post. Lawmakers were most preoccupied by potential attacks, such as placing something on the tracks that would lead to derailing. One section equated attacks on the railways with starting a rebellion.
Managing these “dangers” would require more than a new police force; beginning in the 1840s, they would lead to a larger series of transformations that railways and stations would require of French public space, law, and urban planning. Railway personnel were incorporated into military-style hierarchies and some were trained to monitor and keep order in the station, along with the police. Designing spatial modes of control became pressing as stations expanded. Railway companies attempted to isolate their interiors from the encroaching urban neighborhood surrounding them. They gained three distinct classes of waiting rooms, separated either by full walls or by high barriers.75 Women were given separate train cars in first and second class, at the urging of a public health official (only third class had mixed gender cars).
Delaroy and his contemporaries sought mechanisms to control the potential dangers of massive migration and a growing urban population. Over the course of the nineteenth century, prostitutes and “vagabonds” would come to occupy the area around the station, as the railway terminals transformed the physical and social environment of their urban locations.76 These dangerous classes could not be eliminated, but had to be contained, and the station and its surrounding neighborhood—like train station districts across the world—would become the container. But as containers, they were always leaky ones.
FIGURE 4. “Une Gare,” a mid-nineteenth-century caricature of a French railway station interior, by Henry Monnier. Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
Accounts of train station life suggest that many of the built-in attempts to separate by passenger class were also opportunities for transgression. Passengers in lower-class waiting rooms tried to sneak into the first-class rooms.77 Even in the epoch of separate classes of waiting rooms and isolation from the surrounding city, the Gare du Nord was already a site for new forms of social mixing. Writer Benjamin Gastineau’s 1861 description emphasizes that the railway station life was “society in miniature, the theater of a million scenes, a million intrigues, and a million deceptions as well.” There were “multiple types of the citizens of the world, Babels of all languages, of all sentiments, packages of all kinds of merchandise, contrasts of all positions.” Potential danger abounded as “thieves and deportees” could be placed among the milieu of “honest folk.” Women voyagers from all the provinces of France would be subject to these spaces of “masculine flirtation” and could become the victims of “seducers.”78 The Gare du Nord still has this reputation in the twenty-first century.
Police officers could not contain this exciting and dangerous world of encounter that formed in the railway station. Although they were meant to maintain order and separations, they also participated in transgressions. Labiche’s vaudeville play about the railways, performed in the Palais-Royale in 1867, included police officers acting as interminable pick-up artists, profiting from the presence of lone women travelers.79 As we shall see, police are still ambivalent social participants—not only “forces of order”—at the Gare du Nord. The new semipublic space became a site of encounter that then led to more security interventions.
For Foucault, the dual goals of control and circulation guided governance and planning. Yet the Gare du Nord illustrated how often these goals contradicted each other, leading to new solutions. The separate waiting rooms (a control measure) created bottlenecks when it was time to board that often led to delays, thus disturbing train circulation (passengers who have taken the Eurostar train to London will recognize that this problem persists). The Gare du Nord was an embodiment of the contradictory forces that shaped nineteenth-century Paris—repressive force, utopian ideals, commercial interests, exploitation, and social engineering.
SHIFTING BELONGING AND EXCLUSION
When the Gare du Nord was built, the government was more concerned by the arrival and mobility of rural French migrants in Paris than it was with foreigners (who were often presented as more of an interesting oddity than a danger).80 Before national ID cards, the state imposed interior passports for rural migrants and special papers for workers so that the police could control their movement and manage how many provincials came to the capital.81 Such measures were justified by the representations of moral degeneracy and inferiority created in a context of pseudo-scientific racial classifications and French imperialism.
The development of French colonial administration in the nineteenth century honed racial discourse, while conflicts with European neighbors (especially with Prussia) reinforced the French national project. Colonial administrations developed new means of differentiation, first between citizens and subjects (indigènes), and then among indigènes, who were classified according to how close or distant they were to French “civilization.”82 Spatial organization became one of the mechanisms for managing these distinctions, whether in projects confining newly classified groups (“tribes”) through territorial divisions of vast rural terrain or through the establishment of new cities (villes nouvelles) such as in North Africa, where Haussmann-style urban districts were built next to existing cities.83 Territorial management and urban planning were key techniques of rule in imperial France, both in the colonies and in the metropole.
The idea of a national French identity encompassing rural migrants and the urban poor emerged in the late 1800s and was connected to the expanding colonial endeavor. Before the Third Republic, the foreigner (l’étranger) was not a derogatory term, as Gerard Noiriel observes, and the main social cleavage was not based on nationality but on wealth.84 By the early twentieth century, the provinces had been integrated into a nation consolidated through the policies of the Third Republic (1870–1940), including the erasure of “interior passports” and the imposition of more stringent rules about nationality. Rural migrants, workers, and the urban underclass were still treated as inferior and dangerous, but they were no longer seen as incommensurably different.85 In the North railway company, the emerging divide between French and foreign would become codified in new kinds of separation measures. For example, by 1900, there were at least four types of train cars, each with its own hygiene regulations. The fourth type grouped “emigrants” and “animals” together and had the most stringent cleaning procedure.86
During World War I, more refugees (many from Belgium) arrived in France through the Gare du Nord than any other train station, leading charities to set up offices around the station. These refugees were often arrested by station police and “lumped together by the press alongside ex-convicts and vagrants.”87 In the aftermath of the war, colonial subjects including veteran soldiers, students, and workers became a visible presence in Paris, where they were surveilled by police.88 These populations would come to occupy the position of the dangerous classes, and their otherness would help white provincials, the poor, and European immigrants to be further assimilated into the category French (though these groups would remain marginalized in many ways).89
The history of the once incommensurable difference of provincials and workers would be glossed over in favor of an imagined past of white homogeneity and frictionless assimilation of European immigrants into the French model, troubled only by the occasional emergence of populist xenophobia. This sanitized version has become the palatable history of French immigration; it is the one exhibited at the French national museum of immigration that was opened in 2007.90 This version erases the struggles of integration, the fights for immigrant worker rights, and the significant presence of nonwhite people in metropolitan France, including many West Africans who helped shape Paris and its politics in the 1930s.91
During this period, colonial subjects came to occupy the dangerous slot that threatened the new national order. While workers and the urban poor would remain potential sources of danger and disorder from the state
