Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
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