Eiffel Tower shuts for a day after staff say women were moved for a BAPS visit

The Eiffel Tower stayed closed all day on Monday after staff walked out over the way female colleagues were treated during a private visit on Saturday by a delegation of the Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha. Diane Davoine, a union representative, told Reuters that women were asked to leave their posts so that men could stand there while the group passed. A staff statement condemned "professional instructions that led to female employees being sidelined, replaced and made invisible because of their sex."

Société d'Exploitation de la Tour Eiffel, the company that runs the monument, confirmed that the delegation had asked for a visit organised to limit "interactions with women." SETE said those conditions should not have been accepted. Ariel Weil, the SETE president and a socialist official in the city, told AFP the company would establish what happened and draw conclusions. Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire wrote on X that it was unacceptable for management to have agreed.

About 100 people linked to BAPS came to the tower on Saturday, the same day as a ceremonial boat procession the movement organised on the Seine. BAPS, headquartered in Ahmedabad, consecrated its first large temple in France on Sunday, near Paris. The group describes itself as a volunteer fellowship. Davoine said management has since apologised to the workers and that the apology did not settle the room. Staff met on Monday morning first to talk to management and second to set a rule that women would not be treated that way again. A representative said the tower would open as normal on Tuesday.

The monument takes nearly seven million visitors a year. A full-day closure in early September is a visible strike, which is the point. France's public services have a long habit of using the tower as a billboard for a workplace grievance. This grievance is specific. A private religious party asked for a female-free path through a state monument. The operator said yes. The women who sell tickets and run lifts were told to step away from their own floor.

BAPS has built temples in London, Toronto, Abu Dhabi and New Jersey and keeps close public ties with India's ruling party. The Paris consecration was a prestige event. The request to limit contact with women is consistent with practice inside some Swaminarayan institutions. It is not consistent with French labour law or with the way SETE usually staffs a Saturday. That clash, once it was on the record, left Weil and Grégoire with nothing to defend except an admission.

The staff are back on Tuesday. The temple in the suburbs is open. The unanswered piece is the internal file at SETE: who took the call, who wrote the instruction, and whether that person still has the authority to redesign a shift so that half the workforce disappears for a guest.