Since construction began on the famous tower in 1887, 370 people have died there. Accidents, stunts that ended in tragedy, and above all, suicides. Astonishingly, the count also includes two murders connected to the Eiffel Tower, one of which took place inside it.
Alongside the common question “should I go up or not?” that Paris tourists ask themselves and each other, there is another, very different question that is asked by people who feel like tourists in their own lives, people thrown into their circumstances against their will, set on a path they never chose: “to be or not to be?”
Several hundred of them answered that question with a no, and chose to carry out an act with no way back. They chose the Eiffel Tower, a grandiose backdrop, as the last witness to their passing, perhaps to give their death a meaning they never found in life. To become part of the history of this famous landmark, to enter it with one final, violent blow. This article sheds light on the dark fate of some of the unfortunate people who did just that.
The article will also tell you about stunts that ended in death. The Eiffel Tower, itself an architectural and aesthetic achievement, a challenge in its own time that defied conventional wisdom, a human victory over matter, nature, time, and space, has drawn (and still draws) pilots, athletes, and inventors who wanted, and still want, to break records, fulfill dreams, and merge with the structure and its spirit.
And there were also “simple” accidents, the most famous of which took the life of an enthusiastic and curious Italian worker who took part in building the tower from start to finish.
The First Suicide: A Young Parisian Mechanic, 1891
The first among the suicides was a young Parisian mechanic who hanged himself inside the northern leg of the “Iron Lady” (the Eiffel Tower’s nickname) on August 23, 1891. At seven in the morning, his naked body was found hanging from one of the metal beams, at a height of twenty meters. Around the body, three candles burned, arranged in a triangle.
His clothes hung nearby, and in his coat pocket was his will, which stated that he was leaving all his possessions, namely his clothes, to Gustave Eiffel (1832-1923). He left his head to his commanding officer in the army, and his body to the Paris school of medicine.
What did this strange ritual that the original mechanic arranged for himself mean? His body was found at the center of a triangle formed by three candles. Three was also the number that ruled his will, in which he divided himself into three parts and named a different heir for each.
Why did the young man choose to hang himself? Was the hanging connected to erotic asphyxiation? What was the meaning of this mysterious ritual? If the “Iron Lady”, draped in her lace skirt, within whose frame the event took place, could testify, perhaps she would answer these questions.
The Parisian mechanic was the first to die by suicide, but not the first to die. That sad distinction belongs to an Italian worker who took part, with pride and passion, in assembling the tower. Let’s salute Angelo Scagliotti, that was his name, whom I came to appreciate and grow fond of through the website created by his great-great-grandchildren, in order to uncover the truth about the man and set the record straight.
Scagliotti was forgotten, or wrapped in legends. Plenty of falsehoods circulate online about the circumstances of his death. It’s time to bring this worker, who loved his life so much, out of the oblivion into which Gustave Eiffel had pushed him, so that his death would not overshadow the glittering project that became the most distinctive symbol of the City of Light. Gustave Eiffel had every reason in the world to cover up the drama, which would have damaged the tower’s image and his own good name as its creator.
The First to Die: A Curious Italian Worker, 1889
Angelo Scagliotti (1849-1889) was one of two hundred and fifty workers who assembled the tower with rivets, and the only one of them to die on the job.
Angelo Scagliotti was born in 1849 into a farming family in Bressana, in the district of Pavia. Unlike his parents, though, he was drawn to mechanics, and especially to building bridges. After taking part in building the Garabit Viaduct (Le viaduc de Garabit), he returned to Italy and met, in his hometown, the woman who would become his wife, Amalia Novrini.
The couple had two sons, Pierino in 1885 and Mauro in 1887. When he heard about the Eiffel Tower project, Angelo Scagliotti decided to move to France with his entire family. How much he wanted to meet again with the colleagues he had worked with riveting the Garabit Viaduct!
He had no trouble getting hired for the ambitious project and took part in it from start to finish, earning the silver medal awarded to all the workers who stayed on through the whole job. In 1889 his daughter Ernesta was born. Angelo and Amalia decided to stay in France, and they adapted their own names and their children’s names as a sign of settling into their new homeland: Angelo became Ange, Amalia became Mélie, Pierino became Pierre, Mauro became Émile, and Ernesta became Ernestine.
Angelo earned good money at his rewarding job, and the family was happy in their home, not far from the tower, where the father used to ride his bicycle, until the bitter and hasty day arrived. On May 24, 1889, at ten in the morning on a sun drenched Friday, Angelo was watching the installation of the first elevator. Disaster struck: Ange had apparently gotten too close. His curiosity, his thirst for knowledge, proved to be his undoing. The elevator car struck his head and crushed it beyond saving. Two colleagues who were there with him had to confirm his death.
This was not a workplace accident in the usual sense. Angelo’s fate certainly touched Gustave Eiffel’s heart, but on the other hand, Eiffel undoubtedly wanted to prevent the story from spreading, since it would have cast a shadow over the tower’s inauguration. He offered the widow, left with three small children, a sum of money, on the condition that she return to Italy and not sue him. Five hundred francs up front to cover the cost of the return, plus another four thousand francs deposited in an Italian bank once she proved she had resettled in her home country.
Amalia Novrini agreed to the arrangement and went back to live with her mother in her native country. She raised the children alone and faced another loss when her eldest son died during the sixth wave of a cholera epidemic.
After her mother died, she returned to France with her two remaining children, settling in Vaulx-en-Velin near her aunt, among a tight-knit community of Italian immigrants. In 1908 all three received French citizenship. Amalia, a seamstress by trade, died in 1952 at a ripe old age, having lived to see her grandchildren and great-grandchildren. They all still live in France. A full and successful integration, despite the drama.
Angelo’s four great-great-grandchildren, Françoise, Alain, Jean-Claude, and Jean-Pierre, created the moving website in memory of their great-great-grandfather on their mother’s side, and you are invited 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 tailor shop in the Opéra district, but his dream was to develop a parachute suit that would protect pilots and let them survive crashes. Aviation was still in its infancy, and in 1911, a year before Reichelt’s jump, pilots were dying at a rate of one a week. A prize of ten thousand francs was offered by Colonel Lalance for anyone who could invent a parachute suited to pilots.
The Austrian, who had emigrated to France and done well for himself, was looking for a way to thank his adopted country and win its recognition. Saving pilots, what a noble goal! A jump from the tower would make him famous, and no one would be able to steal credit for his invention!
The tailor’s clients, mostly Austrian women touring Paris, loved hearing, during their long fitting sessions, his stories about the miracle suit that would let even the most timid of souls take up the sport of jumping without any fear.
Reichelt designed a genuine flight suit, fitted with wings, inspired by the physiology of bats. The suit was meant to turn into a parachute the moment of an accident. For nearly two years already, the tailor had been drawing, cutting, and sewing.
He had tested the finished product, without much success, on dummies and on himself, but he blamed the failures on insufficient height, and so he went to the trouble of getting a permit to jump from the first level of the Eiffel Tower, which rises to fifty-six meters. What’s more, the tower, a symbol of the Republic (built to mark the centennial of the French Revolution) and the voice of the army (it had been broadcasting and receiving radio waves connecting soldiers to headquarters since 1908), had become a focal point for aviation stunts: hot air balloons and the earliest airplanes circled around it to pay it tribute.
On Sunday, February 4, 1912, Reichelt arrived at the tower in his car with two friends. About thirty onlookers, aviation enthusiasts, journalists, and photographers were present. Reichelt’s friends tried to talk him out of jumping, but he refused to budge. Was he really that confident in his invention? The day before, he had drawn up his will at a notary’s office. Was it suicide? Madness? Obsession?
The police chief later claimed that Reichelt had lied, saying he intended to drop a dummy. Had he told the truth, that he planned to jump himself, he would never have gotten the permit. But Reichelt showed up already wearing the parachute suit, with no dummy in sight, and no officer stopped him.
In temperatures below freezing and with a strong wind blowing, Reichelt hesitated for forty seconds, but in the end he jumped to his death, the parachute suit folding around his body like a shroud.
Some say the doctor who examined the body afterward determined that Reichelt died of a heart attack before he ever hit the frozen ground, but this claim is not well established. It seems more likely that Reichelt died when his skull was crushed on impact. The dreamer was thirty three years old when he died. Footage of his jump, one of the first newsreels by the film company Pathé to document a real-life news event, still sends a chill down the spine.
François Reichelt continues to spark curiosity. Historian David Driolla published a fascinating investigation into the flying tailor in a book that came out nearly a hundred years after the inventor’s death, a dream he never saw fulfilled.
The Daring Pilot, 1926
The pilot, Léon Collot, a reserve lieutenant born in Besançon, made a bet with an American friend that he would fly straight through the legs of the Eiffel Tower, in a plane, of course. A daring challenge that Léon Collot rose to.
Legend has it that Léon Collot met an American acquaintance at the theater, who expressed his surprise that no Frenchman had yet tried to fly between the Eiffel Tower’s legs. If the tower were in the United States, the American added in a burst of patriotic feeling, I have no doubt it would have already been done long ago. Léon Collot took this as an insult to his country’s honor and to its phallic tower, and immediately decided to take up the challenge.
Flying between the legs of the Eiffel Tower, an AI-generated image, credit Zvi Chazanov via Midjourney
On February 24, 1926, Léon Collot took off at eight in the morning from Orly Airport in his Breguet 19 plane, heading for the Eiffel Tower. The fog that morning made him hesitate, but at ten past nine, as the sun broke through, he began his descent and successfully passed under the western and northern legs of the Iron Lady.
The disaster came right after. As he tried to level off his plane, he was blinded by the sunlight and struck a wireless telegraph antenna. The plane burst into flames, and its pilot perished in the fire before the helpless eyes of his brother and a handful of journalists. Léon Collot was thirty-two years old when he died.
The Parachutist Who Defied the Law, 1928
In 1912 the authorities passed a law banning the use of the Eiffel Tower as a platform for parachute jumps, after too many accidents. But some people see a law not as something to follow, but as something to break, and Marcel Gayet was one of them.
Marcel Gayet was no novice; he had made numerous jumps from airplanes already. And so, on March 20, 1928, he invited photographers to watch another jump, this time from the Eiffel Tower.
An improperly folded parachute proved fatal. The thirty-five year old jeweler plunged to his death from the tower’s first level after his parachute failed to open.
The Unlucky Norwegian Parachutist, 2005
On May 16, 2005, a young Norwegian man, Aksel, 31, arrived at the Eiffel Tower intending to parachute off it to celebrate his country’s national holiday, which fell the next day, and to film the stunt for use as an advertisement for a fashion brand called “Impact” that he had founded with friends. He arrived at the tower along with Elle, his girlfriend, and two others. One of them, Joe, was also supposed to jump, but when he realized his parachute wasn’t fit for use, he abandoned the idea and climbed back down.
The Norwegian hid his parachute under his clothes and his video camera in his helmet. He climbed to the third level but found it fenced off, so he went down to the second level, at a height of one hundred and fifteen meters, climbed over the railing, and jumped. The parachute did open, but the parachutist landed on the iron beams of the first level and died on the spot, around ten at night. The video camera perished along with its owner.
His friends watched him from below and witnessed his death. Joe expressed his grief but declared he would keep practicing the dangerous sport of base jumping, that is, jumping from a fixed structure (a building, an antenna, a bridge, a cliff) rather than from an airplane.
Neurasthenia, 1960-1961
On May 14, 1961, around seven in the evening, a man of about forty jumped from the tower’s second level. Police who examined the deceased’s body found identifying documents bearing his name and address: Albert Dufourmentelle, 26 rue de Châteaudun, in the 9th arrondissement.
When they reached the suicide victim’s home, they were stunned to find a second body, that of his wife, Léonie Dufourmentelle. There was no doubt about the killer’s identity: before taking his own life, Albert Dufourmentelle had murdered his wife. He had not worked for more than a year, suffering from neurasthenia, and his wife had been supporting the household. Why did he kill her? Albert Dufourmentelle took that secret to his grave.
A year earlier, a twenty-four year old stenographer who also suffered from neurasthenia had jumped from the tower. Just a few days after her jump, she was supposed to meet her future fiancé’s family. A tragic way to call off a wedding.
The chain of neurasthenia sufferers who jumped from the tower did not end there. Thirty-five years earlier, a Russian immigrant, a servant to a wealthy man, whose homeland’s troubles had driven him to neurasthenia, had jumped to his death. The Russian took his life just a few days after the accident that killed the pilot Léon Collot, who had made his flight, as we saw, out of patriotism.
A Tourist’s Suicide at the Eiffel Tower, 2012
The fencing and railings discourage jumpers, but here and there, “successes” are still recorded. In 2009, a twenty-year-old woman jumped to her death from the second level. She landed on the terrace of the restaurant on the first level while many diners calmly kept eating, unaware of what had happened.
The most recent suicide was that of an Israeli man. Since he did not speak French, it’s assumed he was a tourist, which is why this type of case is sometimes called a “tourist suicide.” On June 24, 2012, close to midnight, tourists spotted a man wearing a backpack climbing up the outside of the tower, and called the authorities. Twenty-four firefighters quickly arrived and tried to talk the young man, who was hanging onto the tower as he climbed toward the third level, into coming down.
The twenty-five year old did not respond to the attempts by the doctor and the rescue team, who spoke with him for about two hours. “We did everything we could,” said a spokesman for the fire department. “I have nothing more to say,” the young man said, let go of his grip, and fell 125 meters to the second level, arms spread out, striking the structure and dying instantly.
The French call a jump with arms spread out a “saut de l’ange”, an angel’s jump, because of the resemblance to wings. And so the young man’s soul flew off toward the heavens and joined that of the Italian worker Angelo, for those who believe in the afterlife.
The soul is one thing, the body another. The body of the man who had taken his own life was taken to the forensic institute. Israel’s ambassador in Paris was notified of the incident in order to help locate the young man’s family, since he had not known French and spoke only English. The relevant authorities refused to release further details about the identity of the man, who remained unnamed to the public.
The day after this drama, firefighters were called out again when a twenty-five year old woman threatened to jump from the tower’s first level. The woman, of Indian descent, under the influence of alcohol and medication, had climbed barefoot and without any equipment onto the tower’s western leg.
This time, the same firefighters, dressed in red, from the special unit for high-risk rescue and recovery, managed to convince her to be evacuated by helicopter, after a dramatic hour during which she hung fifty-five meters above the void. It’s worth noting that there is always a risk that a suicidal person will pull their rescuer down with them the moment they are grabbed, and members of the unit risk their lives with every single action. It was decided to evacuate the woman, who seemed determined to end her life, by helicopter, in order to prevent her from causing a rescuer to fall along with her.
The rescue was extremely risky, in part because a strong wind was blowing, and a worker at a nearby construction site, who watched the scene unfold, feared the helicopter would strike the tower. The young woman was taken to the Georges-Pompidou European Hospital for treatment and psychiatric evaluation.
The Tower’s Only Murder: A Spanish Criminal Who Threw His Wife to Her Death, 1963
Let’s go back in time to an extraordinary criminal case that left investigators with doubts for a long time before the truth finally came out. This was a femicide, the murder of a woman by her partner. The killer tried to disguise it, presenting it first as a suicide and later as an accident. It remains the only murder ever committed on the Eiffel Tower.
On February 9, 1963, a Spanish immigrant couple, Francisco Toledo Pernia, thirty-one years old and a factory worker on the outskirts of Paris, and his wife Dolores, twenty-eight, were preparing to go up to the second floor of the Eiffel Tower but stopped on the first floor, supposedly to talk. Dolores fell and was killed instantly.
Police arrested the husband on suspicion of murder. In the first version he gave investigators, he claimed he had watched, helpless, as his wife took her own life.
The woman thrown to her death by her murderous husband, an AI-generated image, credit Zvi Chazanov via Midjourney
In a second version, after pressure from investigators and incriminating testimony from a young couple who had seen him push his wife toward the edge, he said he had indeed lifted her onto the railing, but only to scare her after she had confessed to cheating on him. It was she, he said, who chose to take her own life out of guilt over the affair.
In a third version, after fifteen hours of interrogation, he claimed he had held her over the railing to make her admit to the affair, and that she then slipped from his hands and fell. Just an accident, he insisted. He was innocent.
The trial opened two years later. Testimony from the woman’s family revealed that Dolores had been a thin, shy, withdrawn woman who didn’t speak a word of French, never integrated into French society, and so it wasn’t unreasonable to assume she had taken her own life.
But contradictions emerged in the testimony of a couple who had witnessed the dramatic scene. They were the Karchers, a couple from Strasbourg honeymooning in Paris, who had been descending from the second floor to the first floor of the tower. Monsieur Karcher testified that he saw a man push a figure in front of him into the void. Madame Karcher, however, said she saw a figure lift something off the ground that looked like a pile of clothes and throw it over the railing. She only realized it was a woman when she saw a pair of legs emerge from the pile and heard a sharp scream. Monsieur Karcher heard nothing, even though he was standing right next to his wife, and the whole scene happened in a flash.
During the trial, Francisco Toledo cried, shouted, beat his chest with his fists, raised his hands in the air, and swore he had loved his wife and had no reason to kill her. On the contrary, he said, she had been the person most precious to him in his entire life.
At the end of this performance, the defendant was sentenced to five years in prison for manslaughter without premeditation. But today, no one is so sure that Francisco Toledo was innocent. Quite the opposite. The man, born in 1932, turned out to be a hardened criminal involved in numerous crimes, including the murder of a seventy-nine-year-old pensioner in Spain in 2011 over a financial dispute.
Toledo had brokered a real estate deal between a seller and a buyer and demanded a commission of six thousand euros from each side, twelve thousand euros in total. The seller and buyer offered him only one thousand eight hundred euros.
Toledo was furious that he didn’t get the amount he demanded. In 2006, he 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, who was sitting on a bench in the main square of the town of Torremolinos. There is no longer any doubt that Toledo, a man with a long and bloody criminal career, also murdered his wife Dolores some fifty years earlier.
Hoping for No More Deaths at the Eiffel Tower
For thirty years now, increasingly sophisticated efforts have been made to prevent suicides from the tower. Safety nets, fences four meters high and two meters wide, railings, pointed spike-like elements, security cameras monitoring unauthorized entry, and frequent police patrols have all helped bring down the number of suicide attempts, which has dropped to about one a year, according to a fire department spokesperson.
Each intervention, rescue and evacuation costs fifty thousand euros. The goal, of course, is to save costs, but above all, to save lives. Let’s hope the suicide in 2012 remains the last one. May it be so.
If reading this touched something personal, please reach out to a local crisis line or to someone you trust. You do not have to carry it alone.
A Note
French speakers are welcome to read an interesting piece by Roland Barthes, available online, about the tower. Also included is a link to his book devoted to the tower.
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