Five years from now, there are going to be two types of retirees in America

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Five years from now, there are going to be two types of retirees in America.

One is greeting strangers at Walmart in a blue vest. Not because they want to. Because the war in Iran was the first domino that knocked their retirement sideways and they never saw it coming.

The other is sitting on a beach with a margarita. Not because they got lucky. Because they understood what the Iran war was really about and made one simple move.

Here's what most people are missing.

The war in Iran isn't about nukes. It's about oil being sold in yuan instead of dollars.

Every barrel that leaves the dollar system makes your savings worth less. And 40 countries are following Iran's lead.

The retiree at Walmart kept everything in the same 401(k) their advisor set up ten years ago. They watched the dollar weaken. They watched inflation eat their savings. They hoped somebody in Washington would fix it. Nobody did.

The retiree on the beach moved a portion of their retirement into the one asset that goes up when the dollar goes down. Took 15 minutes. No taxes. No penalties. And they slept fine while everyone else panicked.

Same starting point. Same savings. One decision made the difference.

A free report called "The Great Gold Reset" shows you exactly what the Iran war means for your dollars, why it's accelerating a shift that was already underway, and the simple move that separates the Walmart greeters from the beach retirees.

Download Your Free Report Here

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Good morning.

Today, a building nearly three hundred of France’s most famous artists demanded be torn down… before it was even finished.

Let’s begin.

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The Building Paris Tried to Cancel Before It Opened

Gustave Eiffel—the Eiffel Tower

P	aris. 14 February, 1887. A letter appeared on the front page of the newspaper Le Temps, three weeks into construction. Nearly three hundred of France’s most respected artists and writers had signed it, demanding the whole project stop.

Gustave Eiffel (1832–1923) was a French civil engineer, already well known for railway bridges and, less obviously, for designing the interior iron skeleton that holds up the Statue of Liberty. He had proposed a thousand-foot iron tower as the centerpiece for the 1889 World’s Fair, marking the centennial of the French Revolution.

The protest letter called it “this truly tragic street lamp” and “a gigantic black smokestack.” Signatories included the novelist Guy de Maupassant, the composer Charles Gounod, and Charles Garnier, the architect who had designed the Paris Opera. They warned it would dishonor the entire city.

This is the tower they were trying to stop, photographed not long after the Fair opened.

The Eiffel Tower during the 1889 Exposition Universelle, Paris.

Construction finished on 31 March 1889, using roughly 18,000 individual iron pieces and 2.5 million rivets. The elevators weren’t yet working when the Fair opened, so the first visitors, including Thomas Edison, climbed the stairs by hand. Nearly two million people ascended the tower over the six-month Fair.

Guy de Maupassant, one of the loudest original critics, reportedly ate lunch in the tower’s restaurant on a regular basis afterward. Asked why, he said it was the only place in Paris where he didn’t have to look at the thing.

I always assumed the tower had simply always been beloved. Reading the actual 1887 letter changed that fast: some of the exact insults now used affectionately, like “the iron giant,” started out as genuine contempt.

Eiffel’s permit ran for only twenty years. The tower was legally supposed to come down in 1909. He saved it by offering the French military free use of its height for one of the earliest wireless radio antennas, a scientific use no city council wanted to lose right as the technology was becoming strategically important.

Eiffel himself had a rockier decade than the tower did. While it was still under construction, he had also signed on to build locks for the Panama Canal. When that project collapsed into scandal, he was charged with fraud and briefly sentenced to prison, later cleared on appeal. He spent his remaining years working on aerodynamics instead… using the tower itself as a wind-testing platform.

Three hundred signatures demanding its destruction in 1887… a permit that legally expired in 1909. It is still standing, purely on account of a radio antenna nobody else wanted to give up.

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Three Things Worth Knowing

I	Art Delaunay’s Obsession

The French painter Robert Delaunay (1885–1941) painted the tower more than thirty times between 1909 and 1928, fracturing it into overlapping Cubist planes of orange and blue. Where the 1887 protesters saw an industrial eyesore, Delaunay saw the perfect subject for painting modern life itself, speed, steel, and a skyline that hadn’t existed a generation earlier.

II	Le Mot Juste Belle Époque

French for “beautiful era,” this phrase describes the decades between roughly 1871 and the outbreak of the First World War in 1914, remembered afterward as a golden stretch of peace, optimism, and rapid technical progress in Western Europe. Nobody living through it called it that at the time. The name only appeared retroactively, once people on the other side of the war had something to compare it against.

III	Philosophy Form Follows Function

In 1896, the American architect Louis Sullivan (1856–1924) argued that a building’s shape should grow directly out of its practical purpose, rather than being dressed up afterward in borrowed historical ornament. Eiffel, an engineer rather than a trained architect, built almost exactly to that principle a decade earlier, without ever framing it as a philosophy. The protesting artists wanted ornament. He gave them structural math, left fully exposed.

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Connoisseur’s Diary

Worth Seeing This Week

The tower is open to visitors every day of the year, with three publicly accessible levels, including the summit near 300 meters up.

Where: Champ de Mars, 5 Avenue Anatole France, 75007 Paris. Tickets: prices vary by level and whether you take the stairs or lift; check the official site for current rates, since they change with the season. Insider tip: booking a specific time slot online in advance avoids the walk-up line entirely, which can run several hours in peak season. Book at toureiffel.paris →

Worth Reading

Eiffel’s Tower — Jill Jonnes (2009). A lively account of the tower and the 1889 World’s Fair around it, populated by Buffalo Bill, Thomas Edison, and a young Van Gogh.

Eiffel: The Genius Who Reinvented Himself — David I. Harvie (2004). A full biography, including the Panama Canal scandal and his later career studying aerodynamics.

The Statue of Liberty: A Transatlantic Story — Edward Berenson (2012). The story of Eiffel’s other famous iron skeleton, built a few years before the tower that made him a household name.

Test Your Knowledge

1How did Eiffel save the tower from its scheduled 1909 demolition?

He offered its height for free to the military as a radio antenna

He personally bought the land beneath it

He won a public referendum among Paris residents

Answer: He offered it free for use as a radio antenna. The strategic value of early wireless transmission made the tower too useful to tear down on schedule.

2What does “Belle Époque” actually describe?

A retroactive name for decades of peace and progress before 1914

The official name of the 1889 World’s Fair itself

A specific architectural style used for iron structures

Answer: A retroactive name for the era of peace before 1914. Nobody living through it used the term; it only appeared once people had a war to compare it against.

3What did Louis Sullivan mean by “form follows function”?

A building’s shape should grow from its practical purpose

Ornament should always come before structural planning

All buildings should imitate historical European styles

Answer: A building’s shape should grow from its purpose. Eiffel built to that exact principle nearly a decade before Sullivan ever named it.

If the links above don’t respond in your email app, just reply with your answers—I’ll write back.

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That’s all for today.

Tomorrow, we trade the tower for the page, and a writer who asked his best friend to burn everything he’d ever written.

In good taste,

Charles T. Mayfair

Editor, Connoisseur Daily

P.S. The stairs to the second floor are almost always cheaper than the lift… 674 steps, but a genuinely good way to see the ironwork up close instead of through glass.