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- Emmanuel Grégoire au micro de Sud Radio
Photo extraite d’une captation vidéo - See the image in its page
In an excerpt widely shared on social networks, Emmanuel Grégoire is heard talking to Sud Radio about the Eiffel Tower and the request for the monument to be classified by Culture Minister Rachida Dati (speaking herself via Twitter). As usual, he’s talking nonsense, even if for once you’d think he wasn’t doing it knowingly. It’s more likely that he has no idea what he’s talking about, which is perhaps just as serious, given that he is the first deputy mayor of Paris, in charge of urban planning. That he should appear to be so ignorant of the heritage and environmental laws is inexcusable.
He begins with an error that is admittedly minor and commonly made, but which is an error nonetheless: "This monument has been " inscribed on the supplementary inventory of historic monuments since 1964". However, there has been no " supplementary inventory" since 2005. We’ve been talking about "inscription" as a historic monument for almost twenty years.
More seriously, he goes on to say - and we transcribe this in full before examining his statement point by point - that this monument is "on a classified site, which means that from a legal point of view it benefits from the highest level of heritage protection: it has the assent of the Architecte des Bâtiments de France, it is in the UNESCO protected sector, and of course it has everything that surrounds these heritage protections and the fact that each time we have recourse to an advisor".
The Eiffel Tower is indeed on a classified site. It doesn’t come under the heritage law, but under the environment law. So it’s not heritage protection in the sense of historic monuments, except on the margins. It is true that the Architectes des Bâtiments de France can be consulted for a building that is not protected, but is located on a inscribed or classified site. On an inscribed site, the ABF only gives its assent to demolition projects (see this page on the DRAC Val-de-Loire website). On claissified sites, all works "likely to modify the state of the site or its appearance" (see the same reference) are submitted to the Commission départementale des Sites, and then authorisation comes directly from the Minister for the Environment.
It is therefore completely false to claim that a classified site, which does not come under the Ministry of Culture, benefits from "the highest level of heritage protection". Inscription as a historic monument is a higher level of protection - as in the case of the Eiffel Tower - but it is still much lower than classification.
As for inclusion on the UNESCO World Heritage List, this does not provide any additional protection compared to French law. It only implies that the French State takes it into account to give the monument or site the protection it deserves. Apart from moral pressure, the only concrete action that UNESCO can take for an endangered site is to remove it from the list.
As for Emmanuel Grégoire’s reference to "an advisor", it should probably be understood as a reference to a chief architect of historic monuments, in this case Pierre-Antoine Gatier. It is true that inscription alone does not require the project manager to be qualified. The project manager can be an ordinary architect with no skills whatsoever in working on a historic monument. This is one of the many anomalies in the Heritage Law.
All this shows Emmanuel Grégoire’s astounding ignorance of the legislation governing historic monuments, an ignorance that is unfortunately widely shared. In particular, the simple difference between inscription and classification is often not understood, even by some senior officials at the Ministry of Culture, as we have already written about the Château de Grignon. We refer you to this article where we listed the main differences between classification and inscription as a historic monument.
It should be noted, because this concerns the Eiffel Tower, that the difference between classified and inscribed monuments in terms of "scientific and technical control" (point 5 of this article) is even more marked than we said. This is in fact much stronger for a classified monument than it is for a inscribed one. This is because "scientific and technical studies" may be imposed by the regional prefect, "according to the nature, scale and complexity of the work envisaged" and these must be "carried out prior to determining the programme of operations". There is no such requirement for inscribed monuments. On the other hand, if the monument is listed, the scientific control concerns the entire operation, from the start of the studies, and "throughout the works carried out until their completion". In the case of an inscribed monument, for which there may not have been any preliminary studies, the control is only carried out during the work itself - if at all, because the lack of resources at the DRACs often prevents serious monitoring of all worksites, and the first to be sacrificed are, of course, listed monuments.
For this reason alone, it is clear that the Eiffel Tower would benefit from being classified rather than simply inscribed.
Emmanuel Grégoire is nevertheless right on one point. He says of the minister: "the mayor’s office has to ask me. No, from a legal point of view, it can also ask, it has the right to do so". That’s true. In reality, anyone can request classification, including of course the Minister of Culture, who can even impose it if the monument is in danger.
In reality, it would be hard to understand why the city of Paris should refuse to classify the Eiffel Tower as a historic monument. According to the French Heritage Code, a monument is classified if its "conservation is of public interest from the point of view of history or art". Who would still doubt this for the Eiffel Tower?