Hello and welcome to our monthly series History Behind the Headlines. In each episode, an expert panel will be exploring historical news stories that have caught their eye and the history that will help you make sense of what's going on in the world. Each month, I'll be joined by our two regular panelists. I'm Hannah Skoda. I'm fellow and tutor in medieval history at St John's College in Oxford.

I'm Ron Amitter. I'm St. Lee Chair in US-Asia Relations at the Harvard Kennedy School,

and I'm a specialist on modern Chinese history. Thank you both so much as always for being here.

As regular listeners to this podcast might have noticed, we've covered quite a few

big, sizable news stories over the past few episodes. So this time round, we're going to look

at some of the other stories that we perhaps haven't had chance to cover. And Hannah, I believe

there's a story that you noticed that connected to the recent Olympics. Yes. Like many listeners, I imagine I found watching the Olympics this summer extremely exciting.

And I've been rather fascinated to see about a big controversy erupting in Paris at the moment

about whether or not the Olympic rings should stay attached to the Eiffel Tower or whether they should take them down.

And the mayor of Paris, Anne Eidalgo, is adamant they should stay as a great celebration

of Olympic spirit.

And the family, the descendants of Gustav Eiffel and quite a few Parisians are adamant

that they should come down.

So it's a really fascinating debate which raises quite a few Parisians are adamant that they should come down. So it's a really fascinating debate, which raises quite a range of questions, I think.

The two most important sort of polls of this debate being, is the mayor of Paris sort of politicising the rings and using them essentially for her own ends, which is what some people are arguing?

Or is this really about a celebration of Olympic spirit? But it's also a much more interesting debate about whether great monuments

should remain kind of iconic and untouched and exactly in the state in which they were put up.

So just to remind everybody, the Olympic rings are blue, yellow, black, green and red, and they represent five continents, and that image was developed in 1913.

The Eiffel Tower was built in 1889 for the World Fair or the Universal Exhibition in Paris, obviously by Gustav Eiffel and the firm that he was running.

It was an extremely controversial structure at the time. Now it seems to us so iconic,

but of course it is quite a strange shape, really, when you think about it. So there was an

enormous debate about it then, but it has become this amazing symbol of Paris and of France.

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