Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
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