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

Illustration The 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 on our shelves reached Paris, the Eiffel Tower had already survived its own scandal: built for the 1889 Exposition over the protests of the artistic establishment, meant to stand twenty years, 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

Pen-and-ink illustration of the Eiffel Tower rising over the Seine, a barge moored below the bridge in the foreground — The thing at the end of every westward street.Editorial illustration

The 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

Timeline

1889
Opens with the Exposition, tallest structure on earth, to the horror of the artistic establishment.
1909
Saved from demolition by its value as a radio mast.
1925
The Citroën illuminations begin — the tower becomes the world's largest advertisement.
1930s
Miller's night-walking Paris, the tower fizzing overhead.
Today
Open, lit nightly — the sparkle now its own, not a carmaker's.

On the map

Related books

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

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.

Within walking distance

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

The Square de Robiac in soft daylight, pale stone and cobbles curving past the doorway of No. 2

Apartment · Champ de Mars (Gros-Caillou)

2 Square de Robiac

James Joyce's longest Paris address — the family flat in a quiet cul-de-sac off the rue de Grenelle, with the cool quiet study where Work in Progress cost twelve hundred hours a chapter.

Visit the place

Restaurant · Place de l'Alma

Chez Francis

The brasserie on the Place de l'Alma that Cendrars scholarship names as one of the writer's regular stops — a Right Bank address in a café life mapped mostly through Montparnasse.

Visit the place

The theater's pale stone-and-concrete front in daylight, gilded reliefs above the marquee and trees along the avenue

Theatre · Champs-Élysées

Théâtre des Champs-Élysées

The concrete temple of the avant-garde — where The Rite of Spring caused a riot in 1913, and the Ballet Mécanique caused another in 1926, with Ezra Pound shouting over the pianolas.

Visit the place

The Friday Letter

Paris, one address at a time.

The cafés, studios, and walk-up flats where the work was made — one story from the map in every letter.