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Landmark · Champ de Mars · 7e arrondissement

Eiffel Tower

The buildingStill standing
Getting inHours or admission
What's there nowStill the same

The tower at the era's edge of vision — and in the twenties and thirties, a champagne advertisement three hundred meters tall, fizzing in lights over everyone's night walks.

Address
Champ de Mars, 5 Av. Anatole France, 75007 Paris
IllustrationThe Eiffel Tower across the Seine on a bright day, a laden barge and the bridge in the foreground

Iron by day — champagne, in Miller's decade, by night.

Editorial illustration

The place, briefly

By the time the writers of the 1920s reached Paris, the Eiffel Tower had already survived its own scandal. It was built for the 1889 Exposition over the protests of the artistic establishment, meant to stand twenty years, and saved by its radio masts. The generation of 1920 inherited it not as novelty but as horizon — the thing at the end of every westward street.

The era gave it a second life the postcards forget: from 1925 the tower wore the Citroën name in a quarter-million bulbs, an animated light show — comets, zodiac signs, cascades of sparks — that ran for nearly a decade and turned the night sky over the Champ de Mars into an advertisement. That is the tower Miller saw: not iron but light, fizzing like something poured. The image in Tropic of Cancer is reportage as much as metaphor.

Its neighbors in these pages are the quarter's quieter rooms — the salon on the Avenue Charles Floquet in its shadow, Joyce's flat at Square de Robiac a few streets east — a reminder that the era's most private literary geography unfolded under the most public structure on earth.

In their words

…the Eiffel Tower is fizzing champagne…
— Henry Miller, Tropic of Cancer (1934)

Key facts

Built
1887–1889, by Gustave Eiffel's firm, for the Exposition Universelle
In the era
The Citroën illuminations (1925–1934) — a quarter-million bulbs animating the night sky
In the novel
Seen fizzing champagne — Miller describing the light show as much as the tower
Today
Open — the most visited paid monument in the world

In images

The thing at the end of every westward street.Editorial illustration
Iron by day — champagne, in Miller's decade, by night.Editorial illustration

Timeline

  1. 1889

    Opens with the Exposition, tallest structure on earth, to the horror of the artistic establishment.

  2. 1909

    Saved from demolition by its value as a radio mast.

  3. 1925

    The Citroën illuminations begin — the tower becomes the world's largest advertisement.

  4. 1930s

    Miller's night-walking Paris, the tower fizzing overhead.

  5. Today

    Open, lit nightly — the sparkle now its own, not a carmaker's.

On the map

Related books

Cover of Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller

Mentioned in passing

Tropic of Cancer

Henry Miller · 1934

Fizzing champagne over the night city — Miller catching the Citroën light-show years in a single image.

Writers who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Guy de Maupassant

Guy de Maupassant

French · The greatest short-story writer in French, who spent eight years as a clerk in government ministries while the novelist Gustave Flaubert corrected his pages line by line, then wrote roughly three hundred stories and six novels in a decade before syphilis ended him at forty-two in an asylum at Passy, on the western edge of Paris. Bel-Ami — the nickname of its handsome, unscrupulous hero — is his portrait of the Paris press as an engine of corruption.

Frequented by · 1889

Maupassant was among the artists who signed the protest against the tower printed in Le Temps on 14 February 1887, three weeks after construction began, and described it in print as a giant ungainly skeleton aborting into a ridiculous skinny factory chimney. The tower's own official history then records that once it was built he said he often lunched on the first floor, because it was the only place in the city where he would not see it. The remark is reported as something he said rather than documented as a habit, so the visits are recorded here as probable — the line itself is the best-known joke ever made about the monument.

— When the Eiffel Tower was a subject of controversy

Illustrated portrait of Henry Miller

Henry Miller

American · The Brooklyn dropout who arrived in Paris broke at thirty-eight and wrote the exuberant, banned books that ended American censorship.

Henry Miller wrote about Eiffel Tower in Tropic of Cancer.

People who knew this place

Illustrated portrait of Gustave Eiffel

Gustave Eiffel

French · Engineer, Industrialist

Eiffel kept roughly 100 square metres at the top of the tower, under the spire, as an office and laboratory - a sitting room with a piano and three desks, a kitchen and a bathroom, but no bedroom, and by the tower's own account he presumably never slept there. He received Thomas Edison in it on 10 September 1889 and used the structure for meteorology from the year it opened, for falling-body measurements from 1903 to 1905, and for wind-tunnel work at its foot from August 1909 to December 1911.

Within walking distance

Bright present-day view of the planted Musée du quai Branly block on rue de l'Université

Landmark · Gros-Caillou (7th), by the Seine near the quai Branly

Auguste Rodin's studios at the Dépôt des Marbres

The state marble depot on the rue de l'Université where Auguste Rodin worked from 1880 until his death in 1917 — first in atelier M, later in ateliers H and J. It was his principal Paris studio, and where The Gates of Hell was developed. The compound is gone.

Visit the place
Bright colour photorealistic view of the Champ-de-Mars and Eiffel Tower beneath a blue sky

Park · Gros-Caillou (7th)

Champ-de-Mars

The great park below the Eiffel Tower, and the site of the 1889 Exposition Universelle — where Claude Debussy heard Javanese gamelan for the first time and never entirely got over it.

Visit the place
The carved entrance in warm afternoon light, the avenue's plane trees reflected along the stone

Salon · Champ de Mars

The Salon on the Avenue Charles Floquet

The drawing room by the Champ de Mars where Ezra Pound the composer made his debut — the Villon songs, heard by invitation before anyone believed he'd really done it.

Visit the place
Colour photorealistic view of 16 rue Benjamin-Franklin beneath a bright blue sky

House · Passy (16th)

16 rue Benjamin-Franklin

The Morisot family house in Passy where a studio was built in the garden for Berthe and her sister Edma — an unusually serious commitment to two daughters' painting for a bourgeois family of the 1860s.

Visit the place
References

References

The sources below include histories, archival materials, scholarly research, and official records that informed this page. They document Eiffel Tower, the people connected to it, and its place in Paris.

  1. 1Tropic of Cancer

    Novel
    Henry Miller, 1934
    Used for

    Primary text included as part of the documented record for Eiffel Tower.

  2. 2OpenStreetMap

    Map data
    Used for

    Map data used to verify addresses, geographic coordinates, and the placement associated with Eiffel Tower.

    View source

  1. 3The Eiffel Tower: history and key dates

    Website
    Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Eiffel Tower page.

    View source

  2. 4The Eiffel Tower and science

    Website
    Société d’Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel
    Used for

    Web source consulted for documented facts and historical context presented on the Eiffel Tower page.

    View source
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Why these sources are here

These references provide the documented foundation for this page's history and context. Claim-level citations remain attached to the specific claims they support.

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