Vice, Crime, and Poverty

How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld

Dominique Kalifa, Susan Emanuel

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780231547260
• Topic: Ciencias sociales
• Subtopic: Sociología urbana

Beggars, outcasts, urchins, waifs, prostitutes, criminals, convicts, madmen, fallen women, lunatics, degenerates—part reality, part fantasy, these are the grotesque faces that populate the underworld, the dark inverse of our everyday world. Lurking in the mirror that we hold up to our society, they are our counterparts and our doubles, repelling us and yet offering the tantalizing promise of escape. Although these images testify to undeniable social realities, the sordid lower depths make up a symbolic and social imaginary that reflects our fears and anxieties—as well as our desires.

In Vice, Crime, and Poverty, Dominique Kalifa traces the untold history of the concept of the underworld and its representations in popular culture. He examines how the myth of the lower depths came into being in nineteenth-century Europe, as biblical figures and Christian traditions were adapted for a world turned upside-down by the era of industrialization, democratization, and mass culture. From the Parisian demimonde to Victorian squalor, from the slums of New York to the sewers of Buenos Aires, Kalifa deciphers the making of an image that has cast an enduring spell on its audience. While the social conditions that created that underworld have changed, Vice, Crime, and Poverty shows that, from social-scientific ideas of the underclass to contemporary cinema and steampunk culture, its shadows continue to haunt us.

PART I

The Advent of the Lower Depths

1

In the Den of Horror

The history of the lower depths is complex. It interweaves a thousand motifs, a thousand references—some are lost in the darkness of time, but others continue to envelop us. My ambition is precisely to unpick the subtle weave of their interlacing. First we have to enter into the heart of this sordid universe to describe more closely the horrid images that were forged by contemporaries. In this chapter I invite you to explore the underworld in all its forms in the era of its heyday—between the 1830s and the Second World War. This voyage is sometimes difficult, but I will try to be neither complacent nor sensational. First I describe, expose, and unflinchingly paint the content of the lower depths. We must enter (without shuddering or flinching) the “world underneath the world” evoked by the Goncourt brothers in 1864¹ and discover the main characters who dwelt there. The description provided here is a place that does not actually exist anywhere; rather, it emerges from a multitude of inquiries, accounts, reporting, and also from myriad fictions that endeavored for more than a century to depict the places of poverty and perdition. This is what I call the social imaginary, which I am trying to restore in letter and spirit, just as Eugène Sue announced on the threshold of writing his Mystères de Paris: “Readers [are] forewarned about the excursion that I am offering among the [inhabitants] of this infernal race that peoples the prisons and penal colonies, and whose blood reddens the scaffolds.”²

CITIES IN CRISIS

The underworld, as stated in the introduction, refers simultaneously to places, individuals, and behaviors. But places come first: they constitute the décor in which the whole history is rooted. The expression first appeared at the beginning of the nineteenth century, the heyday of neo-Hippocratism, a medical theory that closely linked topographies and moral characteristics. Therefore, the bas-fonds were embodied in precise spaces that were intrinsically linked to the experience of the city. This point is crucial. In the peasant and rural societies of France and modern Europe at that time, there was no underworld. Poverty, crime, rape, and incest did indeed dwell in the depths of the rural world—and perhaps especially there—but the lower depths and underworld existed only in large cities. The children of Sodom and Babylon bear the mark of an “urbanophobia” that was exacerbated in the nineteenth century.

The corrupting influence of the city had been long decried, but the threat was most markedly perceived at the heart of the “urban crises” in the first half of the nineteenth century. The city that engendered the bas-fonds is always the “old city”: aging, congested, saturated, agitated by social tensions, and enflamed by the impulses of its imagination. Before Baron Haussmann redesigned Paris in the 1870s, it was overpopulated and overheated, dirty, oozing, and labyrinthine—and no doubt constituted the archetype of this city “in crisis.” It was “Gothic, black, dark, obscure, muddy and feverish, the city of shadows, disorder, violence, poverty, and blood!” wrote Jules Janin in 1843, who, like so many others, depicted the “intersections of houses, dead-end and forked streets, mazes, crossroads [as] … great muddy and bloody spaces in which various tricksters of both sexes were stewing.”³ Thus the standard scene became implanted. This is the Paris of police inspector Vidocq and novelist Balzac, the heart of a cité that was described by a chief of police as a maze of “murderous streets,” stinking alleys, dark staircases, “humid and infected backstreets, with houses the color of mud,” and peopled with indigents, brigands—in short “human vermin among whom the most monstrous crimes were engendered.”⁴

So it was not by chance that Paris in 1840 spawned the “bas-fonds” expression. In the following year, in the first police story in Western literature, Edgar Allan Poe situated the action of “Murders at the Rue Morgue” in Paris (although he never went there). And one year later, in 1842, Eugène Sue inaugurated the genre of “urban mysteries” that in less than two decades came to cover all the cities of the world. It was in this Parisian “labyrinth of obscure, narrow, and winding streets which extends from the Palais de Justice to Notre-Dame”⁵ that the bas-fonds befell modernity.

But Paris’s preeminence lasted for only a short time. Although Walter Benjamin would later promote Paris as the “capital of the nineteenth century,” at the time it had to share the title of “capital of the lower depths” with many other cities. All the old Gothic cities in France demonstrated their claim to the title: Rouen’s Martinville and Saint-Hilaire neighborhoods assembled “what the city has that is most shameful and saddest: vice and crime.”⁶ Ports and manufacturing cities quickly entered the contest. Social inquiries at the beginning of the century showed how Lille, Nantes, Amiens, Saint-Étienne, Lyon, Mulhouse, and so many others had crammed into their peripheral areas or into their cellars the new “barbarians” begotten by industrialization. Southern France was not spared; into the “labyrinth of thousands of dirty, dark streets that comprised primitive Marseille” pressed a population of drunkards, beggars, sailors, thugs, and prostitutes. “It seemed as if Eugène Sue had passed this way to glean some sensational scenes.”⁷

And then there was London, which in this respect had no reason to envy Paris. Although the bas-fonds were unknown there, the city did have its slums, dens, rookeries—and soon its underworld—to make it a hive of vice. London was the great dark Babylon, “the Great Wen” as the radical William Cobbett called it in 1820. Rarely had the city been invested with such a corrupting influence: citizens denounced its denizens’ criminality, laziness, immorality, debauchery, drunkenness, and irreligion. Later on, in the 1880s, it would be the universal whore-shop, the world’s bordello, notable for perversion and prostitution. It was a hideous city, ragged, corrupt, perverted, “a gigantic laboratory of corruption of all kinds of crime […] which pulls the rest of England to the bottom with it,” as Charles Trevelyan wrote in the Times.⁸ Throughout the century, London was subject to almost obsessional mapping to describe in menu fashion the convolution of beggary, workhouses, backstreet slums, and infamous pubs where gin flowed freely. Around 1840, the St. Giles and Covent Garden areas in the heart of the old city constituted an immense slum of more than 4 hectares, nicknamed the Holy Land: “A very dense mass of shacks so decrepit that they had to avoid collapsing, narrow and sinuous alleys, rivulets of stagnant water, trash, discolored walls.”⁹ The city entered by the youth at the beginning of the Mysteries of London is a “labyrinth of dirty and narrow streets which lies in the immediate vicinity of the northwestern angle of Smithfield-Market.” Further on someone recalls “revolting streets which branch off from that Smithfield. It seemed to me that I was wandering amongst all the haunts of crimes and appalling penury of which I had read in romances, but which I never could have believed to exist in the very heart of the metropolis of the world.”¹⁰ When part of the neighborhood was torn down in 1847, the center of gravity shifted to the east, toward the East End, a mixture of quays, docks, shacks, abattoirs, and tanneries. “A vast continent of vice, crime, and poverty,”¹¹ which at the end of the century incarnated the whole horror of London and which the crimes of Jack the Ripper in 1888 would make known to the entire world.

What London did on a grand stage, other British cities realized on a more modest scale—Liverpool with its Waterloo Road area, Birmingham with St. Mary and St. Lawrence—and Edinburgh resonated with the terrible murders of the “resurrectionists” Burke and Hare, who, in 1827, assassinated their tenants and sold their bodies for dissection. Manchester was no better, with its low quarters “with repugnant visions/sights and intolerable stench, where all the garbage, filthy water and muck of houses and basements were putrefying in the streets,” as Geraldine Jewsbury described in Marian Withers in 1851.¹² Nineteenth-century cities everywhere, which had become gangrenous due to an expansion that piled up migrants in unfit living conditions, were exhibiting their lower depths.

The Old World soon had rivals. The resumption of colonial expansion quickly accentuated the ports and major colonial cities, such as Bombay, Algiers, Tangier, and Manila, where indigence and prostitution were tinged with racist overtones. Shanghai became the “brothel of Asia” and had both sumptuous mansions and sailors’ hovels, nailed-together huts, and whorehouses “made of woven bamboo and daub.”¹³ Leopoldville in the Belgian Congo was a lair of thieves, pimps, and a “rabble of downgraded and lazy blacks who have taken from civilization what is least good.”¹⁴ International migrations generated the exceptional growth in the lower depths of the New World. New York, the bridgehead of immigration to the United States, was the first affected. By 1830, Five Points, a muddy intersection in the south of Manhattan, concentrated all the evils that assailed the young nation: poverty, violence, prostitution, and crime. It was the “cesspool of all the depravity of human nature” declared Thomas Jefferson.¹⁵ Henceforth (and for a long time) New York was the wicked city. But soon all U.S. cities were affected to the extent that by 1850 almost every one already had a “mysteries” publication: Boston, Philadelphia, St. Louis, New Orleans, Rochester, Charleston, Lowell, and so on.¹⁶ In South America in the 1880s, Buenos Aires was counted as the epicenter of new underworlds, as an immense bordello fallen into the hands of procurers and ruffians, but also containing a population of professional thieves, children of the streets, scrawny migrants, and fanatical anarchists.¹⁷ Elsewhere in the Americas, Rio, Montevideo, Caracas, and Panama each possessed its neighborhood known for poverty and debauchery.

“A WORLD UNDERNEATH A WORLD”

As an urban reality, the lower depths did not occupy the entire city. Two types of spaces were reserved for it: on one hand, downtrodden zones that were depressed, dirty, poor, and forsaken, the sordid margins with their muddy alleys, dives, and wastelands, and “mucky holes with unfinished constructions”;¹⁸ and on the other hand, places of authority, veritable legal underworlds that unwillingly concentrated all sorts of marginal types: prisons, penitentiaries, hospices, asylums, and workhouses.

A common trait, inscribed in the same “lower” term that designated them, located these repugnant places as essentially “down below”: caves, cellars, underground passages, pits, chasms, catacombs, sewers, and “mines.” Hundreds of examples could be taken from all kinds of sources. In Nantes, all the vices, urban infamy, and immorality seemed to be concentrated around the “quay of the Pit”—whose name says it all. It was the lowest part of the city that bordered the port, and it contained the hovels, shacks, whorehouses, dives, greasy streets, and garbage.¹⁹ “We are leaving out the black walls that retain the viscous air, the basest human odors, the mildew exhaled by superimposed cellars […]. In the evening, the knives are out somewhere or other.”²⁰ In Lille, it was the cellars—“this bleak hell” so disgraceful to Victor Hugo in the Châtiments (Punishments, 1853)—where the poor were described as “phantoms who are there in underground rooms.” In Paris, the worst places are those into which one can sink. The tapisfrancs (grog shops) are “cabarets on the lowest floor,” dens such as the Bras-Rouge, the “Bloody Heart” (the subterranean cabaret of Mystères de Paris), or the Trou-à-vin (Wine Hole) in Mendiants de Paris (Beggars of Paris), a “cavern,” a “low room.” Everywhere in the city were “foul cellars, lit by basement windows reaching the daylight only at the level of gutters,” and, of course, the catacombs celebrated in the stories of Elie Berthet and Pierre Zaccone.²¹ Even in 1929 Henri Danjou still took pleasure in leading the reader into this “city of the dead, […] a city of labyrinths,” with its cadavers and its mysteries.²² In Buenos Aires, the most sordid quarter was La Boca, which Albert Londres described as the “bottom of the bottom,” where one could not “reasonably descend lower.”²³ And yet a few years earlier there had been worse. Jules Huret remembers El Bajo, “a working-class quarter, partly taken back from the waters of the Rio […] It was the dumping ground for dead animals, garbage, and rotten fish. Disreputable people gathered there in the lowest sort of dives.”²⁴ The Berlin Unterwelt was “truly a subterranean world which from cellar to cellar, from dive to dive, from one cut-throat area to another, extended its ramifications under the surface of Berlin.”²⁵ Of course, a few places could prove the exception. Squalid and repulsive in Western eyes, the Kasbah of Algiers was in fact on a promontory with an interminable stairway that rose toward increasingly sordid heights. The worst one was the highest, the street of the Zouaves where “a tribe of gypsies camped on the summit.”²⁶ In effect, the Kasbah was an inverted lower depths that resulted from its colonial nature.

Of course, the concentration of marginal people in depressed places was due to social constraints: these were often the only places left to them. Some places might serve as refuge, such as the Parisian perimeter’s “American quarries” and their plaster ovens, which were occupied in the nineteenth century by Parisian vagabonds, or the dens used for fomenting crimes. In London, the Adelphi arches played the same role. The Orgères Band—a “horde”—lived underground.²⁷ In Paris, a criminal gang known as the “Grouilleurs” arranged its den in ...