Guy de Maupassant: Dreaming of Africa

Fleeing the Eiffel Tower

In Lassitude, Guy de Maupassant explains that he left Paris and France because the Eiffel Tower had become an unavoidable, torturing nightmare. He rejected the celebration of its metallic frame as a new architecture and contrasted it with monuments that embody the thought, feeling and dreams of a civilisation.

Technical prowess without a soul

Maupassant was not merely expressing an architectural preference. For him, the tower symbolised an industrial Europe breaking with mystery, inherited beauty and spiritual meaning.

The problem was not steel itself but the imagination surrounding it: progress without poetry, engineering without a message, spectacle replacing significance.

Africa as an inward refuge

Africa became the inverse dream, a promise of distance from Europe. This dream was not simply colonial exoticism. It represented a symbolic otherness in which one might still contemplate, feel and remain silent.

Maupassant sought an inner refuge and a form of mental freedom in spaces he imagined as not yet saturated by industry, images and noise.

From Maupassant to Fanon

Fanon’s later injunction to leave Europe was political where Maupassant’s escape was aesthetic. Yet both perceived an exhausted Europe that had replaced transcendence with efficiency and enchantment with production.

Architecture is a memory of forms: temples, cathedrals and palaces speak of a society’s relation to gods, power and beauty. Maupassant feared that the Eiffel Tower spoke only of its own empty magnitude.

A question addressed to contemporary Africa

Today, African cities also raise glass-and-steel towers inspired by Dubai, Singapore, Paris and New York. Maupassant’s complaint therefore asks Africa what it is building, for whom and for what purpose.

To reread him is not to worship the past. It is to recover the question of meaning and to demand that monuments and cities express how their inhabitants choose to live, remember and imagine the future.