Olympic Rings on the Eiffel Tower (https://commons.wikimedia.org/)
The Eiffel Tower was unquestionably the focal point and the superstar of the recent Olympic Games in Paris. That is understandable, since Gustave Eiffel’s master piece has been the emblem of the city for a long time. However, the tower is also a symbol of the wealth and power of the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class”, a patriciate whose exclusive ranks also happen to include the ladies and gentlemen of the International Olympic Committee (IOC). A soupcon of history may help us to understand the centrality the tower in the recent Olympic extravaganza in the “city of light”.
Eiffel’s steel pillar was erected in 1889 to celebrate the centenary of the beginning of France’s “Great Revolution” in 1789, but also to erase the memory of less “great” but more recent and very traumatic revolutions, namely those of 1848 and 1871, the latter known as the Paris Commune. All those revolutions constituted eruptions of a complex class struggle between the poor and the rich. The poor were typically referred to as ceux d’en bas, “those below”, or as le menu peuple, the “little people”, but they can also be described as the “demos”, a term of Greek origin we encounter in the word democracy, meaning “power by and for the little people”; in any event, they were – and are – the kind of people who can expect revolutionary changes to improve their mostly miserable lot, for example in the shape of lower prices for bread and other essentials. Looking down on the poor were ceux d’en haut, “those above”, that is, the rich folks on the higher levels of the social pyramid, the nobility and the bourgeoisie, the well-to-do burghers who found the established social and economic order to be quite satisfactory and abhorred the thought of revolutionary changes. It is not surprising, therefore, that the revolutions France experienced in 1789, 1830, 1848, and 1871, and took place, not exclusively but predominantly, in Paris, happened to be mostly the work of the “little” women and men of the country’s capital.
The democratic achievements of those revolutions should not be underestimated, because it was during the great upheaval of 1848, for example, that universal suffrage was introduced and that slavery was abolished. However, each revolution saw members of the bourgeoisie “kidnapping” the revolutions and thus managing to achieve the “liberal” political and capitalist social-economic objectives of their class; and this was done at the expense of the nobility and the Church but especially of “those below”, whose efforts to realize far-reaching democratic reforms were repressed in 1848 and whose attempted construction of a socialist society, manifested in the 1871 Paris Commune, was smothered in blood. After that triumph, the bourgeoisie was the mistress of France.
Before the Great Revolution of 1789, Paris had been a “royal city”, radiating the power and the glory of the centuries-old feudal order whose figurehead was the king. Countless monumental buildings and vast squares, featuring imposing statues of kings and cardinals and such, belonged to the privileged classes of that “Ancien régime”, the nobility and the (upper) clergy, and of course also the monarch. (But the latter preferred to reside in a sumptuous palace in Versailles, away from the busy capital and its “madding crowds”.) The architectural externalization of this “kingliness” of Paris as well as the city’s major tourist attraction was then the Pont Neuf, the very first stone bridge across the Seine, “gifted” to the city by King Henry IV around 1600. The power of the Church, intimately associated with the monarch, was reflected in the multiplicity of prayer houses and monasteries, which caused Paris to impress – or intimidate? – visitors and residents alike as a Catholic “new Jerusalem”.
In Paris, the nobility preferred to reside in the city’s western reaches, in big and fancy residences known as hôtels in the district of Saint-Germain and along the Rue du Faubourg Saint-Honoré, which ran parallel to the Champs Élysées to the village of Roule, perched on a hillock that would later be crowned with the Arc de Triomphe. Earlier, the aristocrats had lived mostly in the Marais, a neighborhood of central Paris, situated near the Bastille, with as its hub a “royal square” (place royale) that is now called Place des Vosges. But most of their hôtels in that district had been taken over by prosperous members of the “up-and-coming” bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie also inhabited other fine neighborhoods of central Paris, for example the Rue de la Chaussée d’Antin and its side streets, including the Rue de la Victoire, where the young Napoleon and his bride, Josephine, were to live for some time.
The “little people” lived in run-down, often slum-like neighborhoods of the still quasi-medieval city center, featuring narrow, crooked, and dirty streets, and also in the city’s eastern districts and suburbs (faubourgs), especially the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, situated just beyond the Bastille and the demolished medieval city walls, a defensive system of which the Bastille had been a major stronghold. The faubouriens of Saint-Antoine revealed themselves in 1789, and again in 1830 and 1848, to be the shock troops that pulled the chestnuts out of the revolutionary fire; they did so, inter alia, by storming the Bastille on that famous fourteenth of July 1789 and by attacking the Tuileries Palace, and chasing the king from it, on August 10, 1792.
In some way, France’s revolutions came down to attempts by the “little people” to conquer Paris and to “de-royalize” the “royal city”. In 1793, during the “Great Revolution”, it was not a coincidence that the king was executed in the middle of the most royal of Parisian royal squares, the Place Louis XV, later to become known as Place de la Concorde. Other squares lost their regal names and statues, and royal symbols such as de fleur-de-lis were replaced by republican attributes such as the tricolore flag and the motto “liberty – equality – fraternity”. The “de-royalization” of the capital inevitably also involved a “de-clericalization” that saw countless monasteries and churches being closed and demolished, or in some cases transformed, for the benefit of the “great unwashed”, into hospitals, schools, or warehouses for the storage of large supplies of flour, wine, and other essential foodstuffs, this to avoid their prices to skyrocket in case of poor harvests.
The French capital appeared destined to become a city of, and for, the “little people”, the demos, a literally democratic city. However, this was not appreciated by the well-to-do burghers who supported the revolutionary movements as long as they targeted the feudal established order, but felt threatened and became reactionary when the Parisian revolutionaries started to pursue objectives that violated the “liberal” ideas and capitalist interests of the bourgeoisie. This happened in 1792, 1848, and 1871. Each time, the bourgeoisie managed to repress the attempted revolutionary radicalizations, to thwart the efforts to make Paris more plebeian, and, instead, to transform the former “royal city” a little more into a bourgeois metropolis.
A systematic embourgeoisement of Paris was launched under the auspices of Napoleon, who had been hoisted into the saddle of power by the bourgeoise and proved to be a keen promotor of its class interests.[1] The Corsican, the scion of a family that may equally well be said to have belonged to the lower ranks of the nobility as to the higher levels of the bourgeoisie, was largely responsible for the fact that western Paris, prior to the Great Revolution monopolized by an elite of high birth, the nobility, could be colonized by an elite of high income, the (higher levels of the) bourgeoisie. This was achieved by the construction of wide avenues, inspired by the already existing Champs Elyées, along which rich folks could built prestigious homes to live in or to sell or rent out at high prices; those avenues converged to a large star-shaped space, the Place de l’Étoile. Western Paris thus became the exclusive habitat of the rich, the gens de bien, the propertied class.
Afer Napoleon and the 1815-1830 “Restauration”, a brief comeback of the Bourbon monarchy and the nobility as well as the Church, the embourgeoisement of Paris restarted under the rule of a “constitutional” king of the House of Orleans, Louis-Philippe, known as the “bourgeois king” because he championed very liberal policies. And spectacular progress towards the bourgeoisification of Paris was made when a nephew of Napoleon ruled France as Emperor Napoleon III for a couple of decades in the middle of the nineteenth century. Under the auspices of the Prefect of the Department of the Seine, Georges–Eugène Haussmann, known as “Baron Haussmann”, boulevards, vast squares and parks, and impressive monuments were created that transformed the historical center of Paris into a modern metropolis. However, the “Haussmannization” of the city also featured a contrarevolutionary dimension. First, the majority of the slums were made to disappear from Central Paris together with their poor and restless, and therefore potentially revolutionary, denizens. Room was thus made for beautiful but expensive constructions, immeubles de rapport, “buildings that generate money”, such as shops, restaurants, offices, and handsome apartements. Those projects provided juicy money-making opportunities for wealthy burghers but especially for the big banks that made their appearance on the economic stage at the time, among them the Crédit Lyonnais, Société Générale, and Rotschild Bank, the latter from 2008 tot 2012 employer of the present President of the Republic, Emmanuel Macron. No less than 350,000 poor folks were thus exiled from the city centre.
The gens de bien, the “propertied people”, moved in, and the gens de rien, the “propertyless folks”, were forced to move out of the heart of the city. They were driven out eastward, to the Faubourg Saint-Antoine and other outlying districts of the city, the eastern “Paris of poverty” that happened to be a very different planet compared to the western “Paris of luxury”. It was from the plebeian east that, in 1789, the Parisian demos had invaded central Paris for the purpose of “de-royalizing”, “revolutionizing”, and, indeed, “democratizing” the ville royale. In 1871, the Paris Commune constituted a final attempt to achieve that goal, but the uprising was repressed by troops that, coming from Versailles, penetrated Paris via the city’s western districts, where they were welcomed with open arms, but ran into increasingly tough resistance as they made their way toward the eastern reaches; the fighting ended there with the execution of countless captured Communards.
The bloody repression of the Commune sealed the triumph of a French bourgeoisie that was henceforth resolutely, almost fanatically, contra-revolutionary. The “Era of Revolutions” was over, in France and in the country’s revolutionary hotbed, Paris. The possibility of a conquest of the capital by its plebs appeared to have vanished forever; conversely, the city’s embourgeoisement, launched under Napoleon, now seemed to be a fait accompli.
This triumph of the bourgeoisie was to be certified symbolically in 1889, on the occasion of the centenary of the outbreak of the Great Revolution, by the erection of the Eiffel Tower, an oversized kind of totem pole that conjured up modernity, science, technology, and progress, values identified with by the bourgeois “tribe” in France as well as abroad, in general, and by France’s newborn “Third Republic”, in particular. The “republican pillar” simultaneously functioned as a phallic symbol of the young, dynamic, and potent class the victorious bourgeoisie believed itself to be.
Rising high above the waters of the Seine and conjuring up a lighthouse, Eiffel’s creation seemed to radiate the bright light of modernity to the four corners of the land and, indeed, the world. From a bourgeois point of view, the tower also had the merit of overshadowing the very horizontal Pont Neuf, emblem of the former royal Paris, as well as Notre Dame, the architectural face of the former ville royale. The pillar thus proclaimed the superiority of the new, republican, capitalist France of the bourgeoisie, to the old, monarchical, feudal France dominated by the nobility and the Church. Last but not least, the tower replaced the Pont Neuf as the greatest tourist attraction of the French capital and effectively shifted the city’s center of gravity from the Île de la Cité, hub of the Parisian wheel, to the city’s bourgeois western parts, the sumptuous domain of the bourgeois beau monde.
The Eiffel Tower during the Paris World Fair of 1889, by Georges Garen (Wikimedia Commons)
Mircea Eliade, the great Romanian specialist in ancient myths and religions, has argued that archaic people tended to be overwhelmed by the vast, seemingly chaotic and in many ways mysterious and frightening world they inhabited, a world (or universe) of which they were only an infinitesimal, insignifcant, and powerless part. They experienced the need to bring order and surveyability to this world, that is, transform its chaos into a cosmos, a world that remained mysterious but was at least to some extent familiar, understandable, and less fearsome. This task was typically accomplished by finding and marking a center, that is, a place with great meaning in space as well as time, a sacred space: that spot was considered to be the center of a geographic space, the earth, and simultaneously as the locus of a high point in time, the place where the gods had created human beings and/or the world.
A very old and big tree and a real or imaginary mountain, such as a pyramid, might fucntion as such a sacred spot. Alternatively, a pillar or tower could be constructed and proclaimed to be the centre (or navel, axis) of the world and/or the locus of creation. Arguably the most famous example of such an axis mundi was the ziggurat or step–pyramid in the city of Babylon, the famous Tower of Babel, known locally at the time as Etemenanki, “temple of the creation of heaven and earth”. Such constructions functioned as symbolic connections between earth and heaven, they enabled humans to ascend or at least approach heaven and, conversely, permitted the gods to descend on earth to create humans; consequently, they were also viewed as ladders and featured steps, representing rungs, as in the case of the terraces of Etemenanki, the “hanging gardens” of Babylon, proclaimed by the Greeks as one of the Seven Wonders of the World.
The Eiffel Tower’s construction, location, and most striking features may be interpreted with the help of these Eliadian insights. The French revolutions that rocked Europe and the entire world, but above all France itself, starting in 1789 and lasting until 1871, brought about the demise of the old cosmos of feudal and monarchical France, dominated by the duo of nobility and Church. After nearly a century of revolutionary chaos, a new cosmos emerged, a capitalist rather than feudal order with a republic as political exoskeleton, and dominated economically and socially by the (haute) bourgeoisie. Other countries were to follow suit, but France was first to achieve virtually perfect bourgeois status, it was the primordial bourgeois state.
The French capital, where most of the crucial revolutionary events had taken place, revealed itself to be the epicenter of an emerging international capitalist and bourgeois cosmos. It was therefore only fitting that the bourgeois metropolis erected a monument to confirm and celebrate its sacred status with respect to space and time: first, as epicentre of the new bourgeois and capitalist world, and second, as locus of the uneasy birth, via revolution(s), of this new world. The Eiffel Tower, highest building in the world, was that monument, a kind of step-pyramid whose perpendicularity, interrupted by three floors, also conjured up a ladder, much as the terraces or “hanging gardens” of Babylon had done. And indeed, the Eiffel Tower proclaimed Paris to be the Babylon, the city of cities, of the new bourgeois cosmos.
In other European countries too, the bourgeoisie came to power in the course of the nineteenth or early twentieth century, via revolutions or not, but no capital was ever “bourgeoisified” as early and as thoroughly as Paris. Russia, Germany, and the Habsburg Empire were monarchies, linked with “established” Churches, whose capitals were to remain not just royal but imperial cities boasting mostly magnificent imperial and aristocratic palaces as well as exuberant churches. In Britain, the liberal upper–middle class became a partner, but only a junior partner, of a conservative landowning nobility that continued to set the tone politically, socially, and also architecturally and urbanistically. London thus continued to be an urban world with two feudal architectural poles, on one end the Tower, a medieval, Bastille–like fortress, a fossil of royal absolutism, and on the other end the tandem of Buckingham Palace, a British Tuileries Palace, and Westminster Abbey, London’s Notre Dame; and it is not a coincidence that the style of most grand architectural creations of the time became known as “Victorian,” reflecting, even emphasizing, its monarchical connections.
In comparison with other capitals, Paris looked über–bourgeois after 1871. It is hardly surprising that the city was admired, visited, and praised by bourgeois women and men, young and old, conservative as well as avant-garde, from all over the world, that is, the “Western” world that was becoming increasingly industrial, capitalist and, indeed, bourgeois. From the four corners of the earth, well-to-do burghers converged on Paris like Catholic pilgrims converge on Rome or Muslim pilgrims on Mecca. Conversely, a bourgeoisified Paris, most effectively symbolized by “Haussmannian” town planning and architecture, migrated to cities all over the world where the bourgeoisie likewise triumphed politically, socially, and economically. Featuring imposing residences and expensive “money-generating buildings” overlooking wide avenues or vast squares, as well as imposing government edifices, banks, stock exchanges, theatres, palace hotels, and deluxe restaurants, Bucharest, Brussels, and Buenos Aires, for example, tried very hard to resemble the French capital.
In 1871, the curtain came down on France’s dramatic “Era of Revolutions”, but below, and occasionally above, the surface, lower-intensity class conflict persisted, and with it, the symbolic “Battle for Paris” fought between rich and poor. The bourgeoisie believed to have won that battle, but its victory was never truly complete. Eastern Paris remained plebeian, and as equally plebeian, even proletarian, revealed themselves the mushrooming new suburbs to the east and north of the capital, such as Saint-Denis; that is where the immigrants settled who came from all over France as well as abroad, looking for work in the capital but unable to afford the high prices of accommodation in the city’s center and western neighborhoods.
During the 135 years that have passed since the erection of the Eiffel Tower, Paris managed to remain bourgeois, but not as securely as one might think. This bourgeois supremacy was in fact threatened on a number of occasions. However, the German occupation of 1940-1944 did not constitute a problem in this respect, as one might think. Under the auspices of the occupant and the collaborator regime of Vichy, both eager practitioners of policies of low-wages and high-profits, the bourgeoisie prospered in France and especially in Paris. Hitler, himself a petit bourgeois who had been coopted by Germany’s haute bourgeoisie and governed on its behalf, was an admirer of Paris; he did not wish to destroy the city but, in cooperation with architect Albert Speer, made plans to transform Berlin so that the German capital could replace Paris as bourgeois Babylon. The Führer also opined that many Frenchmen were not unhappy with the German presence in the “city of light” because it eliminated “the menace of revolutionary movements”.[2]
And indeed, a potentially revolutionary situation, threatening bourgeois supremacy in Paris, arose there in August 1944, when the Germans were pulling out of the city and Allied troops, coming in from Normandy, had not yet arrived. An opportunity thus opened up for the leftist, communist-led Resistance to come to power in the capital, and potentially in the entire country, in which case extremely radical, anticapitalist reforms would very likely have been introduced. But that scenario was foiled by the Americans. General de Gaulle, whom they had previously ignored, something for which he would never forgive them, was quickly transferred by them to Paris and presented there as the uncontested supremo leader of the Resistance, which he really was not, and soon to be head of the government of liberated France. His grand entry into the capital was staged not on Place de la Bastille or another site in eastern Paris, but on the Champs Elysées, the major thoroughfare of the same western districts where in 1871 an enthusiastic welcome awaited the troops on their way from Versailles to smother the Commune in blood. De Gaulle was to ensure that in France the bourgeois social-economic order remained intact – with, as cherry on the sundae, a Paris that was to remain equally bourgeois.
Hitler visits Paris on June 23, 1940 (https://upload.wikimedia.org/)
Charles de Gaulle strolls down the Champs Élysées on August 26, 1944 (https://en.wikipedia.org/)
That the bourgeoisifcation of Paris was never completely secured, also became evident in May 1968, when workers and students went on strike and demonstrated in the Latin Quarter and elsewhere in the city centre and the situation threatened to degenerate into civil war or revolution. On the other hand, the City of Light also experienced attempts to perfect its embourgeoisement. Interpretable this way are the great projects that were undertaken in eastern Paris, first by de Gaulle’s successor as President, Georges Pompidou, who arranged for the last slums of central Paris to make room for an art centre that was to receive his name. A little later, under the auspices of President François Mitterand, in theory a socialist but in reality a “bourgeois gentleman” (bourgeois gentilhomme), initiatives such as the construction of new opera on Place de la Bastille and a new ministry of finance as well as a sports stadium in the working-class neighorhood of Bercy, officially purported to rejuvenate the city’s east end for the benefit of its plebeian denizens; in reality, Mitterand’s urbanistic schemes came down to a gentrification for the benefit of the bourgeoisie and especially its jeunesse dorée or “gilded youth”, for whom western Paris probably looms a tad too bourgeois in the sense of “dull”.
In 2018, a new menace emerged for bourgeois Paris in the shape of a movement whose numerous and rowdy participants became known as the “yellow vests”. The protestors were “the usual suspects”, that is, plebeians from the capital’s eastern districts and suburbs, but they were joined in their weekly invasions of the city by counterparts from all over France and even from abroad. They demonstrated most provocatively not only on Place de la Bastille and elsewhere on their “home turf” in eastern Paris, but also, provocatively so, in the heart of the western “Paris of luxury”, including the Champs Elysées. The gilets jaunes were gunning for the person and politics of President Macron, a former banker and as much as bourgeois-president as Louis-Philippe had been a bourgeois-king. Bourgeois Paris trembled as the movement dragged on until, in 2020, de COVID-19 pandemic provided a perfect rationale for outlawing large gatherings.
The recent organization of the Olympic Games may be viewed, and understood, from the same perspective. The modern Olympics have effectively been described as a form of “celebration capitalism”,[3] that is, a feast for the bourgeois “capitalist class” whose crème de la crème consists today of the hyper-rich owners, large shareholders, and managers of multinational enterprises, media moghuls, their allied financiers, jurists, and billionaire celebrities such as Lady Gaga, Céline Dion, and so forth. The primordial objective of this class is the maximization of profits. And the function of the Olympic Games is to enable this accumulation of riches with the collaboration of the host-city and the host-country, who are supposed to facilitate this privatisation of the profits not exclusively, but primarily, by the socialization of the costs.[4] This elite of multinational capitalism sponsors the Games, and its members include mostly corporations whose home turf is the USA, now the centre of gravity of the capitalist world system, such as Coca-Cola, but also French companies like Louis Vuitton (LV), purveyor of all sorts of luxury products, a firm that flourished during the German occupation, as mentioned not a bad time at all for France’s bourgeois elite, typical consumers of the expensive goods made available by LV.
This international elite was willing to hold its Olympic celebration in Paris, but in a congenial Paris, in a Paris in which they could feel at home, and that meant the western, bourgeois part of the city, the “Paris of luxury”. Conversely, for the bourgeoisie, the “capitalist class” of Paris and all of France, the Olympic Games constituted a golden opportunity in two ways. First, to register unseen profits, for example by charging skyhigh prices for rooms in the fine hotels of western Paris that are pricey even at normal times, and also for balconies on the higher floors of favorably located “money-generating” buildings, whence well-heeled tourists could acclaim the passing athletes. Second, and more importantly at least for our purposes, to the bourgeoisie the Olympics also offered the possibility to reconfirm and even advance the embourgeoisement of the city – and to allow Paris to shine again, if only for a few weeks, as the Babylon of the international bourgeoisie. It was in this context that a “social cleansing” (nettoyage social) of the city was carried out, namely the expulsion of the homeless and the concomitant “obfuscation of poverty” (invisibilisation de la pauvreté).[5]
Thus we can also understand why, on opening day, the boats loaded with thousands of athletes departed from the Austerlitz Bridge, situated on the cusp of the city’s historic center and its eastern neighborhoods, the “Paris of poverty”. By starting there, the Olympic show turned its back to plebeian Paris. Place de la Bastille, the primordial revolutionary locus delicti, and, behind it, the Faubourg Saint-Antoine, once the den of the revolutionary lion, much of it literally barricaded, could thus be left unseen and unmentioned, it sufficed that the Olympische torch had briefly passed through that district earlier, namely on on July 14, Bastille Day. Unperturbed by unpleasant associations with the Revolution and with revolutions in general, the flotilla could thus happily descend the Seine to western Paris, the Paris where a sporty “celebration of capitalism” was as welcome as the troopgs coming from Versailles and General de Gaulle had been in 1871 en 1944, respectively.
Inevitably, the Games also had to make use of some of the sports infrastructure that happened to be located elsewhere, such as the national football and rugby stadium in the plebeian suburb of Saint-Denis, an impressive venue known as Stade de France. However, as many events as possible, including the most spectacular ones, took place in western neighborhoods. The marathons finished on the vast Esplanade des Invalides, and the cyclists arrived at the photogenic spot that could be viewed as the topographic focal point of the Parisian Olympics, virtually at the base of the Eiffel Tower, where temporary facilities had also been erected for events such as tennis and beach volleyball. That also happened to be the place where the athletes had disembarked from the boats to attend the opening ceremony. On that occasion, Eiffel’s pillar, sparkling with thousands of lights, proclaimed to the Parisians, the athletes, and the entire world not only that the Olympic celebration of capitalism was welcome in Paris but also that Paris continued to belong to the bourgeoisie – at least until imperiled again by a second coming of the “yellow vests” or the appearance of yet another plebeian horde.
1. See Jacques R. Pauwels, “Napoleon Between War and Revolution”, Counterpunch, May 7, 2021. ↑
2. See the comments on Paris (including the Eiffel Tower) and Berlin in Adolf Hitler, Libres propos sur la guerre et la paix, Paris, 1952, pp.23, 81, 97. ↑
3. See Jules Boykoff, Celebration capitalism and the Olympic games, London, 2014.
4. Jules Boykoff, who developed the concept of “celebration capitalism”, considers the Olympic Games as a reverse form of trickle-down economics, whereby the wealth actually trickles upward, from the poor to the rich. ↑
5. Igor Martinache, “L’olympisme, stade suprême du capitalisme (de la fête)?”, Revue Française de Socio-Économie, 1:32, 2024, https://shs.cairn.info/. ↑
The post Paris Olympics 2024: Celebration Capitalism Around the Eiffel Tower appeared first on CounterPunch.org.
