Dr S Shabih ul Hassan Rizvi
I am neither Japanese nor a woman, but when I visited Paris for the first time in 1997, I experienced the disillusionment and disappointment that some Japanese tourists, especially women, went through when seeing Paris.
It is called Pari shōkōgun in Japanese, syndrome de Paris in French, and in English Paris syndrome. Forty years ago, in 1986, Dr Hiroaki Ota, a Japanese psychiatrist working in France, thus named this culture shock. In my visit and to my vision, there was an aftershock as well. That was visiting the Eiffel Tower.
Today, 31 March, marks the 137th anniversary of the Tower’s completion and ceremonial inauguration. On May 15, it was opened to the public. But well before its opening, it was an open target of critics. History consoled me that I was hardly the first or the only to dislike it.
To celebrate the centenary of the French Revolution in 1889, the Exposition Universelle was held in Paris. Engineer Gustave Eiffel and his firm secured the contract to construct the tower. On January 28, 1887, construction began. The structure started to emerge like an iron provocation over Paris. In its very first year, criticism rose taller than the tower itself. Nearly forty artists, writers, and architects published a protest in Le Temps, denouncing it as a monstrous, useless eyesore.
Among the signatories were Guy de Maupassant, Charles Gounod, Charles Garnier, and Paul Verlaine. They likened it to a factory chimney, a skeleton disgracing Parisian elegance. Maupassant used to have his lunch beneath it because it was the only place where he did not have to see it. The Eiffel Tower was an irony of iron against the aesthetic authenticity of the city.
But that irony of iron is now an icon, an ideal, an identity. The structure once stigmatised became beloved, then indispensable, and finally synonymous with Paris itself. Visitors sought it, Parisians accepted it and gradually affection replaced aversion. The proverb “familiarity breeds contempt,” traced to Publilius Syrus and echoed by Augustine of Hippo, seemed to reverse itself here. Exposure, then overexposure, did not erode admiration. Familiarity nurtured attachment and the stranger gradually became intimate. I invented for this inversion an expression in 1997, the Eiffel Tower Effect (TETE): the paradox by which what is first rejected acquires meaning, then beauty and ultimately identity through visual or other sensory continuity.
The Eiffel Tower today stands not merely as iron, but as interpretation and reinterpretation, a timely reminder that time, like a wise writer, revises the first draft too often. The Eiffel Tower, once dismissed, is now missed by those who saw it but once. There is, perhaps, a final irony to this iron structure. The Eiffel Tower that was unloved at first was later loved so fondly that Erika Eiffel married it in 2007.
The Eiffel Tower Effect teaches philosophy of Logical Pausism in judgment. It reminds us that initial criticism is no condemnation; time, resilience, and familiarity can transform perception. What is unfamiliar can become intimate. What is awkward can become iconic. It invites us to look again and then again, until beauty consents to reveal itself.
—The writer is Chairman of the international think tank World Future Forum.
