Anyone who showed up at the Eiffel Tower on Monday got the same sign. Opening delayed, it said, for operational reasons. No queue moving, no ticket booth open, nothing. Inside, staff were holding a meeting that had clearly been building since the weekend.
Two days earlier, on Saturday, a delegation of about 100 people linked to BAPS, short for Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, a Hindu group with ties to Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi's ruling party, came through for a private tour. The group had just consecrated its first major temple in France, a short drive outside Paris, and the Tower stop was part of the same trip.
Staff say the visit came with conditions nobody should have agreed to.
According to a statement from the CGT union, female employees, both Tower staff and contract workers, got instructions to make themselves scarce for the duration. Some were pulled off their posts entirely and replaced with men. Others were just told to avoid certain corridors and platforms while the delegation passed through. Diane Davoine, a union representative, put it plainly to Reuters: "women were asked to leave their workstations so that men could take their places." Staff described themselves as shocked to have been put in that position at all.
SETE, the company that actually operates the Tower, didn't try to bury the story. It confirmed the delegation had requested the visit be arranged to limit interactions with women, and it admitted the obvious in its own statement, that "these conditions should not have been accepted." SETE president Ariel Weil told AFP the company intended to get to the bottom of it and draw whatever conclusions needed drawing.
Paris Mayor Emmanuel Grégoire called the arrangement unacceptable and said an investigation was already underway. French Equality Minister Aurore Bergé went further on X, writing that "In France, we do not ask women to erase themselves." Marine Le Pen, who rarely agrees with Bergé on much of anything, called it unacceptable too. National Assembly President Yaël Braun-Pivet added her own line, arguing that welcoming visitors never means giving up the country's values, and that women are fully present in French public life whether anyone likes it or not.
The temple organization put out its own statement Monday evening. It said the visit had been arranged with Tower staff in advance, scheduled at the start of opening hours specifically so it wouldn't disrupt other visitors, given how large the group was. It maintained that, as far as it knew, nobody was ever actually barred from entering. Then came the apology anyway, for "any pain or inconvenience caused," worded carefully enough to admit fault without quite admitting what the fault was.
The Tower reopened Tuesday, business as usual from the outside. The investigation Grégoire promised is still ongoing, and there's no public answer yet on who actually gave the instructions, or how far up the decision went before someone at SETE signed off on it. Close to seven million people pass through the Eiffel Tower every year. Plenty of them probably had no idea any of this happened until they found a closed ticket booth instead of the usual line.
It's also not the only labor flare-up at the Tower this year. Back in August, staff walked out over a new ticketing system they said was producing miles-long queues during peak season. Different issue, different grievance entirely, but the pattern is getting hard to ignore: one of the most photographed structures on earth, and it keeps having very ordinary workplace problems just out of frame.
The Eiffel Tower closed for the entire day Monday after staff walked out over an incident from the weekend, when female employees say they were pulled from their posts, swapped for men, and told to stay clear of certain areas while a roughly 100-person Hindu delegation toured the monument. SETE, the company that runs the Tower, admitted the group had asked to limit "interactions with women" and said the request never should have been granted. French officials, including the equality minister and Paris's mayor, condemned what happened. The group behind the visit apologized. The Tower reopened Tuesday.
