100 Euros Gustave Eiffel

This piece belongs to the long-running French "Grands Hommes" series, which Monnaie de Paris has used to rehabilitate figures whose reputations outlasted their controversies. Eiffel himself is the better example of that dynamic: when the tower bearing his name opened in 1889 as the entrance arch for the Exposition Universelle, it was almost universally despised by the Parisian artistic establishment. The petition against it ran to three hundred signatories, including Maupassant and Zola.

Eiffel's later conviction in the Panama Canal bribery scandal — though ultimately overturned — had effectively ended his engineering career by 1893.