What's interesting is that it may have had multiple changing purposes during construction.
It took 1500 years to be established in its current form. It's pretty likely (to me at least) that the purpose of the year 1 work was different from year 1500.
It honored the 100th anniversary of the French Revolution. And it demonstrated French industrial prowess, iron craftsmanship advanced engineering capabilities..
Yet if an archaeologist excavated it with no knowledge of that, like everything that is not clearly a house, it would be chalked down as a 'ritual site'
I realize that was tongue in cheek, but what I found more interesting is that is was only to stand for 20 years and was initially set to be demolished in 1909. So your question is even more amusing as the thing was only supposed to be temporary.
Since it was part of a World's Fair, it is unsurprising today that the Eiffel Tower was slated for demolition. I grew up very near to Balboa Park, and it was rather late in life that I learned that all those buildings were sort of hastily erected for the Panama–California Exposition, 110 years ago, and they were expected to be demolished quickly, or decay, because they were never intended for permanent habitation. And so the intervening years have been a saga of very industrious preservation and restoration, as most all of the buildings have been deemed to be architectural marvels and very much worth keeping around.
The cathedral movement started in 1006 with a quiet goal to redirect resources away from the crusades. It was also from a sort of cultural vacuum after the world didn't end at the turn of the millennium.
It wasn't "for the view," it was, in no particular order, and non-exhaustively:
* To provide work
* To serve as a reminder of the power and authority of the church
* To glorify God
* To make sure all the other nearby kingdoms were aware of how much cooler you are than them
Cite required. Work in a pre-industrial agrarian society is ever-present, unless there's a drought. (Although in that case the coffin builders may need extra hands.)
That's a simplistic, reductive, and uninformed expression of history which completely disregards the roles of the artisan, merchant, innkeeper, or any of the numerous other trades which kept early economies moving. Not everyone was a hand-to-mouth peasant farmer, either in medieval Europe, or in earlier points in history.
The building of a cathedral provided generations of employment for stonemasons, men involved in felling and shipping timber, men involved in cutting and shipping stone, as well as people responsible for feeding the workers, making and repairing their tools, etc.; and once built, the cathedral would be a draw for pilgrims, who would need places to stay, food to eat, and so on.
Without disregarding other lines of work, but from the neolithic revolution to the early modern times, the vast majority of the population were farmers. Quoting Brett Deveraux:
"Prior to the industrial revolution, peasant farmers of varying types made up the overwhelming majority of people in settled societies (the sort with cities and writing). And when I say overwhelming, I mean overwhelming: we generally estimate these societies to have consisted of upwards of 80% peasant farmers, often as high as 90 or even 95%." (https://acoup.blog/2025/07/11/collections-life-work-death-an...)
To elaborate: A lot of that labour was what we would term ‘strategically important’. It is well understood today the importance of stabilising demand for strategic industries (such as those involved in the construction of weapons, siege engines, warships, fortifications, et cetera). While they may not have understood it in exactly these terms, it seems that at some level keeping these people around in times of uncertain demand would have been seen as more than simple charity.
sarcasm (noun) - the use of words that mean the opposite of what one intends to say especially in order to insult, to show irritation, or to be funny : a mode of satirical wit depending for its effect on ironic and usually bitter and caustic language often directed against an individual or idea.
Like, it obviously had SOME purpose.