wrought by rural-to-urban migration created a process that went against the gentrifying tendencies of Haussmannian reforms. Workers came in, not out. They built their homes in the northeast of Paris and worked throughout the capital. Once new infrastructures were in place, they required continued maintenance, renewing the demand for workers that could not be satisfied by the Parisian population.59
These workers were not only potential revolutionaries. As we have seen, by virtue of coming from provincial regions, they were classified as inferior on the civilizational scale: “There is a great deal of evidence to suggest that vast parts of nineteenth-century France were inhabited by savages,” wrote Eugen Weber to describe how Parisians viewed much of France in the first chapter of his tome investigating the transformation of the French countryside after the advent of new infrastructures and language homogenization.60 The label of savage applied to two main groups: the “urban poor” and parts of the “rural population.” The latter appeared less dangerous to the ruling elite, Weber claims, because they were more spread out. Railways would make them more dangerous by concentrating them in provincial capitals and in Paris. The population of Paris saw unprecedented growth between the 1830s and 1856, despite the falling level of real wages.61 “Savage” peasants transformed into the urban underclass. They also went from being backward races in need of civilization to dangerous classes who could not be assimilated but rather needed to be contained with security measures.
The distinction between difference that could be included (peasants into Frenchmen) and difference that was incommensurable (the dangerous classes) and needed to be contained was derived from a nineteenth-century ideology honed through the French conquest of Algeria, which elaborated on pseudo-scientific eighteenth-century schemas of racial difference.62 Faced with the threat of revolt, crime, and moral degeneracy supposedly brought by the dangerous classes, the response in both Paris and in Algiers was to circumscribe the danger of the underclass by isolating it and preventing the mixing of bourgeois and dangerous classes, thus emphasizing the logic of security over that of assimilation.63 Peasants would theoretically become Frenchmen if they learned French and had contact with the bourgeois order of the capital. But they were poor, and as they joined the urban underclass, they would be accused of moral deviation. The promise of migrating to the city to become a modern individual contrasted with the experience of many workers from the rural areas during that period. They would be accused of retrograde beliefs, inherent criminality, and immoral behavior.64 In short, they were seen as culturally other.
Migrant workers in nineteenth-century Paris became the scapegoat of all things undesirable. As in other eras, the danger did not arise from inherent immorality, but rather from their transgression of the boundaries meant to exclude them from the bourgeois public sphere. They were exemplary “matter out of place” to use the anthropologist Mary Douglas’s formulation: dirty because of their insistence on occupying spaces not meant for them.65 Although Haussmann’s renovation of Paris in the 1850s and 1860s increased segregation in some parts of the city, concurrent developments made segregation difficult. Urban transportation and the development of new social spaces, such as railway stations and department stores, blurred boundaries.66 As physical distance diminished, new methods had to be invented to maintain social distance. The idea that dangerous classes were morally degenerate and a polluting influence on respectable ladies and gentlemen justified urban separation measures and helped to solidify bourgeois class identity.67
The dangerous classes seemed threatening to the very railways that enabled their mobility to Paris. As the Gare du Nord’s location was being debated in the 1850s, the printer of all train schedules and train-related pamphlets sold in the stations published the essay by Rautlin-Delaroy on “containing” the dangerous classes. This publication illustrates the double goal and multiple meanings that railway infrastructure brought to Paris, helping to build an ideology that could contain the more 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
