Charles Bremner's Paris blog

Paris celebrated the 120th birthday of its “Iron Lady” yesterday, treating the Eiffel Tower to a facelift a century after it was supposed to have been dismantled.

A team of 25 steeplejack painters from the poorer fringes of Europe clambered to the top and started brushing on 60 tonnes of semi-gloss, the 17th coat it has received since its opening on March 31, 1889.

The men, working for a Greek shipyard company, will take about 18 months to finish the job, using brushes but never spray-guns to apply the grey-brown hue that is patented as “brun Tour Eiffel”. When Gustave Eiffel completed his 300m (990ft) edifice in 1889 it bore only red rust-proofing. It was not expected to need much more because it was due to be demolished in 1909, 20 years after it dominated the great exhibition marking the centenary of the French Revolution.

Times Archive, 1889: The Eiffel Tower

Even those who protested against the structure acknowledge now that it has a light and graceful appearance

• The Eiffel Tower, first ascent in the Otis lift

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The muddy brown was chosen in 1968 to blend in with the cityscape and to reflect a copper tone when illuminated at night. The water-based, lead-free paint is applied in three shades to give an impression of uniformity when observed from the ground.

Jean-Bernard Bros, head of the company that runs the monument, said: “It is the colour that best suits the tower; it’s her most beautiful dress. That’s what the film-makers, Parisians and lovers of the tower tell us, so we have decided to keep it.”

A “campagne de peinture” takes place every seven years. The painters are attached with ropes but even when they climbed free none has ever been killed. The men say that they take a special pride in their work on the symbol of Paris.

“Once you are up there, you forget the ground, cares, danger and leave everything behind,” said Aderito Dos Santos Baptista, who has painted the tower since 1981. “There is this silence and light and the view. We are nothing less than birds.” Bird-droppings account for a share of the damage, along with wind and rain, which wears off so much paint that the painters do not strip layers but merely paint over them.

The tower’s original red added to its awe-inspiring scale, far greater than the world’s tallest structure of the time – the Monument in the Mall of Wash-ington DC. The tower kept the record until 1930 when the Americans took it back with the Chrysler Building in Manhattan, which is a few feet taller.

Three years after the inauguration of his exhibit, Eiffel had it painted in brownish orange. For the 1900 Universal Exposition he jazzed it up in yellow. Paint, Eiffel said that year, was the key to the survival of his very rust-prone edifice. “The more meticulous the paint job, the longer the tower shall endure.” The daring yellow, however, gave new ammunition to those who wanted to tear down what they saw as a blot on the skyline. Just before the yellow coat went on, a band of Parisian eminences, including the composer Charles Gounod and Alex-andre Dumas Jr signed a complaint against “the odious shadow of the odious column built up of riveted iron plates”.

The writer Guy de Maupassant lunched there regularly because he said that it was the only spot in Paris where his view was not spoilt by the Eiffel Tower.

The chef Alain Ducasse has just taken over the tower restaurant, the Jules Verne, and earned a Michelin star for it.

In the early 1900s Eiffel persuaded the Paris council not to take down his contraption as scheduled. The city made it permanent because it was proving useful for wireless transmission and aerial navigation. In the 1920s it became an icon for avant-garde artists such as Raoul Dufy and Marc Chagall. For a while in the 1930s the tower sported a huge advertisement for Citroën cars.

Lighting, not paint, is now used to change its colour for special events. It was blue and gold last year to mark France’s turn in the rotating presidency of the European Union.

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