of France from a social welfare state to a “security state,” a process beginning in the 1970s and accelerating in the early 2000s under Nicolas Sarkozy.2 Changes during that time period would also restrict immigration and expand the policing of immigrant groups.
The history of the Gare du Nord reveals the longer lineage of these innovations in policing and security, which have existed since its construction in the nineteenth century, when concerns over the so-called dangerous classes—often also migrant workers—coalesced around the station and its neighborhood. This history of inequality built into French public space in general, and into the Gare du Nord in particular, is key to understanding how West African migrants today remake the station and their own adventurers in France.
Interwoven into the station’s history since its inauguration in 1846 (and reconstruction in 1861) are ideologies about dangerous difference. These ideologies bolstered efforts to control migrant workers from the provinces and prevent the urban underclass from interfering with the dreams of modern progress embodied in infrastructure. Often colored by ideas about the immutable differences of the underclass, these ideologies have led to policing methods intended to limit social mixing and maintain separations through the built environment. Notions that some differences between groups were “in the blood,” that some people were unassimilable, did not remain static; they were reorganized and reapplied to new groups over the course of the nineteenth century. The colonizing project in Algeria (like the station, begun in earnest in the 1840s) and the simultaneous explosion of pseudo-scientific writing about racial difference profoundly shaped this evolution, as colonial subjects (and later immigrants) would come to occupy the dangerous slot. The evolution of these ideologies would be built into the Gare du Nord and guide its subsequent management.
The imagination of racialized difference, despite being written into French policy since at least the seventeenth century, has been hidden by the homogenizing narrative of French universalism. That narrative supported the story that racial difference was banished by the French Revolution and only arrived in metropolitan France in the postwar period when immigrants came from former colonies.3 Politicians, academics, and even casual observers contrast France’s reckoning with immigrant populations to the immigrant history of the United States.4 Unlike France, they say, the United States was founded on immigration.5 When immigrants do appear in the French national narrative, they are predominantly white European populations that (according to the popular narrative) quickly assimilated to French norms, customs, and values.6 This narrative promotes what Ghassan Hage calls “the White fantasy of national space.”7 In the French case, this fantasy wears the garb of universalism.
Race and racism are thus often presented as existing outside of France proper—in the colonies, in the outre-mer (France’s overseas territories), and in the United States—and as having been imported as part of “Anglo-Saxon” cultural hegemony to disturb France’s color-blind “Republican 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
