Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
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