Arrival City_ How the Largest Migration in History Is Reshaping Our World - Doug Saunders [67]
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THE FIRST GREAT MIGRATION: HOW THE WEST ARRIVED
VILE PORTALS TO THE MODERN WORLD
Paris
When a skinny girl named Jeanne Bouvier made her first trip through the newly built outer walls of Paris in 1879, at age 14, she brought with her only two changes of clothing, which she wore on top of one another, a few toiletries she kept in a kerchief with its four corners tied together, and the timeless set of expectations that rural migrants bring to cities. She was alone, having made the long journey from the Rhone valley by coach and foot a few months before with her mother, who, after a depressing time trying her luck as a brush-dyer in the Paris outskirts, had given up and returned to their famine-blighted village. Jeanne continued on alone, plunging into the city’s migrant-packed center. She joined the greatest surge of rural-to-urban migration the world had ever seen, arriving in Paris at the very apex of a 125-year transformation of the Western world. Like the hundreds of thousands of other peasant arrivals who formed a majority of the French capital’s population in the nineteenth century, she was seeking nothing more than a source of cash income to send back home to the village and a place, any place, to sleep.
What she found was the first great arrival city of the modern world: not the largest one, since London and Manchester had by then far exceeded Paris in size, scope, density, activity, and horror, but certainly the most explosive. It was in Paris that governments made the first grave mistakes of managing the great migration, mistakes that are being repeated today. And it was in Paris that the arrival city became a political force capable of changing nations.
Jeanne descended into a maze of streets that native-born Parisians dared not enter, streets that the works of Victor Hugo, Honoré de Balzac, and Eugène Sue had transformed into popular bywords for filth, depravity, murder, disease, and ruination, streets that had already been the main stages of violent and history-altering uprisings and revolutions in 1789, 1830, 1832, 1848, and 1871. In the popular imagination, these neighborhoods were the repositories of the fallen, the hideouts of failed urbanites, the dwelling grounds for the animalistic ruins of humanity. Jeanne saw them for what they really were: a transitory home to millions who, having found something marginally better than the despair of the village, were seeking a permanent foothold in a better urban world.
Her first quarters, a tiny room whose only outstanding features were a bare plank bed and a rivulet of human waste running beneath its small window, did indeed confirm the worst images of the arrival city, as did her cruel employers. Within a year, after a series of unrewarding jobs as a domestic servant, she found distant relatives from her village working in the needle trades of Paris’s ninth arrondissement, and they helped her find work sewing seams in the burgeoning ready-to-wear clothing industry. There, in workshops that would seem familiar, in both appearance and function, to those in the very similar arrival cities of Shenzhen and Dhaka today, she worked long hours for wages averaging two and a half francs a day.
And Jeanne Bouvier did what arrival-city residents were doing all over Europe: She calculated, and saved, and sent money home, with a constant eye to improvements. Her budget was rigid. From her earnings of between 12 and 40 francs per week (she was paid by the piece, so earnings varied widely), she spent 8.4 francs on food, 3 on rent, 3.75 on clothes; the rest was sent to the village or saved. “I would suffer any sacrifice to be able to