In “The Eiffel Tower” Roland Barthes draws into question the cultural and symbolic significance of the Eiffel Tower. Barthes notes that the tower has come to represent Paris itself as it has heavily engrained itself within pop culture and daily Parisian life. The Eiffel Tower, true to its nature, looms over the Paris skyline as its metal trusses solidify it as both a symbol of the past and the future, “The Tower is at once a symbol of Paris, of France, and of modernity itself”. The rawness of the tower serves as the perfect place to get a panoramic view of Paris, it is, of course, natural for us to want to see the “natural” landscape of the land. We see this here in New York City with the One World Trade Center Observatory and with the Empire State Building Observatory. While looking out of The Eiffel Tower people get an over-encompassing idealistic view of daily Parisian life as everything appears orderly and almost routine similar to ants in an ant hill performing their everyday tasks while they think no on was is watching, “The Tower seems to triumph over the disorder of the city, fixing it within a frame, organizing its elements into a coherent whole.”  

            I find it interesting how Barthes toys with the idea that we as a society flock to build these huge structures that give us some sort of an understanding of the world when the world isn’t thousands of feet up in the sky but, here on the ground level. Barthes does this by posing the idea that people are so excited to express the fact that they have been to Paris and been on the Eiffel tower but, what does that truly mean? Did you just stand there and take some pictures or videos of you looking out to Paris? How does going to Paris equate to looking at Paris from hundreds of feet in the air? Barthes expresses this idea by writing, “The Tower is both an object of fascination and a mirror reflecting the desires and anxieties of the society that produced it.” It is our constant struggle to understand the world around us that drives us to construct objects that provide us with some sort of dominion over a set area and therefore allow us to feel as though we have a sort of understanding of that set area. I believe Barthes’ commentary on The Eiffel Tower could be applied to many other facets of life as it allows for the critical analysis of our cultural symbols as being more than symbols as their importance seems to change as time passes.