During its renovation, the Eiffel Tower will change color

The visitors ballet has been replaced by that of painters and the flashes of telephones by the scraping of scrapers: at almost 132 years old, the Tour Eiffel offers itself the biggest facelift in its history, in the perspective of 2024 Olympic Games.

For her 20th painting campaign, the famous Iron Lady, one of the most visited monuments in the world in the pre-Covid era, didn’t do things by halves: exit, on the south arc, the 19 previous layers of paint, the thickness of which could reach 3 mm.

The Tower will regain its “yellow-brown” color

Exit also the “Brown Eiffel Tower” color that the 324 m high building, the symbol of Paris, has since 1968 covered with Notre-Dame Cathedral and the Sacré-Cœur Basilica in Montmartre. The Tower, which was originally red when it was presented at the 1889 Universal Exhibition, will regain the “yellow-brown” color desired by Gustave Eiffel in 1907.

“It will give a little more ” gold ” side to the Eiffel Tower at the time of the Olympics compared to the color we used to see”, describes Patrick Branco Ruivo, general manager of Sete, the monument operating company.

“You can already see the new color when you look at the top. It’s not revolutionary, but when there is a beautiful blue sky over Paris, we see some metallic and shiny effects ”, he adds.

The end of the renovations scheduled for November 2022

Begun in 2019 for a scheduled end in November 2022, the site – stripping and painting – is titanic in view of the 18,000 parts connected by 2.5 million rivets. Costed at 50 million euros, the operation required a reinforced sanitary protocol for stripping, given the presence of lead in the previous paints.

In addition to specific equipment and decontamination areas, around fifty samples per week were added on the site and in the various areas of the Tower, lists Alain Dumas, technical director of Sete.

Safety as a “priority”

“We are extremely careful in terms of safety, it is our priority”, he assures, a few weeks after the publication of an article by Marianne reporting three readings above normal. “A week later, we re-measured at the locations indicated and we had completely satisfactory values ​​below the required threshold. “

The stripping only concerns 2% of the structure at this stage and focuses on the arch which overlooks the Champ-de-Mars, the most subject to wind, rain and sun, and in fact the most degraded.

A degradation foreseen by Gustave Eiffel who had himself recommended to renew the coat of paint every seven years. A rhythm that has been respected since, with a change of nuance this year.

The painters move around “as on a tree climbing course”

“Why did Gustave Eiffel choose the color yellow-brown? No doubt so that the Eiffel Tower echoes the whole of the great city of Paris, a city of freestone, limestone ”, considers Pierre-Antoine Gatier, chief architect of historical monuments.

Several hundred meters above the ground, equipped with harnesses, tools and a paint bucket, painters move from one room to another. Suspended by ropes, they revolve around the 20,000 small lamps that make the Tower sparkle every evening at nightfall for five minutes, every hour.

“We move most of the time like on a tree climbing course”, explains Antoine Olhagaray, a 22-year-old rope painter. With “One more view”, complete by his side Charles-Henry Piret: “We don’t have the opportunity every day to be hung on a rope 300 m high.” »

“We are in continuity”

Do they have the impression of being, almost 70 years later, the descendants of the painter of the Eiffel Tower immortalized by Marc Riboud in 1953?

Marc Riboud, painter at the Eiffel Tower. 1953 #Riboud pic.twitter.com/sIzYf2xBoM

– marc voinchet (@mvoinchet) August 31, 2016

“We are in continuity”, believes Charles-Henry who says he is ready to “Reproduce this photo version 2021”. With one difference: they would pose with ropes when their “Ancestor” posed nonchalantly, cigarette in beak and hat on head, holding a brush in one hand and a pillar of the Tower in the other, the city at its feet.

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