Eiffel Tower reopens after staff walk out over women being hidden for a BAPS visit

The Eiffel Tower reopened on Tuesday after a one-day strike by staff who said female colleagues had been taken off their posts for a Saturday visit by a Hindu religious delegation. Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, the city-owned company that runs the monument, admitted it had accepted a request to limit "interactions with women" and said those conditions should not have been accepted. Paris City Hall apologised for a breach of the republican rule of equality and ordered a full inquiry. By 9:30 a.m. visitors were again going through the security gates at the base.

The delegation numbered about 100 and came from Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, known as BAPS. The group was in France to consecrate its first major temple in the country on Sunday. Staff union representative Diane Davoine told Reuters that as the visitors arrived, women were told to move. "During the visit of this delegation, women were asked to leave their places of work in order to place men there," she said. Management had since apologised to workers, she added, and that did not settle the insult.

A staff statement described the orders in sequence. Some women were told to leave their posts and wait in other rooms. In some posts they were replaced by men. All female employees, including contractor staff, were instructed not to walk through certain areas while the delegation was on site. The statement called the result sidelining, replacement and invisibility on the basis of sex. Tensions rose through the weekend. On Monday morning workers met, closed the tower, and demanded a rule that this would not happen again.

BAPS said on X that it apologised for any pain or inconvenience. "To the best of our knowledge, at no point was anyone prevented access to the Eiffel Tower," the organisation wrote. It said the visit had been set at the start of opening hours, with the tower team, so as not to block other visitors. That statement does not address the staff account of women being pulled off posts. SETE's own admission that it accepted a limit on interactions with women is the fact that City Hall now has to investigate.

The political layer is immediate in both capitals. BAPS is close to India's ruling Bharatiya Janata Party. Indian media treated the Paris row as a cultural misunderstanding. French politicians treated it as a public operator applying a religious dress code on a national monument. The tower is not a private hall. It is run by a company the city owns. Staff there are public-facing workers in a country that writes laïcité into the way the state receives guests.

SETE can write a protocol tomorrow that forbids any visitor, however large, from dictating the sex of the person at a ticket desk or a lift. That is the minimum the strike asked for. The inquiry will have to say who inside the company said yes on Saturday, whether the request arrived in writing, and whether similar conditions have been granted before. BAPS will open its temple. The tower will sell tickets. The usable residue is a sentence SETE has already spoken: those conditions should not have been accepted. The inquiry's job is to make that sentence a rule with a name attached to the next breach.