countries. The North Railway Company in the 1850s and 1860s sought to reduce barriers to cross-border travel. In 1856, the company reports in a board meeting that the Belgian government agreed to forgo the necessity of visas for travelers with direct tickets from elsewhere who were transiting through Belgium to get to France. The company reports making a similar request to the French government, which also agreed to allow passengers transiting from Belgium, through France, to England (or the reverse) to pass without needing to obtain a French visa.48
First-class travelers on those cross-border lines would have enjoyed opulent compartments like those the North railway company exhibited in the press, along with the wonders of its technological achievement that garnered accolades at the Universal and Industrial Expositions.49 Rothschild and his company projected a world of luxury and transcontinental travel where elites would enjoy their moments of leisure on a train. As we will see, twenty-first-century transformations of the Gare du Nord into a more upscale mall echo this earlier representation and even make explicit reference to it: in 2016, a fancy brasserie called L’Etoile du Nord (the old name of the train to London) was opened in the main hall of the station, in the former locale of a police commissariat. Security personnel guard the entrance. In the mid-nineteenth century, opulence was to be found only in first-class train cars and waiting rooms.
The representation of luxury travel obscured the major sources of North Railway Company profits: freight transport and third-class passenger travel (just as the dilapidated commuter line traffic at the Gare du Nord today provides more profits for the national railway company than the high-speed TGV lines). Third-class passenger tickets comprised the bulk of passenger-derived revenues (rising from 44% of profits in 1869 to 53% in 1898, while first class tickets decreased from constituting 30% of profits to 18% in the same time period).50 The station was less chic than nearby Gare Saint Lazare, whose trains went to fashionable Normandy; many contemporaries described the foul odor of the Gare du Nord, emanating from its transports of coal and coke produced in the north of France.51 The international imaginary of rail transport promoted both by Rothschild and by the Saint-Simonian vision contrasted with the real use of this railway and obscured where its profits came from. Migrants and mineral transport from France’s poor industrial north allowed the company to thrive. Yet third-class passengers, many of them industrial workers, were represented as dangerous populations who threatened to derail modern progress.52
The station was built at a time when Haussmann was implementing plans to “make the right to the city an exclusively bourgeois prerogative,” as David Harvey put it—allowing workers and others to come into the city on the train in order to rebuild Paris but making it impossible for them to make any legitimate claim on urban space.53 The expropriations and destructions of Haussmann’s renovation led many lower-class inhabitants to leave the historic core, but also created workers’ neighborhoods where the poor were concentrated in northeastern Paris.
Although the Gare du Nord sat on the line separating the wealthy west from poor eastern areas of the capital city, it was not a wall but a space of encounter that brought them together. Urban transit systems both separated and related sections of the city: they made the segregation that Haussmann created difficult to maintain, because they allowed people to move throughout the city. At the same time, railway tracks would also cordon off entire neighborhoods.54 To understand how this particular attribute of transit infrastructure helped produce the Gare du Nord’s social environment, it is important to consider the changing perspectives on the “dangerous classes” that would guide station architects for more than a century.
THE DANGEROUS CLASSES: FROM BETTERMENT 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,
