Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
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