In January 1887 seven thousand tons of iron and cast-iron began to be assembled on the Champ-de-Mars. Painted a reddish bronze, the Tower rose gradually, and soon came to dominate the Parisian skyline, provoking the admiration of some and the anger of others. J. K. Huysmans called it 'a solitary suppository, riddled with holes', Guy de Maupassant 'a disgraceful skeleton'. As for the poet Verlaine, he made detours around Paris to avoid seeing it.

Inaugaurated on 31 March 1889, the Tower rose to a height of 300 metres. The many pavilions making up the Exposition were laid out below. Everything was ready to receive massive crowds, which nonetheless exceeded all expectation: in six months 3,512,000 people ascended the 1,710 steps of the tower, and 33 million visited the Exposition.

In the aisles filled with rickshaws and Arab donkey-drivers, a visitor might come across the Prince of Wales, Savorgnan de Brazza, various crowned heads or perhaps Buffalo Bill or Sarah Bernhardt. English, German Spanish and Russian could be heard. As for the French visitors, they might just as easily have a southern or a Burgundian accent as a Parisian one. There were fewer workers than petit-bourgois, because the price of entry, at five francs (equivalent to one hundred sous) including access to the first floor of the Tower was expensive for those who earned on average 4.80 francs a day.

The Exposition Pavilions were wide-ranging in their themes, but with a definite emphasis on all things French and modern innovation in general.

The immense Machinery Hall, in the shadow of the Tower, contained a major exhibit of French iron, a symbol of burgeoning capitalism: industrialists and men of influence had sealed their alliance in the blast furnaces and in the banks. Indeed, the Universal Exposition itself would prove to be an excellent investment for the capital city and for the country as a whole.

On show at the Exposition were also all the inventions of fin-desiècle France, a period which saw the appearance of the first submarine, the airship of the Renard brothers, the bicycle, and the four-stroke internal combustion engine. Though not yet widespread in Paris, the wonder of electricity was much in evidence on the Champ-de-Mars and, at night, the Eiffel Tower was ablaze, surmounted by a tri-coloured searchlight, lighting up the hills of Chaillot. Foreign inventions were also very much in evidence: in the Palace of Liberal Arts, the latest photography and cameras were on display, including George Eastman's Kodak box camera; in the Machinery Hall Marinoni's rotary printing-press heralded the enormous circulation that was soon to be enjoyed by newspapers, whilst the Edison exhibit allowed people to discover his many devices, from the gramophone to the kinetoscope. As for the telephone, invented in 1876 by Alexander Graham Bell, its usage was becoming more common: the first public telephone boxes appearing in Paris in 1885.

The fine arts were also well represented with their own pavilion, reflecting the continuing strength of classicism despite the challenge of the synthetist realist painters. These painters, led by Gauguin, staged an alternative exhibition of their works in the Café Volpini. Although some artists were concerned about the advance of photography, others saw it not as a threat, but as a complementary art form allowing reality to be captured in a new way. Others still, began to turn their back on realism and to embark in artistic directions that would radically change the history of painting, a departure already noticeable in the work of the impressionists in the 1850's. The same trends affected music and literature with naturalism and symbolism having their passionate followers.

The Exposition was also an opportunity to introduce the French to their colonies. Tunisia had been a French protectorate since 1881, Annam since 1883, and Cambodia since 1884. Bamako was occupied in 1882. People were talking about Madagascar and the Congo. They were closely following the digging of the Panama Canal and taking a great interest in China.

Curious spectators crammed into the Esplanade des Invalides to admire the full-sized reconstruction of one of the temples of Angkor. Enthralled by the Javanese dancers, the crowds passed effortlessly from New Caledonia to Cochin China and crossed the Senegalese village to relax in the Algerian café. Millions of people who had never left France, or sometimes even Paris, discovered whole new worlds. Italy, Spain, Hungary, Russia, the two Americas, Japan . . . the entire globe awaited them on the Champ-de-Mars, accessed by the little Decauville railway line.

The Paris of 1889 was made up of a series of villages, some were poorer districts, others were reserved for the more fortunate, and, following the work of Haussman, was already very much as we know it today. In that year, heralding the beginnings of the souvenir industry, one particular location began to be represented in miniature. These tiny models, made from fragments of the iron used to build the Tower itself, were soon on sale in shops all over the world. The Eiffel Tower had become the undisputed symbol of Paris in 1889 and of France itself, a role it continues to fulfil with ease to the present day.