Adventure Capital. Julie Kleinman
threatening aspects of a new infrastructure while ensuring transnational circulation. Delaroy singled out two causes for what he claimed was the unprecedented growth of these dangerous classes. The first was the 1848 revolution overthrowing the monarchy. The second was the completion of the railways.
Unlike the champions of progress who would proclaim that French modernity had arrived with the rail revolution and Haussmann’s urban planning, Delaroy points out that the same technology that permitted faster military troop mobilization would also lead to the arrival of dangerous groups who would threaten security and stability. “The rapidity of transportation,” he claimed, “allows for organized gangs from the provinces to arrive, at the first signal, to the capital.”68 (It is worth pointing out that 150 years later, politicians and media commentators would make the same point, when participants in the 2007 station “riot” would be referred to as “gangs”; it would also be pointed out that telephone technology (text messaging) and commuter rail transport were what enabled the quick arrival of “rioters” from the banlieue.) For Delaroy, thanks to the speed and transportation of the railway, the dangerous classes were more dangerous than ever. As the Gare du Nord was designed, these concerns were built into the station’s interior architecture.
FIGURE 3. Blueprints of the Gare du Nord showing two entrances and three classes of waiting rooms, separated according to suburban (“banlieue”) and long-distance (“grandes lignes”) trains, 1860. Archives Nationales de France.
Blueprints of the 1860 project designing the interior of the Gare du Nord reveal a compartmentalized space in which each station function had a small room devoted to it; there was little open space. It had separate exits and entrances depending on whether one had arrived or was departing, or was coming from the suburbs or from further afield. The station was not accessible to everyone; to enter you needed a train ticket for the day in question, a platform ticket, or some other justification for your presence. The only accessible part of the station was the vestibule on the departure-side entrance. Passengers departing on trains were sorted into waiting rooms divided by destination (suburb or province). They were then further divided according to service classes—first, second, and third class, each with its own enclosed waiting room. These design solutions reinforced social boundaries through physical separations.
The dangerous classes were often seen as those who came from elsewhere to pollute Parisian blood, as Delaroy believed: they were people “of all colors and from all countries, the crazy men who come from the provinces and from abroad to find refuge in Paris” and threaten “our social order.”69 It did not matter whether they were French or foreign. They were of a different genus, and were dangerous not only because of their criminal or rebellious nature but because of their mobility.
Like many of his contemporaries, Delaroy was concerned with the issue of social mixing.70 In order to master these undesirable yet mobile classes, Delaroy proposed a large number of elite police with military training whose main purpose would be to maintain order.71 Such a force was necessary because dangerous classes were liable to “become confused with the honest population” when “lost in an immense city.”72 He worried about the corrupting force of mixing between mobile, vagabond populations and “the bourgeois classes,” enabled by the railways. His solution was not to roll back technological progress, but rather to create an elite corps of ex-military policemen who would guard the city’s bourgeois population from dangers posed by the intrusion of the masses.
His proposition had precedents. In 1837, lawmakers had proposed the necessity of new criminal laws and a separate railway police. One legislator justified the need for a new section of the penal code by explaining that “especially around Paris, we are dealing with the most destructive and degrading people [peuple] that exists in the world.”73 The railway police were meant to combat what lawmakers assumed would be an increase in existing crimes. They also anticipated new types of dangerous criminal and political activity ushered in by the railway, such as the potential for train sabotage or blocking trains from leaving as a part of political protest.74 The law had special sanctions that considered it criminal for a railway employee to leave his post. Lawmakers were most preoccupied by potential attacks, such as placing something on the tracks that would lead to derailing. One section equated attacks on the railways with starting a rebellion.
Managing these “dangers” would require more than a new police force; beginning in the 1840s, they would lead to a larger series of transformations that railways and stations would require of French public space, law, and urban planning. Railway personnel were incorporated into military-style hierarchies and some were trained to monitor and keep order in the station, along with the police. Designing spatial modes of control became pressing as stations expanded. Railway companies attempted to isolate their interiors from the encroaching urban neighborhood surrounding them. They gained three distinct classes of waiting rooms, separated either by full walls or by high barriers.75 Women were given separate train cars in first and second class, at the urging of a public health official (only third class had mixed gender cars).
Delaroy and his contemporaries sought mechanisms to control the potential dangers of massive migration and a growing urban population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, prostitutes and “vagabonds” would come to occupy the area around the station, as the railway terminals transformed the physical and social environment of their urban locations.76 These dangerous classes could not be eliminated, but had to be contained, and the station and its surrounding neighborhood—like train station districts across the world—would become the container. But as containers, they were always leaky ones.
FIGURE 4. “Une Gare,” a mid-nineteenth-century caricature of a French railway station interior, by Henry Monnier. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Accounts of train station life suggest that many of the built-in attempts to separate by passenger class were also opportunities for transgression. Passengers in lower-class waiting rooms tried to sneak into the first-class rooms.77 Even in the epoch of separate classes of waiting rooms and isolation from the surrounding city, the Gare du Nord was already a site for new forms of social mixing. Writer Benjamin Gastineau’s 1861 description emphasizes that the railway station life was “society in miniature, the theater of a million scenes, a million intrigues, and a million deceptions as well.” There were “multiple types of the citizens of the world, Babels of all languages, of all sentiments, packages of all kinds of merchandise, contrasts of all positions.” Potential danger abounded as “thieves and deportees” could be placed among the milieu of “honest folk.” Women voyagers from all the provinces of France would be subject to these spaces of “masculine flirtation” and could become the victims of “seducers.”78 The Gare du Nord still has this reputation in the twenty-first century.
Police officers could not contain this exciting and dangerous world of encounter that formed in the railway station. Although they were meant to maintain order and separations, they also participated in transgressions. Labiche’s vaudeville play about the railways, performed in the Palais-Royale in 1867, included police officers acting as interminable pick-up artists, profiting from the presence of lone women travelers.79 As we shall see, police are still ambivalent social participants—not only “forces of order”—at the Gare du Nord. The new semipublic space became a site of encounter that then led to more security interventions.
For Foucault, the dual goals of control and circulation guided governance and planning. Yet the Gare du Nord illustrated how often these goals contradicted each other, leading to new solutions. The separate waiting rooms (a control measure) created bottlenecks when it was time to board that often led to delays, thus disturbing train circulation (passengers who have taken the Eurostar train to London will recognize that this problem persists). The Gare du Nord was an embodiment of the contradictory forces that shaped nineteenth-century Paris—repressive force, utopian ideals, commercial interests, exploitation, and social engineering.
SHIFTING BELONGING AND EXCLUSION
When