plenty of people doubted it could even stand.

Artists protest and Eiffel replies

The artists were furious. They formed a group called the Committee of 300, with one member for every meter of the tower, led by the famous architect Garnier, In February 1887, a newspaper printed their protest. They called the tower useless and monstrous, an insult to French taste.

Eiffel replied with a comparison. People admire the pyramids in Egypt, he argued, so why should something grand suddenly become ridiculous in Paris?

From scorned to beloved

The tower went up anyway, and it became the tallest structure on Earth, a record it held for 41 years. Some of the protesters changed their minds once they saw it finished. others never did. By 1918, the poet Apollinaire had written a poem shaped like the tower, and the Iron Lady truly belonged to Paris.

So, next time you see it sparkling at night, as it does every hour until closing time, picture Maupassant at his lunch table, high above the city, eating with his back to the view.