Wednesday search challenge (1/1/14): Did everyone like the lights?

As fate would have it, I've been in Paris this week.  Not working (really!), but just on vacation, enjoying the city.  

Naturally, last night I had to watch the Eiffel Tower turn all sparkly and put on its light show at midnight.  So I walked down to the Place de la Concorde and stood around with about a million other folks and enjoyed the cool night air, the show on the tower, and the show of all the revelers on the city streets.  

Midnight at the Place de la Concorde

Naturally, this made me think about a search challenge.  Not a hard one in particular, but one that you can pursue to whatever depth you'd like.  

As you probably know, the Eiffel Tower was an object of some, shall we say skepticism when it was built.  As one writer put it:  

"... imagine for a moment a giddy, ridiculous tower dominating Paris like a gigantic black smokestack, crushing under its barbaric bulk Notre Dame, the Tour Saint-Jacques, the Louvre, the Dome of les Invalides, the Arc de Triomphe, all of our humiliated monuments will disappear in this ghastly dream. And for twenty years…we shall see stretching like a blot of ink the hateful shadow of the hateful column of bolted sheet metal"

Of course, over the years it has become one of the most beloved symbols of Paris. 

And then I wondered--If the Parisans were that hard on the Tower when it was first built, what did they think of the lights when they were first installed? 

Today's question (again, not hard, but go as deep as you like...) 

1. Did Parisians like the new light show when they were first installed?  Or did they think of them as wildly excessive and somewhat crass?  

The easy solution here is to look for the English language resources.  But a more motivated searcher might look for original sources (say, French or Parisian newspapers of the time) and get a "sense of the time" from the people in the city.  

Bonne Année! 

Search on!