Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman

      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