THE TOWER IN PERIL

DARK DAYS FOR THE EIFFEL.

A possible solution for the Eiffel Tower’s predicament. It could lease the advertising rights, as it did to Citroen cars in the twenties.

In February 1912, an Austrian tailor named Franz Reichelt stood uncertainly on the first level of the Eiffel Tower. The frozen ground sixty metres below looked hard, but he told himself repeatedly that the folds of the silk suit he’d sewn so meticulously would slow his fall and win the prize offered by the Aero Club de France for the first practical parachute.  Friends urged him to use a dummy, but Reichelt insisted on jumping himself, to show there was no trickery. It took long moments of hesitations and half starts before he launched himself - but only a few seconds to reach the ground. The Eiffel Tower had claimed another victim.

Speaking of the tower, would anyone care to buy it? It’s rusted, and looking its age, but then again, it was supposed to be torn down a few years after it was built in 1889, so that it survives at all is something of a miracle.

           It’s been offered for sale before – just not legally. In 1925, a swindler named Victor Lustig, claiming to represent the Ministère de Postes et Télégraphes, informed France's leading scrap metal merchants that  “because of engineering faults, costly repairs, and political problems I cannot discuss, the tearing down of the Eiffel Tower has become mandatory.”

Bids were invited for the contract.  Lustig then hinted to the more greedy that he might be open to a bribe. One dealer paid him a large sum for preferential treatment, after which Lustig, convinced the swindled man would report him to the police, fled the country. When the mark proved too embarrassed to reveal his humiliation, Lustig returned and tried to work the scam again, this time escaping one step ahead of the law. 

           Eiffel said the tower should be painted every seven years, but that hasn’t happened since 2010. Rust is attacking the framework. Unions recently struck for five days in protest at "several corrosion points"  and "signs of a worrying deterioration".

Bizarrely, the Tower isn’t a national monument. If it were, the government would pay for its upkeep. In the person of its new culture minister, the redoubtable Rachida Dati, it has even offered to accord it that status, as it has the bridges across the Seine. But there’s no money in bridges, while the spectacularly unpopular mayor of Paris, Annie Hidalgo, is reluctant to surrender the city’s most popular tourist attraction, since she would also relinquish the millions people pay to visit.  

Meanwhile the tourists keep coming.The tower also continues to tempt daredevils and those afflicted with a death wish. Suicides do take place, two or three some years. Applications to climb it are routinely denied. Only GREP,  the deep exploration and research group, a specialized unit of the Paris firefighters, is allowed, once a month, to use it to practice abseiling.

Parachutists and sky divers periodically evade the guardians, however, undeterred by the fact that 800 metres is regarded as the lowest safe height from which to attempt a base jump and the tower is only 300.  In 2003, veteran Hervé Gallou successfully parachuted from the summit. In 2005, police arrested two Norwegians as they attempted the same feat to advertise a line of clothing. A third member hid and tried again that night - fatally, since the wind carried him into the lower structure and he died instantly.  He won’t be the last.