Читать книгу Adventure Capital - Julie Kleinman - Страница 10

1

Dangerous Classes

The express commuter train barrels into an underground passage beneath the périphérique—the circular highway that divides the suburbs from Paris. It is 6:30 a.m. on a Thursday in mid-March in winter 2010 and the rush hour has just begun. The railcar we are in is standing room only, with the passengers’ bulky winter coats brushing up against one another. The train emerges from the underground tunnel and we travel through the outlying neighborhoods of Paris proper, passing the housing projects built in the 1960s that rise up above the graffitied walls of the train tracks. We enter another tunnel and a pleasant recorded voice comes on to announce our arrival at “Paris–Gare du Nord.” The doors open and it seems as if the entire train will empty onto the crowded platform. We are shuffled out along with most of the other passengers. In the sea of puffy jackets, I almost lose Yacouba, an Ivoirian man in his thirties who is my guide today at the station. He finds me and gives my elbow a nudge, guiding me through the crowd toward an escalator. We step on, moving to the right to make way for people hurrying to catch another train. At the top, we arrive at the mezzanine level, still underground. We walk toward the exit, passing a long strip of clothing stores that are shuttered at this early hour.

As we exit through the turnstiles, Yacouba points out that there are no police checking IDs yet and tells me they will start after the initial rush hour ends. He is running a little late for work, so there is no time to grab a plastic-cupped espresso at the Autogrill, a chain of inexpensive cafés once ubiquitous in French train stations. We take a steep escalator up to the commuter rail area, where Yacouba will board a train to his construction worksite in another suburb north of Paris. The worksite itself is not that far from the suburb where he lives—just six miles as the crow flies—but the centralized urban transit design makes it necessary to go through the city.

When we get to the top of the escalator, we go through another set of turnstiles. This time a group of burly police wait on the other side, in street clothes except for their orange armbands. Yacouba points them out to me with a nod; perhaps it is the two years he spent undocumented before getting a resident permit through his employer that have made him hyperaware of police presence. Yacouba walks past them, toward the platform. “Those ones won’t stop me,” he says to me, “I see them here every day. They’re a special unit, looking for drug trafficking.” Like many of his peers who have spent time at the station, he knows the landscape of police forces and can categorize them by their respective clothing, habits, and location. The officers he has spotted come from an investigative unit of the national police that works out of an office within the station. I bid him farewell as he rushes to board his outgoing train to get to his worksite on time.

I meet Yacouba again that afternoon on the station platform in the quiet suburban town of Enghien-les-Bains after he has finished the day’s work. The commuter train car is almost empty when we board, but it has filled with passengers by the time we reach the périphérique. We arrive at the Gare du Nord, and as we exit the train, I follow Yacouba’s gaze to the three policemen waiting at the head of the platform. Two other officers, a few yards away, have stopped a young black man and are scrutinizing what looks like a French national ID card. Yacouba is walking a few steps ahead of me, and the first group of police wave him aside as we reach them. I slow down and pretend to look at my phone. I cannot hear what they say to him because of the ambient noise. I stop a few yards past them, with the officers’ uniformed backs to me. I see Yacouba take out his carte de séjour—a resident and work permit—and place it on top of his passport as he hands it to the balding officer.

The cop scrutinizes the residency card and pages through the passport. Yacouba fixes his gaze on a point just beyond the cop’s shoulder in an expressionless stare that many men adopt during these stops. The cop gives him back his card without a word, and Yacouba takes it, nods, and then catches my eye and nods toward the exit. I am unsurprised but still incensed at the blatant racial profiling and want to talk about it, but I cannot keep up as he takes off down the platform. When I catch up with him, he maintains a poker face, wordlessly dissuading me from asking any questions. On our way to the exit, he greets a few friends who are heading toward the commuter trains. I follow him to the large, atrium-like arena of the newest part of the station, and I have to hurry again to keep up as we head through the big glass doors to the small plaza outside. Instead of going to get a coffee and catch up with more friends as he often does, Yacouba bids me farewell in the front square, eager to retreat into the solitude of his train journey home. He is frustrated about what has happened, and his reaction suggests the emotional struggle that migrants confront when they are stopped on public transportation. He mumbles something about needing to get home early and then heads back into the station to take his train to the outer-city where he lives, again crossing the circular highway that serves as a boundary line between suburb and city-proper.

A few months after I accompanied Yacouba that day in 2010, the minister of the interior, Brice Hortefeux, gave a speech at the Gare du Nord, unveiling new security measures and calling the station “symbolic of violence in public transport” because of the crime, drugs, riots, and gang fights associated with it.¹ The police and security forces we saw that day embody what many journalists and scholars see as the transformation of France from a social welfare state to a “security state,” a process beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the early 2000s under Nicolas Sarkozy.² Changes during that time period would also restrict immigration and expand the policing of immigrant groups.

The history of the Gare du Nord reveals the longer lineage of these innovations in policing and security, which have existed since its construction in the nineteenth century, when concerns over the so-called dangerous classes—often also migrant workers—coalesced around the station and its neighborhood. This history of inequality built into French public space in general, and into the Gare du Nord in particular, is key to understanding how West African migrants today remake the station and their own adventurers in France.

Interwoven into the station’s history since its inauguration in 1846 (and reconstruction in 1861) are ideologies about dangerous difference. These ideologies bolstered efforts to control migrant workers from the provinces and prevent the urban underclass from interfering with the dreams of modern progress embodied in infrastructure. Often colored by ideas about the immutable differences of the underclass, these ideologies have led to policing methods intended to limit social mixing and maintain separations through the built environment. Notions that some differences between groups were “in the blood,” that some people were unassimilable, did not remain static; they were reorganized and reapplied to new groups over the course of the nineteenth century. The colonizing project in Algeria (like the station, begun in earnest in the 1840s) and the simultaneous explosion of pseudo-scientific writing about racial difference profoundly shaped this evolution, as colonial subjects (and later immigrants) would come to occupy the dangerous slot. The evolution of these ideologies would be built into the Gare du Nord and guide its subsequent management.

The imagination of racialized difference, despite being written into French policy since at least the seventeenth century, has been hidden by the homogenizing narrative of French universalism. That narrative supported the story that racial difference was banished by the French Revolution and only arrived in metropolitan France in the postwar period when immigrants came from former colonies.³ Politicians, academics, and even casual observers contrast France’s reckoning with immigrant populations to the immigrant history of the United States.⁴ Unlike France, they say, the United States was founded on immigration.⁵ When immigrants do appear in the French national narrative, they are predominantly white European populations that (according to the popular narrative) quickly assimilated to French norms, customs, and values.⁶ This narrative promotes what Ghassan Hage calls “the White fantasy of national space.”⁷ In the French case, this fantasy wears the garb of universalism.

Race and racism are thus often presented as existing outside of France proper—in the colonies, in the outre-mer (France’s overseas territories), and in the United States—and as having been imported as part of “Anglo-Saxon” cultural hegemony to disturb France’s color-blind “Republican model.”⁸ Defining racism, through George Fredrickson’s work, as “the conviction that an outsider group is ‘innately, indelibly, and unchangeably’ inferior,” historians Herrick Chapman and Laura Frader have argued, on the contrary, that France has been a world center in the production of racist ideology.⁹ From the Black Code laws governing slaves during the ancien régime to Arthur de Gobineau’s pseudo-scientific nineteenth-century tome The Inequality of Human Races to the Dreyfus affair and beyond, the government and the public sphere have promulgated white supremacy.¹⁰ There is much evidence to suggest that slavery and colonialism were not anomalies contradicting Republican ideals, but were fundamental building blocks of French universalism and the French nation-state.¹¹ Racial and cultural hierarchies have thus long been part of French law and policy, not only in overseas territories and colonies but in Paris, the center of the metropole.¹² It should not be surprising that this ideology also guided the design of public spaces and infrastructures well before the arrival of postcolonial immigrant groups seen as a “problem” and blamed for challenging the universalist model.¹³

Every aspect of my journey with Yacouba, from the train to the police to the périphérique itself, is part of the infrastructural history of Paris. The commuter rail (the RER, or Réseau-express-regional) that took us across the périphérique moves hundreds of thousands of passengers between Paris and the suburbs each day, a significant share of which will pass through the Gare du Nord. The RER, built in the 1970s, is one of the more recent additions to the history of transportation in this neighborhood, which has long been a transit hub—from Roman conquest–era road building to the canals and barges of the early nineteenth century that defined northeast Paris as a crossroads for goods and people.¹⁴

As infrastructure developed, so did measures to limit the potential threats that the mobility of a growing urban underclass posed to state and industrial development. The police who stopped Yacouba at the Gare du Nord find their forebears in early railroad expansion, when private railway companies appealed to the state to provide a special police force to guard stations and tracks. At the time, private companies that managed railroads in collaboration with the government were concerned about the potential danger of large numbers of incoming migrant workers from rural areas in France. The station’s neighborhood—just a field with a few windmills and houses when the Gare was built—would also emerge as a product of worker migration from rural France and Belgium. The history of the station’s nineteenth-century construction reveals how the preoccupation with “dangerous classes” shaped the way it would be built and managed. The Gare du Nord came to represent both the glory of French imperial modernity and the potential dangers that modern urban life posed to the bourgeois social order established in Paris.

The lens of the Gare du Nord reveals how inequality has been built into French public space and how the notion of a dangerous other went from signifying rural populations within France to foreign populations outside of France. The discourse about the dangerous classes emerging in the nineteenth century helped to bolster France’s racial project by configuring certain populations as so morally dubious and culturally other that they could not be assimilated. In other words, this racial project is not a recent phenomenon in metropolitan France, created by immigration; rather, it is fundamental to the way Frenchness and French urban spaces have been produced.

BUILDING MODERN GATEWAYS

In June of 1848, thousands of workers in Paris rose up against the Second Republic and were brutally repressed. At the time, Louis-Napoleon Bonaparte (Napoleon’s nephew) was still in exile in London. He returned to Paris in September of that year, on the heels of the failed uprising. Legend has it that in his luggage was a map of Paris, complete with notes to restore the capital to glory and “meet the requirements of movement, hygiene, and elegance.”¹⁵ Shortly after his train came to a halt, he debarked onto what would later be transformed into an emblem of his project of making Paris modern: the train platform of the embarcadère du Nord. Six months later, Louis-Napoleon would be elected president. By 1851, he would suspend the constitution and name himself Emperor of France. Less than a decade after the establishment of the Second Empire, he would replace the old embarcadère du Nord with the massively expanded Gare du Nord. Fittingly, the plaza in front of the station would be called the Place Napoleon III.

When the station was first constructed, it was built just at the capital city’s limit. Beyond it were fields and rolling countryside. Conceived as the gateways to Paris, nineteenth-century railway stations beckoned the train user into modern urban life. Entering the French capital often meant entering a railway station, crossing through its iron-and-glass interior to the grandiose stone façades that opened onto the city. As railways expanded in the nineteenth century, this new infrastructure became a direct representation of what Karl Marx called “the annihilation of space by time”—the possibility of increased mobility, exchange, and circulation across vast territories.¹⁶ In addition to their technological achievement, railway stations were sites of previously unseen social mixing. They became “laboratories” in which planners and passengers experimented with modern ways of using public spaces.¹⁷

The triumphant narrative of railway development takes its shape from the modernist narrative of progress. This narrative, as it emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sees individual development as enabled by the development of society and industry.¹⁸ The iron and glass architecture was designed to create a modern environment that would transform rural passengers into modern subjects, in part through their experience with rail travel.¹⁹ Railways were one of those places in the modern cityscape that united the ideals of economic and individual development, ideals that needed to “fuse” in order for modernist dreams to be realized.²⁰ Like other places of modern dreams, they were also the site of what critic Marshall Berman called the “tragedy of development”: the Faustian nightmare that modernity could beget by unleashing the powerful forces of steam and progress. One of the most powerful renderings of this modern tragedy is in Emile Zola’s novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man), in which the expanding railway forms the backdrop of moral collapse.²¹

Conversely, railways were also central to utopian visions of progress, imagined to be possible through the conquest of vast territories. The nineteenth-century ideology of the Saint-Simonians, whose ideas influenced both the development of French railways and urban planning, encapsulate this vision.²² The Saint-Simonians sought to integrate railways into transcontinental networks by connecting them to other transport systems such as canals and maritime travel. Through infrastructure, they sought to link distant countries into a single region, connecting France not only to Europe but to Algeria and Egypt.²³ Although railways were terrestrial transport, Saint-Simonians imagined the possibility of technological progress that could create new connections by weaving together networks of communication, crossing both national and natural boundaries.²⁴ This Saint-Simonian vision of technology overcoming borders underlay the construction of the Gare du Nord. In 1848, the Rothschild family obtained the concession for the Northern Railway Company from the French government. Their international vision would put the Saint-Simonian ideals to work for a commercial endeavor, eventually connecting Paris to Lille and Valenciennes, with branch lines to Dunkirk and Calais, among others, soon making it possible to travel from Paris to Brussels by train and to London by train and ferry.

The railway stations that punctuated these new rail networks made abstract principles of progress into concrete forms of stone, iron, and glass. They were “cathedrals of modernity” as the poet Théophile Gautier put it, with the power to unite technological progress with social progress in a Saint-Simonian utopia. According to the Saint-Simonian devotee Léonce Reynaud, the architect of the first iteration of the Gare du Nord, railway terminals held the key to the architecture of the future because they called for large spaces with high ceilings that could contain large crowds without being stifling.²⁵

Modern hopes and dreams coexisted uneasily with the fears and potential disorder brought by an infrastructure meant to create order and harmony by uniting faraway places. If stations symbolized the dreams of modern France, they also hosted the perils of speed and industry.²⁶ Spectacular images of derailing and trains tearing through windows magnified the dangers for the French public. Foreign sabotage was also a frequent concern, and there were quotidian reports of minor incidents—such as the train equivalent of a fender bender, when brakes applied too late would lead the train engine to bump into the track head at the terminal. On a less spectacular note, passengers complained about the noise, smoke, and bad odors of railway stations.²⁷

More than physical danger, however, the railways also presented the threat of social disorder and revolt. The poor rural migrants who made their way to Paris over the course of the nineteenth century were often cast as potential corruptors of urban bourgeois morality, as illustrated in H. A. Frégier’s famous 1838 treatise, On the Dangerous Classes in Large Cities and How to Make Them Better. He wrote it at a time when Paris had doubled in population—from five hundred forty-seven thousand in 1801 to over one million in 1846.²⁸ Frégier, a civil servant and political economist, warned the public and the government of the moral and criminal danger of an urban underclass composed of migrants from rural areas. He described them as “savages” whose bizarre behaviors, depravity, and unhygienic practices resembled that of a “nomadic race.”²⁹ His tome reinforced the notion that the poor were fundamentally different from bourgeois Parisians. His account of these dangerous groups seemed to be taken from the playbook of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century explorers of “exotic” lands, such as the new French colony of Algeria.³⁰ Like the peoples of those locales, these “dangerous classes” would require a civilizing project to diminish the threat they posed to bourgeois order.

Railways occupied an ambivalent role in this project and would magnify the questions and divisions Frégier proposed. Railways helped grow both industry and the working class and enabled an unprecedented amount of rural inhabitants to come to the city. On the one hand, this migration might achieve the national civilizing mission to “make peasants into Frenchmen.”³¹ On the other hand, as trains crossed the rural/urban boundary, they became polluting agents that brought undesirable populations into the capital. The question for social policy is a classic one: Is the state to be a paternalist benefactor lifting the poor out of their purported moral turpitude and into modern life, or a repressive force treating working-class people as threats who need to be policed and suppressed? In other words, could these “savages” be assimilated into the bourgeois order of things? These concerns were shaped in early French colonization and the slave trade. They would transform through France’s colonial encounter in Africa, and they resonate still with contemporary public debates on the issues of immigration. They have had important consequences for the management of public and urban space and have helped shape the way the Gare du Nord is controlled and policed.

In the mid-nineteenth century, the underlying fear was that the supposed backwardness of poor provincial migrants, combined with the cramped and unhygienic living conditions of the city, would lead to crime as well as massive revolts. Frégier and his colleagues were wrong about the causes of revolt, but their fears came true in 1848. Following the urban-based insurrection of that year, the preferred solution fell on the side of police repression and urban redesign that would enable military movement and reinforce state authority. The expansion of railway transportation in the 1860s would lead to a further influx of rural migrants, and along with them came new control and containment measures, such as a special railway police force.

Railways and their terminals were wrapped up in questions of morality and social boundaries, and they occupied an ambivalent place amid the transformative years of Paris’s mid-nineteenth-century urban landscape. They were both feared and revered, holding the potential for disorder and progress. As the historian Stephanie Sauget put it, railway stations were “experienced as places of dreams, nightmares, and fantasized projections.”³² From the beginning of French railroad planning, even before the first Parisian station was opened, the new technology of rail travel brought concern about the imagined dangers and rampant crime they might bring.

More than just a site of industrial progress, the Gare du Nord reflected both the dreams of modernization and the nightmares of disorder that it also could bring. The construction of the station tells a story about the railways’ role in the triumphant development of modern self and society, but also reveals how fears about the “dangerous classes” influenced early urban transportation planning, policing, and urban design. From its construction, the Gare du Nord was a place where people from all walks of life might encounter each other, from urban outcasts and vagabonds to foreign dignitaries.

The station has long been what Mary Louise Pratt calls “a contact zone”—that is, a “social space where disparate cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination.”³³ In other words, it is a place where different kinds of people, some privileged and others less so, encounter and confront one another. This character was what brought some migrants to the station 150 years later: many West Africans I met there described the potentiality of the contact zone when they emphasized the Gare’s international character and the possibility of meeting people there who “come from everywhere.” Yet, as the critics of Pratt’s “contact zone” point out, this perspective tends to romanticize the possibility of interaction in these zones, give more attention to the dominant representations of colonial encounters, and deemphasize the violence and distress caused by the unequal access to power and the repressive forces that control the contact zone.³⁴

The social mixing that characterizes the Gare du Nord has expanded since its construction, with the growth and confluence of several routes: international and national trains, the Paris Métro, commuter rail, and bus traffic, and this is what has attracted West African adventurers like Yacouba and Lassana to its iron-and-glass interior. Since it is also an emblem of French progress that once embodied the hopes and fears of urban modernity, it provides a lens to examine how the state and railways together created and enforced social boundaries, and how those boundaries shifted over time.

THE GARE DU NORD: AN URBAN BORDER ZONE

The Gare du Nord has long straddled an invisible internal boundary line of modern Paris that separates working from bourgeois classes. The placement of the barricades in the June 1848 insurrection illustrates the starkness of this boundary: to the station’s east, hundreds of barricades; to its west, none.³⁵ From the station’s initial conception and placement on the north-south axis of the city, it has been a border zone between Paris’s poor east and rich west. When the first version of the Gare du Nord was built in 1846, it was located on the edge of Paris, in a semirural enclave outside of the city’s dominion. Under the expansive vision of Seine prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann in 1860, such enclaves would be incorporated into Paris. Railway development would help make those areas some of the most densely populated in the world as trains brought provincial migrants to Paris in unprecedented numbers.³⁶

Before the still-standing station was constructed under the private auspices of Baron James de Rothschild’s North Railway Company, government engineers together with Léonce Reynaud planned the first incarnation of the station on its current lands.³⁷ Before the railway, it was an idyllic expanse indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. When the first station was completed, its stone wall and manicured gardens made it more a mini-quarter unto itself than an urban building integrated into a neighborhood. By separating it from the encroaching city streets, developers sustained the utopian vision of train travel. Drawings of the station represent this vision: the inside untouched by the messiness of urban life and the potential for accidents, while a few elegant users stroll on the clipped grass. As passenger traffic increased in the mid-nineteenth century, however, it became impossible to welcome growing urban crowds without marring the structure’s immaculate gardens.

FIGURE 2. Illustration of the new Gare du Nord in 1866. Artist unknown; iStockphoto.com/grafissimo.

The engineers who built the first station had been concerned that it was too small. The rise in both passenger and commodity traffic proved them to be correct, and in 1855 the state decided that the station would have to be rebuilt as a much larger structure. Rothschild seized the opportunity to build a new terminal that would represent his commercial and international vision for the North railway. He had already bought most of the surrounding real estate. He sought to create a station that would embody the greatness of his railway company without encroaching on his nearby property interests.³⁸ The North Railway company financed the entire project, while the government prepared the terrain to host such an enormous structure, leveling any buildings that stood in its way and expropriating their residents.

The author of the impressive structure was one of the Second Empire’s favorite architects: Jacques Ignace Hittorff. The Gare du Nord would be his final major oeuvre. The new building needed to satisfy many technical demands and accommodate more passengers and freight traffic. The monumental imperial style used neoclassical columns and enormous statues, each representing a North railway destination. The smaller statues stood for French towns such as Dunkirk, Lille, and Amiens. The larger statues were the European capitals, including Vienna, Amsterdam, Warsaw, and London. The façade placed the Paris statue at the apex, signifying its role as an international capital that would host dignitaries from all parts of the world.³⁹

The station’s pristine neoclassical façade masked the industrial architecture of iron and glass.⁴⁰ Inside, the nineteenth century station would have been full of steam and smoke, noise and odor, and crowds of people.⁴¹ The station’s interior architecture would be guided by the goal of separating wealthier classes from the provincial working class who comprised the bulk of train passengers. As the North railway tried to bring distant places together, its terminal became a place that reinforced separations among classes and populations. These contradictions were part of the visions that guided nineteenth-century railway development.

INTERNATIONAL VISIONS

Railways are often cited as one of those nineteenth-century innovations that helped to create modern European nation-states, uniting separate regions into a single “imagined community” of a nation.⁴² This narrative can overlook the imperial and internationalist vision that also guided railway development. From the beginning, much of the excitement about the Gare du Nord was focused on its ability to connect Paris to destinations beyond France’s borders, from the station’s façade to the way its railway lines were conceived and built. It was open to the world.

For Rothschild’s North Railway company (“La compagnie des chemins de fer du Nord”), linking Paris to the provinces was incidental to the internationalist goal of connecting European capitals to one another. This broader goal was reflected in popular media: for instance, the French magazine L’Illustration published an issue on the North Railway Company in the 1850s. The issue opened with a presentation of the company’s flagship line connecting Paris to the northern provincial capital of Amiens. Yet Amiens is barely mentioned in the magazine, and from this description it seems that the true purpose of the railway line is to link France and Belgium, or, as L’Illustration refers to the two countries: “Two kingdoms, brothers through language, mores, and practices; two peoples whose diplomacy created different nations without creating a distinct nationality; two people unified by so many interests.” The North Railway company lines could even alter geography from this point of view: “France and Belgium have just become closer together in space; two capitals hold hands; Paris is in Brussels and Brussels is in Paris. Rail, that cruel instrument of all conquest, accomplished in this moment, for the happiness of the world, the sweetest and most durable of conquests.”⁴³

The North railway directors aimed at turning elite Frenchmen into international citizens and creating cross-border trade and commercial networks that would benefit the company and the French state coffers. Board meeting records of the development of the company in the 1850s reveal a persistent concern with international relations, including new agreements with England, Belgium, and Luxembourg; there is minimal discussion of French or provincial interests.⁴⁴ By the completion of this northern line, the crowning achievement would be to unite major commercial capitals of Europe and open up a new era of international travel.

Rothschild’s vision was not exceptional in France: his contemporaries also emphasized the international dimension of all networks.⁴⁵ The state engineer Vallée was charged by the government in 1834 with “finding the best means to bring together the three kingdoms of France, England, and Belgium,” a goal that the North Railway would achieve.⁴⁶ The southbound PLM (Paris-Lyon-Méditerrané) railroad was meant to connect to the North railway. In doing so, it would link two major trading ports, going “from the North Sea to the Mediterranean,” and thus also to French colonies in North Africa. The Lyon-Avignon train line would develop French-Swiss-German trade routes.⁴⁷ This international imaginary had consequences for the way railway lines were drawn and for towns that were transformed as they became connected to international routes.

Railway companies appealed to governments to make policies that would allow for the fluid circulation of people between countries. The North Railway Company in the 1850s and 1860s sought to reduce barriers to cross-border travel. In 1856, the company reports in a board meeting that the Belgian government agreed to forgo the necessity of visas for travelers with direct tickets from elsewhere who were transiting through Belgium to get to France. The company reports making a similar request to the French government, which also agreed to allow passengers transiting from Belgium, through France, to England (or the reverse) to pass without needing to obtain a French visa.⁴⁸

First-class travelers on those cross-border lines would have enjoyed opulent compartments like those the North railway company exhibited in the press, along with the wonders of its technological achievement that garnered accolades at the Universal and Industrial Expositions.⁴⁹ Rothschild and his company projected a world of luxury and transcontinental travel where elites would enjoy their moments of leisure on a train. As we will see, twenty-first-century transformations of the Gare du Nord into a more upscale mall echo this earlier representation and even make explicit reference to it: in 2016, a fancy brasserie called L’Etoile du Nord (the old name of the train to London) was opened in the main hall of the station, in the former locale of a police commissariat. Security personnel guard the entrance. In the mid-nineteenth century, opulence was to be found only in first-class train cars and waiting rooms.

The representation of luxury travel obscured the major sources of North Railway Company profits: freight transport and third-class passenger travel (just as the dilapidated commuter line traffic at the Gare du Nord today provides more profits for the national railway company than the high-speed TGV lines). Third-class passenger tickets comprised the bulk of passenger-derived revenues (rising from 44% of profits in 1869 to 53% in 1898, while first class tickets decreased from constituting 30% of profits to 18% in the same time period).⁵⁰ The station was less chic than nearby Gare Saint Lazare, whose trains went to fashionable Normandy; many contemporaries described the foul odor of the Gare du Nord, emanating from its transports of coal and coke produced in the north of France.⁵¹ The international imaginary of rail transport promoted both by Rothschild and by the Saint-Simonian vision contrasted with the real use of this railway and obscured where its profits came from. Migrants and mineral transport from France’s poor industrial north allowed the company to thrive. Yet third-class passengers, many of them industrial workers, were represented as dangerous populations who threatened to derail modern progress.⁵²

The station was built at a time when Haussmann was implementing plans to “make the right to the city an exclusively bourgeois prerogative,” as David Harvey put it—allowing workers and others to come into the city on the train in order to rebuild Paris but making it impossible for them to make any legitimate claim on urban space.⁵³ The expropriations and destructions of Haussmann’s renovation led many lower-class inhabitants to leave the historic core, but also created workers’ neighborhoods where the poor were concentrated in northeastern Paris.

Although the Gare du Nord sat on the line separating the wealthy west from poor eastern areas of the capital city, it was not a wall but a space of encounter that brought them together. Urban transit systems both separated and related sections of the city: they made the segregation that Haussmann created difficult to maintain, because they allowed people to move throughout the city. At the same time, railway tracks would also cordon off entire neighborhoods.⁵⁴ To understand how this particular attribute of transit infrastructure helped produce the Gare du Nord’s social environment, it is important to consider the changing perspectives on the “dangerous classes” that would guide station architects for more than a century.

THE DANGEROUS CLASSES: FROM BETTERMENT TO CONTAINMENT

The railways served the interests of economic growth as well as the more symbolic goals of national integration and international connections. In all cases, they were a tool meant to maximize circulation (of people, goods, trains). Michel Foucault identified this new goal in early modern French urban planning, which he used as a key example of the operation of power based on “security”—for example, unlike fortified walls that would be used to keep things either out or in, the new paradigm used techniques to maximize fluid movement while minimizing risks. Urban planning became “a matter of organizing circulation, eliminating its dangerous elements, and maximizing the good circulation by diminishing the bad.”⁵⁵ These goals would be refined and transformed in the nineteenth century as French imperial and industrial growth would lead the government to confront the so-called “dangerous classes” who were seen to threaten the “good” circulation that infrastructure was meant to enable.⁵⁶

Who were these “dangerous classes”? According to mid-nineteenth century writings about them, they were a motley crew of social marginals defined by their economic status: they were poor and propertyless. They include the jobless poor assumed to be thieves and vagabonds as well as the working poor, who were threatening the political order. They were seen as morally degenerate, prone both to criminality and to revolt. They were a societal disease, lawmakers said, dangerous because they could seduce upstanding citizens into a life of crime and immorality.⁵⁷

As infrastructure developed, so did measures to control or limit the potential threats that the increased mobility of this growing urban underclass posed to state and industrial development. Private companies that managed railroads in collaboration with the government wanted to solve the problem of disorder and moral degeneracy that the ruling classes believed could come about as a result of the mixing between “dangerous” and bourgeois classes. Urban planning and state policies would relegate poor migrants to the periphery—areas that many nineteenth-century observers referred to as “eccentric,” suggesting both their distance from the spatial center and from bourgeois social norms. This marginalizing process would be repeated and refined as French colonialism expanded in the twentieth century. The French state’s control of social mixing—defined in class and racial terms—was part of infrastructural development.

Attempts to manage the dangerous classes would be built into the Gare du Nord. As we have seen, the station was a symbol of the modern imperial nation and a motor of national integration, a threshold between the “modern” city and “traditional” countryside, and a space in which public and private entities vested capital, resources, and dreams of development. As such, it demanded substantial security measures to protect it from the flipside of progress, from the accidents and crowds that threatened growth and compromised circulation. The station’s construction during the Second Empire would be marked as much by the construction of borders and barriers as it would by Rothschild’s focus on transnational travel and circulation.

The government’s approach to the dangerous classes would change under Napoleon III and after the tumultuous events of 1848. Ten years prior, Frégier had devoted part of his treatise on the dangerous classes to proposing policies that would foster their assimilation. At that time, railways were just beginning to expand and Paris had not yet been transformed by Haussmann’s renovations. The 1848 revolution that would overthrow King Louis-Philippe was a decade away, part of a string of revolutions across Europe that were the result of economic crisis and high unemployment.⁵⁸ The purported moral degeneracy of the “dangerous classes”—the urban poor, migrants to the city, and workers—would make them into scapegoats for the upheaval and increase doubts about the possibility for them to be assimilated into bourgeois social order.

Railways would develop in the wake of these revolutions, expanding to traverse the whole of France once Louis-Napoleon had installed himself as monarch at the dawn of the Second Empire in 1851. His regime sought to avoid the mistakes of the past. By the time the Gare du Nord was being planned in 1854, the ruling attitude toward the dangerous classes had shifted. Eduard de Rautlin-Delaroy, a lawyer at the imperial court of Louis-Napoléon, published a pamphlet called “Dangerous Classes and How to Contain Them.” Now it was a question of containment instead of betterment and assimilation. He replaced the social policy reform proposed by Frégier with an approach focused on policing and repression.

Public works projects and new industries needed workers, but those workers were seen as dangerous outsiders invading the city. The demographic change wrought by rural-to-urban migration created a process that went against the gentrifying tendencies of Haussmannian reforms. Workers came in, not out. They built their homes in the northeast of Paris and worked throughout the capital. Once new infrastructures were in place, they required continued maintenance, renewing the demand for workers that could not be satisfied by the Parisian population.⁵⁹

These workers were not only potential revolutionaries. As we have seen, by virtue of coming from provincial regions, they were classified as inferior on the civilizational scale: “There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that vast parts of nineteenth-century France were inhabited by savages,” wrote Eugen Weber to describe how Parisians viewed much of France in the first chapter of his tome investigating the transformation of the French countryside after the advent of new infrastructures and language homogenization.⁶⁰ The label of savage applied to two main groups: the “urban poor” and parts of the “rural population.” The latter appeared less dangerous to the ruling elite, Weber claims, because they were more spread out. Railways would make them more dangerous by concentrating them in provincial capitals and in Paris. The population of Paris saw unprecedented growth between the 1830s and 1856, despite the falling level of real wages.⁶¹ “Savage” peasants transformed into the urban underclass. They also went from being backward races in need of civilization to dangerous classes who could not be assimilated but rather needed to be contained with security measures.

The distinction between difference that could be included (peasants into Frenchmen) and difference that was incommensurable (the dangerous classes) and needed to be contained was derived from a nineteenth-century ideology honed through the French conquest of Algeria, which elaborated on pseudo-scientific eighteenth-century schemas of racial difference.⁶² Faced with the threat of revolt, crime, and moral degeneracy supposedly brought by the dangerous classes, the response in both Paris and in Algiers was to circumscribe the danger of the underclass by isolating it and preventing the mixing of bourgeois and dangerous classes, thus emphasizing the logic of security over that of assimilation.⁶³ Peasants would theoretically become Frenchmen if they learned French and had contact with the bourgeois order of the capital. But they were poor, and as they joined the urban underclass, they would be accused of moral deviation. The promise of migrating to the city to become a modern individual contrasted with the experience of many workers from the rural areas during that period. They would be accused of retrograde beliefs, inherent criminality, and immoral behavior.⁶⁴ In short, they were seen as culturally other.

Migrant workers in nineteenth-century Paris became the scapegoat of all things undesirable. As in other eras, the danger did not arise from inherent immorality, but rather from their transgression of the boundaries meant to exclude them from the bourgeois public sphere. They were exemplary “matter out of place” to use the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s formulation: dirty because of their insistence on occupying spaces not meant for them.⁶⁵ Although Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s increased segregation in some parts of the city, concurrent developments made segregation difficult. Urban transportation and the development of new social spaces, such as railway stations and department stores, blurred boundaries.⁶⁶ As physical distance diminished, new methods had to be invented to maintain social distance. The idea that dangerous classes were morally degenerate and a polluting influence on respectable ladies and gentlemen justified urban separation measures and helped to solidify bourgeois class identity.⁶⁷

The dangerous classes seemed threatening to the very railways that enabled their mobility to Paris. As the Gare du Nord’s location was being debated in the 1850s, the printer of all train schedules and train-related pamphlets sold in the stations published the essay by Rautlin-Delaroy on “containing” the dangerous classes. This publication illustrates the double goal and multiple meanings that railway infrastructure brought to Paris, helping to build an ideology that could contain the more threatening aspects of a new infrastructure while ensuring transnational circulation. Delaroy singled out two causes for what he claimed was the unprecedented growth of these dangerous classes. The first was the 1848 revolution overthrowing the monarchy. The second was the completion of the railways.

Unlike the champions of progress who would proclaim that French modernity had arrived with the rail revolution and Haussmann’s urban planning, Delaroy points out that the same technology that permitted faster military troop mobilization would also lead to the arrival of dangerous groups who would threaten security and stability. “The rapidity of transportation,” he claimed, “allows for organized gangs from the provinces to arrive, at the first signal, to the capital.”⁶⁸ (It is worth pointing out that 150 years later, politicians and media commentators would make the same point, when participants in the 2007 station “riot” would be referred to as “gangs”; it would also be pointed out that telephone technology (text messaging) and commuter rail transport were what enabled the quick arrival of “rioters” from the banlieue.) For Delaroy, thanks to the speed and transportation of the railway, the dangerous classes were more dangerous than ever. As the Gare du Nord was designed, these concerns were built into the station’s interior architecture.

FIGURE 3. Blueprints of the Gare du Nord showing two entrances and three classes of waiting rooms, separated according to suburban (“banlieue”) and long-distance (“grandes lignes”) trains, 1860. Archives Nationales de France.

Blueprints of the 1860 project designing the interior of the Gare du Nord reveal a compartmentalized space in which each station function had a small room devoted to it; there was little open space. It had separate exits and entrances depending on whether one had arrived or was departing, or was coming from the suburbs or from further afield. The station was not accessible to everyone; to enter you needed a train ticket for the day in question, a platform ticket, or some other justification for your presence. The only accessible part of the station was the vestibule on the departure-side entrance. Passengers departing on trains were sorted into waiting rooms divided by destination (suburb or province). They were then further divided according to service classes—first, second, and third class, each with its own enclosed waiting room. These design solutions reinforced social boundaries through physical separations.

The dangerous classes were often seen as those who came from elsewhere to pollute Parisian blood, as Delaroy believed: they were people “of all colors and from all countries, the crazy men who come from the provinces and from abroad to find refuge in Paris” and threaten “our social order.”⁶⁹ It did not matter whether they were French or foreign. They were of a different genus, and were dangerous not only because of their criminal or rebellious nature but because of their mobility.

Like many of his contemporaries, Delaroy was concerned with the issue of social mixing.⁷⁰ In order to master these undesirable yet mobile classes, Delaroy proposed a large number of elite police with military training whose main purpose would be to maintain order.⁷¹ Such a force was necessary because dangerous classes were liable to “become confused with the honest population” when “lost in an immense city.”⁷² He worried about the corrupting force of mixing between mobile, vagabond populations and “the bourgeois classes,” enabled by the railways. His solution was not to roll back technological progress, but rather to create an elite corps of ex-military policemen who would guard the city’s bourgeois population from dangers posed by the intrusion of the masses.

His proposition had precedents. In 1837, lawmakers had proposed the necessity of new criminal laws and a separate railway police. One legislator justified the need for a new section of the penal code by explaining that “especially around Paris, we are dealing with the most destructive and degrading people [peuple] that exists in the world.”⁷³ The railway police were meant to combat what lawmakers assumed would be an increase in existing crimes. They also anticipated new types of dangerous criminal and political activity ushered in by the railway, such as the potential for train sabotage or blocking trains from leaving as a part of political protest.⁷⁴ The law had special sanctions that considered it criminal for a railway employee to leave his post. Lawmakers were most preoccupied by potential attacks, such as placing something on the tracks that would lead to derailing. One section equated attacks on the railways with starting a rebellion.

Managing these “dangers” would require more than a new police force; beginning in the 1840s, they would lead to a larger series of transformations that railways and stations would require of French public space, law, and urban planning. Railway personnel were incorporated into military-style hierarchies and some were trained to monitor and keep order in the station, along with the police. Designing spatial modes of control became pressing as stations expanded. Railway companies attempted to isolate their interiors from the encroaching urban neighborhood surrounding them. They gained three distinct classes of waiting rooms, separated either by full walls or by high barriers.⁷⁵ Women were given separate train cars in first and second class, at the urging of a public health official (only third class had mixed gender cars).

Delaroy and his contemporaries sought mechanisms to control the potential dangers of massive migration and a growing urban population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, prostitutes and “vagabonds” would come to occupy the area around the station, as the railway terminals transformed the physical and social environment of their urban locations.⁷⁶ These dangerous classes could not be eliminated, but had to be contained, and the station and its surrounding neighborhood—like train station districts across the world—would become the container. But as containers, they were always leaky ones.

FIGURE 4. “Une Gare,” a mid-nineteenth-century caricature of a French railway station interior, by Henry Monnier. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

Accounts of train station life suggest that many of the built-in attempts to separate by passenger class were also opportunities for transgression. Passengers in lower-class waiting rooms tried to sneak into the first-class rooms.⁷⁷ Even in the epoch of separate classes of waiting rooms and isolation from the surrounding city, the Gare du Nord was already a site for new forms of social mixing. Writer Benjamin Gastineau’s 1861 description emphasizes that the railway station life was “society in miniature, the theater of a million scenes, a million intrigues, and a million deceptions as well.” There were “multiple types of the citizens of the world, Babels of all languages, of all sentiments, packages of all kinds of merchandise, contrasts of all positions.” Potential danger abounded as “thieves and deportees” could be placed among the milieu of “honest folk.” Women voyagers from all the provinces of France would be subject to these spaces of “masculine flirtation” and could become the victims of “seducers.”⁷⁸ The Gare du Nord still has this reputation in the twenty-first century.

Police officers could not contain this exciting and dangerous world of encounter that formed in the railway station. Although they were meant to maintain order and separations, they also participated in transgressions. Labiche’s vaudeville play about the railways, performed in the Palais-Royale in 1867, included police officers acting as interminable pick-up artists, profiting from the presence of lone women travelers.⁷⁹ As we shall see, police are still ambivalent social participants—not only “forces of order”—at the Gare du Nord. The new semipublic space became a site of encounter that then led to more security interventions.

For Foucault, the dual goals of control and circulation guided governance and planning. Yet the Gare du Nord illustrated how often these goals contradicted each other, leading to new solutions. The separate waiting rooms (a control measure) created bottlenecks when it was time to board that often led to delays, thus disturbing train circulation (passengers who have taken the Eurostar train to London will recognize that this problem persists). The Gare du Nord was an embodiment of the contradictory forces that shaped nineteenth-century Paris—repressive force, utopian ideals, commercial interests, exploitation, and social engineering.

SHIFTING BELONGING AND EXCLUSION

When the Gare du Nord was built, the government was more concerned by the arrival and mobility of rural French migrants in Paris than it was with foreigners (who were often presented as more of an interesting oddity than a danger).⁸⁰ Before national ID cards, the state imposed interior passports for rural migrants and special papers for workers so that the police could control their movement and manage how many provincials came to the capital.⁸¹ Such measures were justified by the representations of moral degeneracy and inferiority created in a context of pseudo-scientific racial classifications and French imperialism.

The development of French colonial administration in the nineteenth century honed racial discourse, while conflicts with European neighbors (especially with Prussia) reinforced the French national project. Colonial administrations developed new means of differentiation, first between citizens and subjects (indigènes), and then among indigènes, who were classified according to how close or distant they were to French “civilization.”⁸² Spatial organization became one of the mechanisms for managing these distinctions, whether in projects confining newly classified groups (“tribes”) through territorial divisions of vast rural terrain or through the establishment of new cities (villes nouvelles) such as in North Africa, where Haussmann-style urban districts were built next to existing cities.⁸³ Territorial management and urban planning were key techniques of rule in imperial France, both in the colonies and in the metropole.

The idea of a national French identity encompassing rural migrants and the urban poor emerged in the late 1800s and was connected to the expanding colonial endeavor. Before the Third Republic, the foreigner (l’étranger) was not a derogatory term, as Gerard Noiriel observes, and the main social cleavage was not based on nationality but on wealth.⁸⁴ By the early twentieth century, the provinces had been integrated into a nation consolidated through the policies of the Third Republic (1870–1940), including the erasure of “interior passports” and the imposition of more stringent rules about nationality. Rural migrants, workers, and the urban underclass were still treated as inferior and dangerous, but they were no longer seen as incommensurably different.⁸⁵ In the North railway company, the emerging divide between French and foreign would become codified in new kinds of separation measures. For example, by 1900, there were at least four types of train cars, each with its own hygiene regulations. The fourth type grouped “emigrants” and “animals” together and had the most stringent cleaning procedure.⁸⁶

During World War I, more refugees (many from Belgium) arrived in France through the Gare du Nord than any other train station, leading charities to set up offices around the station. These refugees were often arrested by station police and “lumped together by the press alongside ex-convicts and vagrants.”⁸⁷ In the aftermath of the war, colonial subjects including veteran soldiers, students, and workers became a visible presence in Paris, where they were surveilled by police.⁸⁸ These populations would come to occupy the position of the dangerous classes, and their otherness would help white provincials, the poor, and European immigrants to be further assimilated into the category French (though these groups would remain marginalized in many ways).⁸⁹

The history of the once incommensurable difference of provincials and workers would be glossed over in favor of an imagined past of white homogeneity and frictionless assimilation of European immigrants into the French model, troubled only by the occasional emergence of populist xenophobia. This sanitized version has become the palatable history of French immigration; it is the one exhibited at the French national museum of immigration that was opened in 2007.⁹⁰ This version erases the struggles of integration, the fights for immigrant worker rights, and the significant presence of nonwhite people in metropolitan France, including many West Africans who helped shape Paris and its politics in the 1930s.⁹¹

During this period, colonial subjects came to occupy the dangerous slot that threatened the new national order. While workers and the urban poor would remain potential sources of danger and disorder from the state perspective, these groups were no longer seen as a savage race with deviant morals.⁹² This assimilation was possible because colonial subjects took their place as the dangerous other, and the notion of the dangerous classes took on a reinforced racialized dimension that would be cemented over the course of the twentieth century.⁹³

SHIFTING BOUNDARIES

This history matters in understanding what Yacouba experienced and what many black people experience in French public spaces. It illustrates the centrality of racial distinctions in the creation of the French nation, and shows that racial profiling at the Gare du Nord emerged from earlier classifications and containment practices associated with efforts to repress so-called dangerous classes and ensure fluid circulation. The station has always been governed by an imperial logic. When it was constructed, the most important boundary the state and railway companies sought to enforce was not between French and foreign but rather between rural and urban, working class and bourgeois, in a system where these distinctions signified not only regional or class divides, but also cultural and moral differences that were difficult or impossible to overcome. Class divides and the division between rural and urban persist to this day. However, despite the long-standing practices of marginalizing rural populations, both groups are now incorporated into the ideology of what constitutes French identity.⁹⁴ This incorporation continues to be denied to Africans and those of African descent.

Racial profiling at the present-day Gare du Nord is also a product of postcolonial migration policy. Until the 1970s, immigration was not a problem to be solved but rather a solution that helped propel the French economy during a period of unprecedented growth in the postwar period, referred to as Thirty Glorious Years. After the Second World War, France needed more workers. In 1954, there were 1,700,000 immigrants in France according to the census; twenty years later, there were almost 3,400,000 (not including naturalized citizens). These foreign workers would become labeled as a problem in 1973 when the oil crisis and recession hit.⁹⁵ By then, almost all of the places colonized by France in Africa were independent.

New laws meant to curb migration would mean that legal workers already in France could find themselves in “illegal” status. Violent racist incidents were on the rise and being documented by activist groups. In the 1970s, xenophobic discourse was on the rise but was not yet an explicit center of public debate.⁹⁶ By the mid-1980s, however, the “immigrant problem” would be at the forefront of electoral struggles. By the end of the 1980s, Muslim North Africans, marked by religious and ethno-racial difference, would come to signify the “new dangerous class” in France.⁹⁷ During this period, as philosopher Etienne Balibar observes, racist discourse became more prevalent, and would come to be couched in cultural terms that imagined a homogenous set of French values, norms, and traditions as threatened by an influx of non-European foreigners.⁹⁸ As in the 1860s, the development of the dangerous classes would also be accompanied by infrastructural expansion. To support flexible migrant labor, the state and private companies built shaky infrastructures—including substandard housing and the RER commuter line.

The geographer René Clozier argued in 1940 that the Gare du Nord “created the banlieues”—making a peripheral suburban belt where there had been rolling countryside.⁹⁹ The périphérique highway would help to cement the boundary between the two spaces. When the RER—which workers like Yacouba take to and from the station each day—was inaugurated in the 1970s, it transformed the station. Today, the millions of inhabitants living in the northeast suburbs of Paris make up more than 80 percent of the station’s traffic.¹⁰⁰ This traffic constitutes a continuous flow between center and periphery, and illustrates the impossibility of maintaining the separation between the two in a mobility hub.

UTOPIA OR DYSTOPIA?

The development of transportation links, from the Eurostar to London to the RER to the suburbs, has created the international crossroads that makes the Gare du Nord so dear to the West African adventurers who meet there. On a cold night in 2010, Lassana sent me a message with a photo of a stone statue of an enormous head. The head was as tall as the few people passing by at that late hour. It was the largest statue that had been made for the mid-nineteenth-century station, representing Paris at an apex above the other European and provincial cities of the erstwhile Northern Railway Company (nationalized into the SNCF, the National French Railways, in 1937). Workers were taking it down as part of a renovation project, power-washing out the gray dirt that had accumulated over the last decades to reveal the cream stone underneath. He took many pictures of the statue, staying late as they lifted it from the apex and maneuvered it to the sidewalk.

Lassana and his friends always paid homage to the importance of the station’s history, positing themselves as the heirs of an international vision that has existed from the station’s foundation. As black men in France, they have also inherited the label of the “dangerous classes,” a term that continues to have currency in French media and political speech. They stand at the crossroads of the question that has long guided the history of the station: Should the Gare du Nord be a space of progress and potential, or might it herald the undoing of society? And what role will they play in either case?