The dark side of the Eiffel Tower

Since the construction of the famous tower began in 1887, 370 people have died there. Accidents, challenges that ended in disaster, and mainly suicides. Surprisingly, there are also two murders related to theEiffel Tower, when one of them was carried out within it.

Alongside the common question “To climb or not to climb?”, tourists Paris Asking themselves and others, there is another, different question, that those who feel like tourists in their lives, who were thrown into it against their will, who were placed on the path against their will, ask themselves: “To be or not to be?”

And several hundred of them, who answered the question in the negative and decided to commit an act from which there is no return, chose the Eiffel Tower, a grandiose setting, as the last witness to their passage through the universe, perhaps to pour meaning into their deaths, a meaning they did not find in their lives. To integrate into the history of the famous site, to enter it with a fierce and final blow. The dark fate of some of the unfortunates who did this, will be illuminated by this article.

The article will also talk about challenges that ended in death. The Eiffel Tower, which is itself an architectural and aesthetic achievement, a challenge for its time, which challenged prevailing opinions, a human victory over matter, nature, time and space, attracted and attracts pilots, athletes and inventors, who wanted and want to break records, fulfill dreams, merge with the structure and its spirit.

And there were also “just” accidents, the most famous of which took the life of an enthusiastic and thirsty Italian worker who participated in the construction of the tower from its beginning to its end.

The first suicide bomber A young Parisian mechanic, 1891

The first suicide was a young Parisian mechanic who hanged himself inside the north leg of the “Iron Lady” (the nickname of the Eiffel Tower) on August 23, 1891. At seven in the morning, his naked body was found hanging from one of the metal rods at a height of twenty meters. Around the body, three candles were burning, placed in a triangle.

His clothes were hanging not far from his body, and in his coat pocket was his will, which stated that he bequeathed all his property, namely his clothes, to Gustave Eppel. He left his head to his commander in the army and his body to the Paris School of Medicine.

What is the meaning of the strange ritual that the original mechanic organized for himself? His body was found in the center of a triangle formed by three candles. Three is the number that also governed his will, in which he divided himself into three parts and appointed a different heir for each of them. 

Why did the young man choose to commit suicide, did the hanging involve erotic asphyxiation, what is the meaning of the mysterious ceremony? If the “Iron Lady,” clad in the lace skirt in which the incident took place, could testify, perhaps she would answer the questions.

The Parisian mechanic was the first suicide but not the first killed. The sad title is bestowed on an Italian worker who participated with pride and passion in assembling the tower. Let us salute Angelo Scagliotti, that is his name, whom I learned to appreciate and love from The website that his grandparents set up for their great-grandfather To reveal the truth about the man and set things straight. 

Scagliotti is forgotten or shrouded in legend – many lies are circulating on the internet regarding the circumstances of his death. The time has come to raise the worker who loved his life so much from the abyss of oblivion to which Gustave Eiffel had reduced him, so that his death would not overshadow the glorious project that had become the most distinct symbol of the shining city. Gustave Eiffel had every interest in eliminating the drama that would have damaged the image of the tower and the good name of its creator.

The first victim – a greedy Italian worker, 1889

Angelo Scagliotti was one of two hundred and fifty workers who assembled the tower with nails (nailed connections) and the only one among them who was killed.

Angelo Scagliotti was born in 1849 to a peasant family in Bressana in the province of Pavia but, unlike his parents, was drawn to mechanics and especially to bridge building. After participating in the construction of the Garabit aqueduct (Le viaduc de Garabit), he returned to Italy and met his future wife, Amalia Nobrini, in his hometown.

Two sons were born to the couple, Pierino in 1885 and Mauro in 1887. Upon hearing about the Eiffel Tower project, Angelo Scagliotti decided to come to France with his whole family. How he wanted to meet again his colleagues with whom he had been working on the Garaby aqueduct!

Without any difficulty he was accepted for the challenging project and participated in it from beginning to end, thus receiving the silver medal awarded to all persistent workers. In 1889 his daughter Ernesta was born. Angelo and Amalia decided to stay in France and combined their names and the names of their children, as a sign of acceptance in the new homeland: Angelo became Ange, Amalia – Meli, Pierino – Pierre, Mauro – Emile, Ernesta – Ernestine.

Angelo earned a good living in his rewarding job and the family was happy in their home, not far from the tower to which the father rode his bicycle until the bitter and hasty day arrived. On May 24, 1889, at ten o'clock on a sunny Friday morning, Angelo watched the installation of the first elevator. Robbed and broken, Angelo had apparently gotten too close. His curiosity, his thirst for knowledge, were his downfall. The elevator car hit him on the head and crushed him beyond repair. Two colleagues, who were with him, had to pronounce him dead.

It was not an accident at work. Angelo's fate certainly touched Gustave Eppel's heart, but on the other hand, he undoubtedly wanted to prevent the spread of news of the drama that would overshadow the inauguration of the tower. He offered the widow, who was left with three small children, a sum of money, on condition that she return to Italy and not sue him. Five hundred francs on the spot to cover the expenses of the return and another four thousand francs to an account in an Italian bank after she proved that she had settled in her homeland.

Amalia Nobrini agreed to the deal and returned to live with her mother in her homeland. She raised the children alone and faced further grief when her eldest son died in the sixth wave of the cholera epidemic.

After her mother's death, she returned to France with her two children, settling in the city of Zol, near her aunt, among a united community of Italian immigrants, and in 1908 the three received citizenship. FrenchAmalia, who was a seamstress by profession, passed away in 1952 in good health after having been blessed with grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They all live in France. Perfect integration despite the drama.

The four great-grandchildren, Françoise, Alain, Jean-Claude, Jean-Pierre, established the moving website in memory of their maternal great-grandfather and you You are welcome to visit it. And see the photographs related to him and his family.

The Flying Tailor, 1912

Franz Reichelt, an Austrian ladies' tailor, settled in Paris in 1900 and ten years later received French citizenship and changed his name to François Reichelt.

Reichelt opened a thriving tailoring shop in the Opera district, but his dream was to develop a parachute suit to ensure the safety of pilots and enable them to survive accidents. Aviation was in its infancy and in 1911, a year before Reichelt's jump, the number of pilots killed was one per week. A prize of ten thousand francs was promised by Colonel Lalance to the inventor of a parachute suitable for pilots.

The Austrian, who had emigrated to France and had done well there, was looking for a way to thank his new country and receive recognition from it. Saving pilots, what a noble goal! The jump from the tower would make him famous and no one would deprive him of his invention!

The tailor's clients, mostly Austrian women who were touring Paris, enjoyed hearing, during the long measurements, his stories about the miraculous suit, thanks to which even the most cowardly of cowards would be able to engage in the sport of skydiving without any fear.

Reichelt designed a silk pilot suit, equipped with wings, inspired by the physiognomy of bats. The suit was supposed to transform into a parachute in the event of a crash. For almost two years, the tailor has been drawing, cutting, and sewing.

Although he tried it, the finished product, without much success, on dummies and on himself, he attributed the failures to the low heights, and so he took the trouble to obtain a license to jump from the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, which rises to a height of fifty-six meters. Moreover, the tower, a symbol of the Republic (it was erected to commemorate the centennial of the French Revolution), the voice of the army (it transmitted and received radio waves connecting the soldiers to the general headquarters starting in 1908), became a focus for aviation challenges: balloons inflated and the first airplanes circled around it to greet it.

On Sunday, February 4, 1912, Reichelt arrived at the tower in his car with two friends. About thirty curious people, aviation enthusiasts, journalists, and photographers were present. Reichelt's friends tried to dissuade him from jumping, but he persisted. Was he really so sure of his invention? The day before, he had drawn up his will at a notary's. Suicide? Madness? Obsession?

The police chief claimed that Reichelt lied when he said it was a dummy parachute. If he had told the truth, that he was preparing to jump himself, he would not have received a license. But Reichelt arrived wearing his parachute suit, without a dummy, and not a single police officer stopped him.

In sub-zero temperatures and strong winds, Reichelt hesitated for forty seconds but eventually jumped to his death as his parachute suit folded over his body, surrounding him like a shroud.

It is said that a doctor who performed a post-mortem examination of the body determined that Reichelt died of a heart attack before he crashed to the frozen ground, but this information is unsubstantiated. It is more likely that Reichelt was killed when his skull crashed at the base. He was thirty-three years old and had dreams at the time of his death. The video of his jump, one of the first by the Pathé film production company to document a current event, sends shivers down your spine..

François Reichelt continues to arouse curiosity. Historian David Dreula Published an interesting investigation He wrote about the flying tailor in a book published about a century after the death of the inventor who did not fulfill his dream.

The Daring Pilot, 1926

The pilot, Léon Collot, a reserve lieutenant born in Besançon, made a bet with an American friend that he would make it past the Eiffel Tower, passing it between his legs, in an airplane of course. A daring challenge that Léon Collot met.

Legend has it that Leon Colot met an American acquaintance at a theater who expressed his astonishment that no Frenchman had yet attempted to fly between the knees of the Eiffel Tower. If the tower had been located in the United States, the American added in a burst of patriotic emotion, “I have no doubt that it would have been done long ago.” Leon Colot saw these words as an insult to the honor of his country and its phallic tower and immediately decided to take up the gauntlet.

Moving between the spires of the Eiffel Tower, creation of artificial intelligence, credit Zvi Hazanov via Midjourney

On February 24, 1926, Leon Colot took off from Orly Airport at 19:19 a.m. in his Breguet XNUMX toward the Eiffel Tower. The fog that prevailed at the time made him hesitate, but at XNUMX:XNUMX a.m., as the sun was setting, he began to descend and successfully passed under the west and north legs of the Iron Lady.

Disaster struck later. As he tried to straighten the craft, he was blinded by the sunlight and hit a wireless telegraph antenna. The plane caught fire and its pilot perished in the fire before the helpless eyes of his brother and a handful of journalists. Leon Colo was thirty-two years old when he died.

The paratrooper who challenged the law, 1928

In 1912, the authorities decided to enact a law prohibiting the use of the Eiffel Tower as a platform for skydiving experiments. The numerous accidents were the basis for the law. But there are people for whom laws are not meant to be broken, and one such person was Marcel Gayet.

Marcel Gayet was no novice, having made numerous parachute jumps from airplanes. So, on March 20, 1928, he invited photographers to watch another parachute jump, this time from the Eiffel Tower.

An improperly folded parachute was to blame. The thirty-five-year-old jeweler fell to his death from the first floor of the tower after the parachute failed to open.

The Unlucky Norwegian Parachutist, 2005

On May 16, 2005, a young Norwegian, Axel, 31, arrived at the Eiffel Tower with the intention of parachuting from it to celebrate his country's national holiday, which fell the next day, and to document the operation to use the video as an advertisement for the fashion company called "Impact" that he founded with friends. Ella, his partner, and two others arrived with him at the tower. One of them, Joe, was supposed to also parachute, but upon learning that his parachute was not working, he abandoned the idea and descended.

The Norwegian hid the parachute in his clothes and the video camera in his helmet. He went up to the third floor but, seeing that it was protected by a grate, went down to the second floor, at a height of one hundred and fifteen meters, climbed the railing and parachuted. The parachute did open, but the parachutist landed on the iron bars of the first floor and was killed on the spot, around ten o'clock in the evening. The video camera died along with its owner.

His friends watched him from below and witnessed his death. Joe expressed sadness but declared that he would continue to engage in the dangerous sport of base jumping, that is, parachuting from a fixed location (building, antenna, bridge, cliff) rather than from an airplane.

Neuristan, 1960-1961

On May 14, 1961, at around 26 p.m., a man in his forties jumped from the second floor of the tower. The police who examined the body of the deceased found identification documents with his name and address: Albert Dufourmentelle, 26 rue Châteaudun, in the 9th arrondissement.

When they arrived at the suicide bomber's house, they were surprised to discover another body, that of Leonie Deformantel, his wife. There was no doubt about the identity of the murderer. Before committing suicide, Albert Deformantel murdered his wife. He had not worked for more than a year because he suffered from neurasthenia and his wife was the breadwinner. Why did he murder her? Albert Deformantel took his secret to the grave.

A year earlier, she had jumped from the tower as a twenty-four-year-old model who also suffered from neurasthenia. A few days after she jumped, she was supposed to meet her future son-in-law's family. A tragic way to call off the wedding...

The chain of sufferers of this disease who jumped from the tower did not end here. Thirty-five years earlier, a Russian immigrant, a servant of a master, whose country's troubles had caused him to become neurotic, jumped to his death. The Russian committed suicide a few days after the accident in which pilot Leon Colu was killed, who, it will be recalled, made his flight out of patriotism.

A young Israeli in the Eiffel Tower suicide squad, 2012

The bars and railings count the casualties from jumps, but here and there are “successes.” In 2009, a twenty-year-old woman jumped to her death from the second floor. She fell onto the terrace of the restaurant on the first floor as many revellers continued to eat leisurely, oblivious to what was happening.

The latest suicide was that of an Israeli. Since he did not speak French, it is assumed that he was a tourist, hence the nickname “tourist suicides” for this type of “candidate.” On June 24, 2012, around midnight, tourists noticed a man with a backpack climbing the tower from the outside and called the security forces. Twenty-four firefighters soon arrived and tried to convince the young man, who was hanging from the tower while climbing to the third floor, to come down.

The twenty-five-year-old did not listen to the persuasive attempts of the doctor and the staff, with whom he spoke for about two hours. We did everything we could, said the fire department spokesman. “I have nothing more to say,” said the young man, loosening his grip and falling from a height of 125 meters to the second floor with his arms outstretched, he was hit and killed.

The French call a jump with outstretched arms “an angel's leap,” saut de l'ange, because of their imagery of wings. And so the young man's soul flew into the sky and joined that of the Italian verb Angelo. For those who believe in the immortality of the soul.

Soul apart and body apart. The suicide bomber's body was transferred to the Institute of Forensic Medicine. The Israeli ambassador in Paris was notified of the incident in order to locate the family of the young man who did not know French and spoke only English. The relevant authorities refused to provide further details about the identity of the suicide bomber, who remained anonymous to the general public.

The day after the drama, firefighters were called again when a twenty-five-year-old woman threatened to jump from the first floor of the tower. The woman, of Indian origin, under the influence of alcohol and drugs, climbed barefoot and without any equipment onto the west leg of the tower.

This time, the same firefighters, dressed in red, from the special unit for rescue and rescue in dangerous conditions, managed to convince her to be evacuated by helicopter after a dramatic hour in which she was hanging at a height of fifty-five meters over the abyss. It is worth noting that there is always a risk that the suicidal person will also pull the rescuer to his death as soon as he grabs hold of him, and the unit members risk their lives with every action. It was decided to evacuate the woman, who was determined to end her life, by helicopter to prevent her from causing rescuers to fall in her wake.

The evacuation was also extremely daring because a strong wind was blowing and a worker from a nearby construction site, who was watching the spectacle, feared that the helicopter would hit the tower. The young woman was brought to the Georges Pompidou European Hospital for treatment and psychiatric examinations.

The only murder in Migdal – a Spanish criminal who threw his wife to her death, 1963

Let's go back in time to an unusual criminal event that raised many doubts in the hearts of investigators that were only cleared up after a long time. It was a femicide, the murder of a woman by her partner. The latter tried to cover it up and presented it first as a suicide and then as an accident. This is the only murder committed at the Eiffel Tower.

On February 9, 1963, a Spanish immigrant couple, Francisco Toledo Pernia, a thirty-one-year-old factory worker in the outskirts of Paris, and his wife Dolores, twenty-eight, were preparing to climb to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower but stopped on the first floor to, ostensibly, chat. Dolores fell and was killed instantly.

The police arrested the husband on suspicion of murder. In the first version he gave to his investigators, he claimed that he watched, helplessly, as his wife committed suicide.

The woman thrown to her death by her murderous husband, a creation of artificial intelligence, credit Zvi Hazanov via Midjourney

In a second version, after pressure from investigators and incriminating testimony from a young couple who saw him push his wife into the abyss, he said that he did lift her up onto the railing, but only to scare her after she confessed to him that she had cheated on him. It was she who chose to commit suicide out of guilt over the act.

In a third version, after fifteen hours of interrogation, he claimed that he held her over the railing so that she would confess that she had betrayed him, and then she slipped from his hands and fell into the abyss. It was just an accident, he was innocent.

The trial opened after two years, and the testimony of the woman's acquaintances revealed that Dolores was a thin, shy, and withdrawn woman, who did not know a word of French, and was not integrated into society, so it was not unreasonable to assume that she committed suicide.

In addition, contradictions were discovered in the testimonies of the couple who were present at the dramatic scene. They were the Kercher couple from Strasbourg who were visiting Paris for their honeymoon and came down from the second floor of the tower to the first floor. Monsieur Kercher testified that he saw a man pushing a figure in front of him into the abyss. Madame Kercher, on the other hand, said that she noticed the figure picking up what appeared to be a pile of clothes from the ground and throwing it over the railing. She realized that it was a woman when she saw a pair of legs emerge from the pile and heard a sharp scream. Monsieur Kercher did not hear anything while he was next to his wife and the whole scene happened in a flash.

Francisco Toledo cried, during the trial, shouted, sighed, beat his chest with his hands, raised his hands in the air, swore that he loved his wife and that he had no reason to kill her. On the contrary, she was the most precious person in his life.

At the end of the play, the accused was sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter, but today no one is sure that Francisco Toledo is innocent. Quite the opposite. The man, born in 1932, was a notorious criminal, involved in numerous criminal cases, including the murder of a seventy-nine-year-old pensioner in Spain in 2011 over a financial dispute.

Toledo brokered a real estate transaction between a seller and a buyer and demanded a commission of six thousand euros from each party, that is, twelve thousand euros. The seller and buyer came to give him only eighteen hundred euros.

Toledo was furious that he did not receive the amount he demanded. In 2006, Toledo stabbed the seller in the neck and ribs and served two and a half years in prison. In 2011, he shot and killed the buyer of the property who was sitting on a bench in the main square of the city of Torremolinos. There is no doubt today that Toledo, who has a rich criminal career, also murdered his wife Dolores about fifty years earlier.

Hoping there will be no more deaths at the Eiffel Tower

For thirty years, many and increasingly sophisticated efforts have been made to prevent suicides from the tower. Safety nets, fences that rise four meters high and two meters wide, railings, pointed, spike-like elements, security cameras that record illegal entries, frequent police patrols, all of which reduce the number of suicide attempts, which have dropped to one per year, according to a fire department spokesman.

It costs fifty thousand euros each time to intervene, rescue, evacuate. Save costs and most importantly, of course, save human lives. Let's hope that the suicide in 2012 will be the last. If only!

Note

French speakers are welcome to read An interesting passage from Roland Barthes, available online, on the tower. Also attached Link to his book Dedicated to the tower.