Eiffel Tower Managers Hid Women for a Guru’s Visit

SETE managers moved female Eiffel Tower staff out of sight on 5 September after a BAPS delegation asked to limit a guru’s contact with women. The tower then stayed shut all day on Monday, 7 September, while workers met management and voted to walk out.

The company that runs the landmark now says those conditions should never have been accepted. Its president says he was not told, and that overzealous operations managers applied a religious courtesy as if it were a staffing order.

Female Staff Were Sent Off the Floor

About 100 people linked to Bochasanwasi Akshar Purushottam Swaminarayan Sanstha, known as BAPS, arrived on Saturday, 5 September, for a protocol visit on the second floor. SETE later said the group had asked in advance that the visit of its spiritual representative be arranged so as to limit his interactions with women.

What the women who work there say happened next is more specific than a quiet detour around a monk. A staff letter obtained by France Télévisions said female employees of the tower, including women employed by contractors, were told to make themselves invisible in order to welcome the delegation. Some were asked to leave their posts and withdraw to other rooms. At some posts they were replaced by men. All female staff were told not to pass through or cross certain zones while the group was present.

During the visit of this delegation, women were asked to leave their places of work in order to place men there.

Diane Davoine, union representative, to reporters

Davoine said the women were humiliated by how some of them were treated, and that tension rose through the weekend. The evening team that had been on duty on Saturday later sat in a second staff meeting that the CGT described as dealing with sexist treatment. Management apologised to staff after the fact. Workers still wanted a guarantee that women would not be handled this way again.

Overzealous Managers at a City-Owned Firm

The request and the roster are not the same act. BAPS asked for limited contact between its spiritual leader and women. SETE, a local public company whose site says it is 99% owned by the City of Paris and 1% by the Métropole du Grand Paris, chose how to honour that ask inside a workplace covered by French equality law.

Ariel Weil, SETE’s president and the socialist mayor of Paris Centre, told Franceinfo on Tuesday morning that he had not personally accepted the demand. He said he had not been aware of it, and that everything indicated the director general had not been aware of the dignitary’s visit either. SETE’s own site names Patrick Branco Ruivo as the manager of the company.

It is clearly not an acceptable practice.

Ariel Weil, SETE president, to AFP

Weil said the delegation’s requests were passed inside the operating company, and that “somewhat overzealous” operations managers then applied them “without the judgment” that the arrangement was obviously unfit. Protocol visits, he said, are routine at the tower and have never meant a different welcome for staff by sex. He called what was reported totally unacceptable, including for cultural reasons, and said an internal inquiry should report in the coming days.

WHO ASKED AND WHO ACTED

SETE’s communiqué, sent to France Télévisions, used the same core admission in plainer words: these conditions should not have been accepted, they did not match the company’s values or equality between men and women, and the firm would take the consequences. Ticket holders for the closed Monday are to be refunded.

Why BAPS Sadhus Avoid Contact With Women

The ask did not come from nowhere. BAPS sadhus, the movement’s monks, live under nishkam, a celibacy rule the organisation itself describes as eight-fold celibacy for sadhus. A BAPS teaching essay on the vow of brahmacharya says a Swaminarayan sadhu could never talk, touch or associate with women.

The same essay records Pramukh Swami Maharaj, the previous guru, telling a former Indian finance minister that sadhus would not sit, talk and walk with women even if others wanted the rule relaxed. BAPS presents the discipline as a personal spiritual guard, not a verdict on women’s worth. That distinction is easier to keep inside a temple than on a public monument with a mixed workforce.

Mahant Swami Maharaj, 93, the current BAPS spiritual leader, was in France to consecrate the new Paris-area temple. He was born Vinu Patel in 1933, ordained as a sadhu in 1961, and became head of the movement in 2016. BAPS’s Paris account posted him at the Eiffel Tower on 5 September, “blessing Paris during the Nagar Yatra.”

https://x.com/BAPSParis/status/2096203883320164577

A volunteer speaking during the temple rites put the monastic rule in one line: the saints have rules to respect, so in ceremonies women stand on one side and men on the other, and that, he said, has nothing to do with inequality. SETE still had to decide whether a monk’s rule could rewrite who stands at a ticket post.

The Temple Opening Spoke of Fraternity

The tower visit sat inside a 13-day Festival of Culture, running from 2 to 14 September, for the opening of BAPS’s first traditional Hindu temple in France. The stone mandir stands in Bussy-Saint-Georges, in Seine-et-Marne, about 30 km east of Paris, on the Esplanade des Religions et des Cultures. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi hailed the opening on social media.

On Sunday, 6 September, Mahant Swami Maharaj performed the consecration in a closed morning rite. Press were kept out. Followers said he was surrounded only by monks and men. About 7,000 men, women and children watched on giant screens in a tent nearby. After the rite, men and women mixed inside the mandir. Jenish Parekh, a BAPS volunteer handling press, said the sexes are separated during ceremonies and together in the temple.

THE WEEKEND AROUND THE VISIT

1. 3 September 2026: BAPS monks are photographed at the Eiffel Tower during festival events, two days before the protocol visit.
2. 5 September 2026: About 100 people visit the second floor. Female staff and contractors are pulled off posts. BAPS posts the guru at the tower during the Nagar Yatra.
3. 6 September 2026: The guru consecrates the Bussy-Saint-Georges temple in a men-only inner rite, with about 7,000 people watching outside.
4. 7 September 2026: Staff meet, vote to strike, and keep the tower closed all day. BAPS posts an apology that evening. Paris’s mayor says a probe will start as soon as possible.
5. 8 September 2026: The tower reopens. Weil, on Franceinfo, blames overzealous managers and says he was not told.

The public script that weekend was harmony: a stone temple billed as an emblem of Indian culture, a river parade, floats through Paris, and a guru blessing the city’s most famous tower. The staffing order on Saturday cut against that script in the one place French law does not treat as a private shrine.

Monday’s Strike Closed the Tower All Day

Workers met management on the morning of Monday, 7 September, then voted to strike. Signs at the base said the opening was delayed for operational reasons. The doors stayed shut all day. Denis Vavassori, general secretary of the CGT at the monument, said a second assembly included the Saturday evening team, and that staff then agreed to go back on Tuesday. He said an agreement to frame VIP delegations would be studied in the coming weeks, and that the union took note of management’s apology.

Davoine had already named the two aims of the Monday meeting: open a dialogue with management, and make sure women are never treated this way at the company again. The walkout was the leverage. It also put a city-owned tourist machine on the front pages for a labor fight, not a view.

SETE IN ONE SNAPSHOT

• Ownership: 99% City of Paris, 1% Métropole du Grand Paris, under a public-service contract running from 1 November 2017 to 2031.
• Traffic: The company says it welcomes more than 6.5 million visitors every year.
• Payroll: About 402 SETE employees, with over €156 million in revenue in 2025.
• The wider site: About 600 people work the tower each day; half are SETE staff and half work for shops, restaurants and other concessionaires, whose women were also pulled aside.

Weil has chaired the SETE board since 25 June 2026, when directors elected him president. The gap between a new political chairman, a director general he says was in the dark, and operations managers who rewrote the floor plan is now the fact the internal inquiry has to pin down.

French Leaders Drew the Same Red Line

Paris mayor Emmanuel Grégoire, a socialist, said the workers’ anger was legitimate and that such conditions cannot be tolerated. They were not his values, he wrote, nor those the Eiffel Tower should uphold, where everyone should move and work without a distinction between women and men. Equality, he said, will not stop at the foot of the city’s historic monuments. He ordered an investigation as soon as possible. City Hall owns the tower and, through SETE, runs it.

Aurore Bergé, the minister for equality between women and men, said that in France women are not asked to erase themselves, and that no dogma and no religion stands above the laws of the Republic. She also wrote that gender equality is not negotiable and not subject to varying standards.

WHAT THEY SAID ON THE RECORD

• Yaël Braun-Pivet: The National Assembly president said she refuses to have women told to step aside to meet the demands of foreign visitors, and that welcoming others never means giving up French values.
• Marine Le Pen: The National Rally presidential candidate said France will never accept that the presence of women be “limited,” and that full light must be shed.
• Bruno Retailleau: The Republicans party president said the Eiffel Tower is France, and that France does not sort people according to the wishes of those who visit.

That lineup is the political fact. Bergé’s camp, Grégoire’s socialists, Braun-Pivet at the Assembly, Le Pen on the right, and Retailleau’s party all used the tower as a republican test. The argument that spread fastest treated BAPS as the author of the insult. The paper trail still puts the staffing order on SETE.

Ticket Refunds and a VIP Rule Still Unwritten

BAPS’s Paris temple account posted its reply on the evening of 7 September. It said the visit had been arranged with the Eiffel Tower team at the start of normal opening hours because of the size of the delegation, to limit disruption to other visitors. To its knowledge, it wrote, no one was denied access. It offered sincere apologies to anyone hurt or inconvenienced, and said it holds to mutual respect and service to others. The statement does not mention women, celibacy, or the request SETE says it received.

https://x.com/BAPSParis/status/2097042887146156073

WHAT WE KNOW

• The request: SETE says the delegation asked that the spiritual leader’s second-floor visit limit his interactions with women.
• The order: Female SETE and contractor staff were moved off posts, replaced in places by men, and told to avoid zones.
• The shutdown: The tower stayed closed all day on 7 September and reopened on 8 September, with Monday tickets to be refunded.

WHAT IS UNCONFIRMED

• The names: Weil has not identified the operations managers he says acted with zeal.
• The wording: BAPS has not published the text of the request, and SETE has not released the internal note that staff received.
• The chain: Weil says he and the director general were not told; the inquiry is supposed to test that claim.

Vavassori’s coming VIP-visit agreement is the practical leftover. Protocol guests will keep arriving. The unwritten rule that let managers hide women for a monk is what the strike was for, and it is still unwritten while two inquiries, one inside SETE and one at City Hall, try to name who signed it off.