of railway development takes its shape from the modernist narrative of progress. This narrative, as it emerged in Western Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, sees individual development as enabled by the development of society and industry.18 The iron and glass architecture was designed to create a modern environment that would transform rural passengers into modern subjects, in part through their experience with rail travel.19 Railways were one of those places in the modern cityscape that united the ideals of economic and individual development, ideals that needed to “fuse” in order for modernist dreams to be realized.20 Like other places of modern dreams, they were also the site of what critic Marshall Berman called the “tragedy of development”: the Faustian nightmare that modernity could beget by unleashing the powerful forces of steam and progress. One of the most powerful renderings of this modern tragedy is in Emile Zola’s novel La bête humaine (The Beast in Man), in which the expanding railway forms the backdrop of moral collapse.21
Conversely, railways were also central to utopian visions of progress, imagined to be possible through the conquest of vast territories. The nineteenth-century ideology of the Saint-Simonians, whose ideas influenced both the development of French railways and urban planning, encapsulate this vision.22 The Saint-Simonians sought to integrate railways into transcontinental networks by connecting them to other transport systems such as canals and maritime travel. Through infrastructure, they sought to link distant countries into a single region, connecting France not only to Europe but to Algeria and Egypt.23 Although railways were terrestrial transport, Saint-Simonians imagined the possibility of technological progress that could create new connections by weaving together networks of communication, crossing both national and natural boundaries.24 This Saint-Simonian vision of technology overcoming borders underlay the construction of the Gare du Nord. In 1848, the Rothschild family obtained the concession for the Northern Railway Company from the French government. Their international vision would put the Saint-Simonian ideals to work for a commercial endeavor, eventually connecting Paris to Lille and Valenciennes, with branch lines to Dunkirk and Calais, among others, soon making it possible to travel from Paris to Brussels by train and to London by train and ferry.
The railway stations that punctuated these new rail networks made abstract principles of progress into concrete forms of stone, iron, and glass. They were “cathedrals of modernity” as the poet Théophile Gautier put it, with the power to unite technological progress with social progress in a Saint-Simonian utopia. According to the Saint-Simonian devotee Léonce Reynaud, the architect of the first iteration of the Gare du Nord, railway terminals held the key to the architecture of the future because they called for large spaces with high ceilings that could contain large crowds without being stifling.25
Modern hopes and dreams coexisted uneasily with the fears and potential disorder brought by an infrastructure meant to create order and harmony by uniting faraway places. If stations symbolized the dreams of modern France, they also hosted the perils of speed and industry.26 Spectacular images of derailing and trains tearing through windows magnified the dangers for the French public. Foreign sabotage was also a frequent concern, and there were quotidian reports 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
