Fate of Eiffel Tower’s Olympic rings turns into political fight 

PARIS — Paris Mayor Anne Hidalgo said she wants to keep the Olympic rings affixed to the Eiffel Tower so that the “festive spirit” of a successful Games lives on long after their conclusion.

Her rivals, however, see an attempt to glue a campaign poster onto one of the world’s most iconic monuments ahead of the next mayoral election in 2026, which will pit Hidalgo against Rachida Dati, the outgoing culture minister and current mayor of the arrondissement where the Eiffel Tower is located.

David Alphand, a right-wing Parisian city councilor and Dati ally, said that Hidalgo “has been doing everything she can to recuperate the positive spinoffs” of the Olympics.

“She has shown a great deal of political opportunism,” Alphand said. “The Eiffel Tower was not made to hang anything and everything on it.”

Paris 2024 sold the French public on hosting the Games by vowing to make them the  “greenest in history,” pledging to use mostly preexisting infrastructure for sustainability purposes and to keep costs from spiraling out of control. Many of the temporary venues were built in the heart of the city, so iconic monuments like the Eiffel Tower became part of the backdrop for events like the opening ceremony or beach volleyball.

After the Games, those temporary structures are supposed to come down. Central Paris is supposed to return, for the most part, to what it was.

Hidalgo’s camp has so far batted off criticism as the typical complaints of Parisians, who are notorious for their loathing of any change to the French capital. I.M. Pei’s pyramids outside the Louvre were panned after their installation in the 1980s, and even the tower itself, which engineer Gustave Eiffel built for the 1889 World Fair, was initially opposed by architects and residents. Novelist Guy de Maupassant called it a “giant ungainly skeleton,” and it is said that he only liked to eat lunch there because that was the only place in Paris from which he could not see it. 

Today, more than a century later, the Eiffel Tower is a near-universally beloved monument synonymous with France — and one that many, including Eiffel’s descendants, want left untouched.

“The rings completely break the design of the monument … it does not respect the work of our ancestor,” Olivier Berthelot-Eiffel, a great-great-grandson of Gustave Eiffel, told POLITICO. Berthelot-Eiffel chairs an association of Eiffel’s descendants, which opposes Hidalgo’s move.

Decorating the Eiffel Tower is not without precedent. It has been used to convey political messages, such as support for Ukraine, and for commercial purposes — at least once by Citroën. But those installations have always been temporary.    

This is the first time the Eiffel family has publicly taken a position against plans related to the Eiffel Tower, Berthelot-Eiffel said.

In an interview with Ouest France announcing her plans, Hidalgo said the decision is theirs to make, as the tower is owned by the city of Paris — so long as it is approved by the International Olympic Committee, which strictly protects where the rings are displayed.

Dati has taken a diplomatic approach to the spat, seemingly keen to let others go on the attack. Shortly after Hidalgo’s announcement, the outgoing culture minister noted on X that the Eiffel Tower is “a protected monument” that can only be modified under certain conditions and after an impact assessment.

“Contrary to what she says, she is not the only one who decides,” Julien Lacaze, president of association “Sites & Monuments,” France’s oldest heritage defense association, said.

Lacaze said the tower should remain the symbol of France and slammed Hidalgo’s proposal as a way to promote herself, latching onto the Eiffel Tower like a “parasite” so she can “take advantage of its fame … to say these are my Games.”

Whatever the final decision will be, the current 30-ton steel rings will have to come down as they are too heavy to remain there permanently. Hidalgo said the city plans to replace them with new, lighter ones.