05.29.07
Eiffel Tower: the Official (1893) Guide
What was it like to visit the Eiffel Tower in the 1890s? Today while following some leads for my dissertation at the Bibliothèque Nationale, I came across a fun little guide for the Eiffel Tower, published in Brussels in 1893. It’s always a pleasure to discover these sources that don’t necessarily have much to do with my project, but that show some aspect of fin-de-siècle French culture.
This 64-page guidebook seems to be mainly concerned with the statistics: how many kilos of steel, how many visitors, how much revenue? It’s fun to think back at what this tower meant in 1893: it was only four years old that year (it was built for the 1889 Exposition Universelle in Paris) and was quite the marvel of modern science and engineering. More than just a “must-see” of rich Parisian history, the Eiffel Tower at that time represented modernity itself.
You can download this guide, and many, many other original documents at the Bibliothèque Nationale’s portal to digital documents, Gallica. Just do a title search for “Guide Offiicel de la Tour Eiffel.” Happy researching!
megan said,
May 30, 2007 at 5:17 am
Very cool. what is your research on BTW?
rachel said,
May 30, 2007 at 9:48 pm
Hey there Megan, my research is on fin-de-siècle devoutly religious women: representation of them in various media (caricatures, art, novels) as well as tracing the lives of some of these women. I actually found this Eiffel Tower guide when I was looking up the name of a Catholic author of popular novels. I’m not sure why this thing came up, but it was fun to look at!