tends to romanticize the possibility of interaction in these zones, give more attention to the dominant representations of colonial encounters, and deemphasize the violence and distress caused by the unequal access to power and the repressive forces that control the contact zone.34
The social mixing that characterizes the Gare du Nord has expanded since its construction, with the growth and confluence of several routes: international and national trains, the Paris Métro, commuter rail, and bus traffic, and this is what has attracted West African adventurers like Yacouba and Lassana to its iron-and-glass interior. Since it is also an emblem of French progress that once embodied the hopes and fears of urban modernity, it provides a lens to examine how the state and railways together created and enforced social boundaries, and how those boundaries shifted over time.
THE GARE DU NORD: AN URBAN BORDER ZONE
The Gare du Nord has long straddled an invisible internal boundary line of modern Paris that separates working from bourgeois classes. The placement of the barricades in the June 1848 insurrection illustrates the starkness of this boundary: to the station’s east, hundreds of barricades; to its west, none.35 From the station’s initial conception and placement on the north-south axis of the city, it has been a border zone between Paris’s poor east and rich west. When the first version of the Gare du Nord was built in 1846, it was located on the edge of Paris, in a semirural enclave outside of the city’s dominion. Under the expansive vision of Seine prefect Georges-Eugène Haussmann in 1860, such enclaves would be incorporated into Paris. Railway development would help make those areas some of the most densely populated in the world as trains brought provincial migrants to Paris in unprecedented numbers.36
Before the still-standing station was constructed under the private auspices of Baron James de Rothschild’s North Railway Company, government engineers together with Léonce Reynaud planned the first incarnation of the station on its current lands.37 Before the railway, it was an idyllic expanse indistinguishable from the surrounding countryside. When the first station was completed, its stone wall and manicured gardens made it more a mini-quarter unto itself than an urban building integrated into a neighborhood. By separating it from the encroaching city streets, developers sustained the utopian vision of train travel. Drawings of the station represent this vision: the inside untouched by the messiness of urban life and the potential for accidents, while a few elegant users stroll on the clipped grass. As passenger traffic increased in the mid-nineteenth century, however, it became impossible to welcome growing urban crowds without marring the structure’s immaculate gardens.
FIGURE 2. Illustration of the new Gare du Nord in 1866. Artist unknown; iStockphoto.com/grafissimo.
The engineers who built the first station had been concerned that it was too small. The rise in both passenger and commodity traffic proved them to be correct, and in 1855 the state decided that the station would have to be rebuilt as a much larger structure. Rothschild seized the opportunity to build a new terminal that would represent his commercial and international vision for the North railway. He had already bought most of the surrounding real estate. He sought to create a station that would embody the greatness 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
