technologies of speed, technologies of crime

Technologies of Speed, Technologies of CrimeAuthor(s): David F. BellSource: Yale French Studies, No. 108, Crime Fictions (2005), pp. 8-19Published by: Yale University PressStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4149294 .

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DAVID F. BELL

Technologies of Speed, Technologies of Crime

The expression "litterature pour hall de gare" is commonly used in modern French to designate dime novels and other popular books of questionable quality or intellectual worth. The phrase is decidedly pe- jorative, meant to disparage works whose sole reason for existence is to be bought by passengers in transit. The implication is that travelers in public conveyances find themselves in chaotic and threatening spaces, unable to concentrate on more difficult and trying texts that would demand a level of attention perhaps impossible to achieve in such a context. Passengers are eager, moreover, to fill the nervous, idle moments of travel with an activity that turns them inward. Ultimately they seek to escape from the distressing thought of surrender to ma- chines traveling at superhuman speeds (trains and airplanes, in particular), to which they have no choice but to abandon themselves for the duration of their trip. High speeds conjure up images of disastrous ac- cidents beyond the control of travelers, to which they are exposed in the absence of any possibility to intervene actively. It is altogether bet- ter not to think about potential catastrophes, brutal interruptions whose consequences can only be dire, given the speed of the vehicle that imprisons the passenger.

In his fascinating history of the rise of train travel and its effects on a new generation of passengers given over to speed, Wolfgang Schivel- busch speaks eloquently about the creation of lending libraries and bookstands in railway stations as the railroad network expanded in Eu- rope: "The idea of reading while traveling on trains is as old as the railroad itself."' The space of the compartment, with its isolating effect,

1. Wolfgang Schivelbusch, The Railway Journey: The Industrialization of Time and Space in the 19th Century (Berkeley: The University of California Press, 1986), 64.

YFS 108, Crime Fictions, ed. Andrea Goulet and Susanna Lee, O 2005 by Yale University.

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creates boredom and tension and encourages passengers to seek relief in an introspective activity. By the late 1840s, Schivelbusch writes, booksellers in England were establishing stalls in railway stations, and by the early 1850s, Louis Hachette followed suit in France. In his history of the Hachette company, Jean Mistler explains Hachette's reasoning: "The traveler finds himself condemned to idleness as soon as he enters the carriage. The monotony of the trip soon takes effect: boredom arrives, and, what is worse, impatience engulfs the unfortunate traveler, pulled along by the machine like a piece of baggage" (quoted in Schivelbusch, 65-66).

The early rationale for establishing bookselling stalls was one of public instruction, the use of idle time to contribute to the cultural for- mation of a captive reading audience. Schivelbusch claims that the reading public in trains was largely bourgeois in composition, because first and second class travelers rode in compartments, in a spatial con- figuration that discouraged communal conversation and exchange, whereas working class passengers rode in cars that were not partitioned into compartments and in which, consequently, an experience of communal space for conversation was possible.2 The bulk of earlier reading materials available in railway stations tended to be edifying and in- structive, targeting this bourgeois audience. Little statistical evidence is provided by Schivelbusch, however, and one might immediately suspect that the act of reading in the train also contained a dimension of guilty pleasure-in other words, that less edifying reading materials played their role in the distraction and absorption of the traveling public. It is fascinating to point out in this vein that the rise of the crime novel and its detective figure is chronologically closely tied to the building of railroads in Europe and the United States. Poe's pioneering "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was published in 1841, and Emile Gaboriau's classic L'affaire Lerouge [The Lerouge Affair] appeared in feuilleton form in 1866. Without wishing to simplify the explanation of the origins of crime fiction, I would nonetheless claim that the

2. One wonders if Schivelbusch does not ultimately fall prey to a stereotype concerning the cultural content of workers' lives when he differentiates so distinctly between bourgeois and worker reading experiences in trains. As Jacques Rancibre has shown, beginning with La nuit des prolktaires: Archives du rdve ouvrier (Paris: Fayard, 1981 ), reading and writing were crucial proletariat activities, hidden in various ways from various masters. To assume that workers do not read or write in certain circumstances is an assumption that denies the existence of a whole gamut of cultural activities the traces of which may be hard to find, but which nonetheless existed.



10 Yale French Studies

chronological parallel with the history of the rise of the railroad at least suggests a connection between a new kind of reading public and the new fictional genre.3

The connection between the rise of the crime fiction genre and the railroad, or, to put it more broadly, increasingly speedy and precise over- land travel, goes much deeper than a chronologically parallel historical development, however. Gaboriau's L'affaire Lerouge furnishes a crucial example in what can only be called archetypal form. The novel is about a murder that takes place in a hamlet called La Jonchere, near Bougival to the west of Paris. Gaboriau situates La Jonchere geographically with great care as the story opens:

La Jonchere owes its fame to the inventor of the chemin de fer a glissement, since he has been conducting public experiments there for several years-with more perseverance than success. It is a nondescript hamlet, perched on the hillside that looks out over the Seine between Malmaison and Bougival, located about twenty minutes from the main road that goes from Paris to Saint-Germain through Rueil and Port- Marly. A steep path, unknown to the department of transportation, leads to it.4

La Jonchere is located within a transportation network of roads and railroads from the start, and a fairly precise evaluation of the time necessary to get from the main road to the hamlet is immediately provided. Surprisingly, the hamlet is the site of an ongoing experiment in railroad technologies. The narrative is ultimately framed by the railroad: the al- lusion to train technology on the first page finds an echo in the penul- timate chapter of the novel, because the mystery of the murder is re- solved in part by a calculation about an alibi based on the time necessary to make a train trip from Paris to La Jonchere and back. On

3. The rise of the genre of the crime/detective novel is linked to a whole array of social developments, including the rise of positivism, the development of forensic science, the slow professionalizing of the police, cheap newspapers distributed widely and quickly via the railroad and stagecoach services, and the ensuing increased fascination with the fait divers.

4. Imile Gaboriau, L'affaire Lerouge (Paris: Liana Levi, 1991), 13. All translations are my own. For a description of the chemin de fer ai glissement, which was a tech- nological dream on the order of our own contemporary dream of MAGLEV (magnetic levitation) trains, see Frederic Delaitre, "Railway Pages," 21 February 2004, http:// perso.club-internet.fr/fdelaitre/Girard.htm. For a description of MAGLEV technologies, see Los Alamos National Laboratories: Superconductivity Technology Center, "Mag- netic Levitation Trains," 21 February 2004, http://www.lanl.gov/superconductivity/ train.shtml.



DAVID F. BELL 11

the evening of Mardi Gras, Noil Gerdy, the murderer, takes his mis- tress to the opera, but disappears for nearly the entire performance. The time lapse of his disappearance corresponds perfectly to the schedule of trains going to the railway station he uses near La Jonchere. Nodl has enough time to make a round trip, murdering the widow Lerouge in La Jonchbre and returning to the opera in Paris before the end of the performance. Unfortunately, in his haste, he forgets his coat, umbrella, and other personal effects in the train, and they are duly recovered and put in the lost and found office of the railroad company, where the en- terprising detective, Tabaret, finds them and confirms what he already suspects about Gerdy's movements and motives.

Part of the constellation of elements creating the context of this early crime novel is thus the existence of precise and rapid travel provided by rationalized stagecoach and railroad infrastructures. The possibility for Gerdy to reach La Jonchere and to return to Paris within the time frame of a single opera performance prompts him to undertake the crime. The train schedule, however, is simultaneously his undoing, because the detective can also calculate, and it is a simple matter to real- ize that the time period in question allows the crime to be committed. Moreover, Gerdy has not yet realized how this precision and speed can immediately lead back to the traces of his passage in the train in the form of the personal effects he accidentally left behind. His insouciance about his lost items is unthinkable for a modern reader of crime fiction: "Losing his coat had worried him only at the very beginning. After thinking about it, he felt reassured. 'Enough!' he said to himself, 'Who will ever know?'" (339). The organization and technologies available to the criminal are precisely the ones upon which the detective calls in order to solve the puzzle of the crime-speed and precise timetables, but also the rationalizing of a lost and found service made possible only by an increasingly professionalized railway company organization. In L'affaire Lerouge, the murderer learns a new lesson: professionalized precision creates a double-edged sword and requires a kind of accrued attention to detail that belies the seeming anonymity of the public transportation system.

It could be argued in fact that, within an American context, the detective character himself, as an identifiable fictional actor, originates, at least to some degree, within a rationalized and rapid transportation system. In his essay on the beginnings and development of the Ameri- can postal system, Richard Johns points out that as early as the late 1820s, the postal system had begun to deploy inspectors charged with




detecting and arresting the perpetrators of postal theft: "By 1828, the employment of special agents was a standard feature of postal opera- tions. Hailed as the 'invisible agents' of the general post office, they were among the most highly regarded of all public officers, precursors of the private eye."5 These proto-detectives had intimate, expert knowledge of the nooks and crannies in the mail transportation system, the places where letters, especially those containing money and bank drafts, could be stolen. James Holbrook's memoirs of his activities as an invisible agent provide us with a fascinating insight into the methods used by such agents.6 Holbrook explicitly calls the reader's attention to the fact that the railroad, with its increased speed and precision, had changed the very perceptions of the stagecoach drivers who served as connectors in the mail delivery system and had thus rationalized time organization along postal routes. In past historical moments, the driver would bow to the requests of a passenger, who might be slow to finish a meal at a stopover on the stagecoach route and re- quire more time: "The driver, meanwhile, being easy in his mind on the subject of 'connecting,' inasmuch as he, the connector, felt quite certain that the connectee would not leave him in the lurch, a 'lee-way' of an hour or two was allowed, and often required by the exigencies of traveling" (214). The coming of the railroad changed mentalities and practices entirely: "But since, by the agency of steam, an hour swallows up thirty miles instead of four or five, minutes become correspondingly precious, and the locomotive infuses somewhat of its own energy into every mode of progression" (214). This can be put another way: "An hour in the present year, represents more ... than did an hour thirty years since" (214).

Not surprisingly, some of the most notable cases of mail theft solved by Holbrook involved mysteries posed by connections and speed. Here is a description of one of those puzzles, a gap in the system where nearly $40,000 had disappeared over a period of several months: "A section of rail road, some thirty-five miles in length, seemed, for a time, to satisfy the conditions of the problem to be solved, but this hypothesis was overturned by the fact that on one and the same night, packages were taken from mails which had passed each other on this road, in opposite

5. Richard R. John, Spreading the News: The American Postal System from Franklin to Morse (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1995), 77.

6. James Holbrook, Ten Years among the Mail Bags or, Notes from the Diary of a Special Agent of the Post-Office (Philadelphia: H. Cowperthwait and Co., 1855).



DAVID F. BELL 13

trains, on separate tracks, and at a high rate of speed" (126). How to ac- count for such a phenomenon? By a process of observation and induc- tion, Holbrook eventually figures out that the thefts are occurring at an interchange station where mailbags are dropped off from one train to be loaded onto another. A station agent manipulates the mailbags in a suspicious way, and the minutes stolen in the exchange process during occasional delays in train schedules provide the necessary gap for an il- legal intervention into the transportation system and the mysterious thefts that ensue.7

In parallel with the building of the railroads in Europe and the United States came the construction and development of an electrical telegraph system. Railway rights of way were perfectly adapted to the installation of poles carrying electrical lines. As it was perfected, the electrical telegraph quickly became an essential command and control system for railway traffic. Its use soon branched out into other domains, and, in fact, the connection between crime and the telegraph occurred very early. An anecdote often found in standard histories of the rise of the electrical telegraph underscores the point. One of the first telegrah lines in England was constructed on the Great Western Railway Com- pany route from Paddington Station in London to West Drayton-and was soon extended to Slough: "This was the first telegraph for public use, not merely in England, but the world."8 The cost of using it was high, however, and the public did not seem willing to pay for such a service. A well-publicized incident changed this perception. In 1845, a telegraph operator up the line from Paddington Station, in Slough, sent ahead the description of a murderer, who had killed a woman and then boarded the London train. When the train arrived in Paddington Sta- tion, the police followed the suspect to a nearby tavern and quietly arrested him, identifying him from the precise description sent in ad- vance in the telegraph message written by the alert operator. This is one of the first recorded uses of the electrical telegraph in England for purposes other than command and control of the railroad system, and it did much to demonstrate the potential of the electrical telegraph for broader application within the field of rapid communication.

7. It should be pointed out that the postal system was the principal means for send- ing money in its various forms in the mid-nineteenth century, and thus the integrity of the postal system, its capacity to provide a useful service, rested on its ability to ensure that whatever was contained in envelopes arrived safely to its destination.

8. John Monroe, The Story of Electricity (1915), 28 February 2004, http://www. harvestfields.netfirms.com/etexts/ 16/08.htm.




As the nineteenth century progressed, the imbrications of the transportation and communication networks within the form and content of the crime novel became more complex and crucial. Intelligent criminals rapidly became experts at manipulating speed, both in their ve- hicular movements and in their messaging activities. This can be demonstrated by reflecting for a moment on certain characteristics of Georges Darien's Le voleur [The Thief]. A word about Darien would be in order for those who might not recognize him immediately. Born in 1862, Darien was the author of half a dozen novels, but also of pam- phlets and plays, and he was a journalist and polemicist of note. Until his death in 1921, he was one of the most virulent critics of French society of his day. His early intellectual affinities were Socialist in ten- dency, but his interests and his increasing pessimism eventually drew him toward right-wing anarchist thought. Le voleur was his second novel, published in 1897. It is the story of Georges Randal, the son of a fairly well-to-do bourgeois family, whose parents die when he is still a child. Raised by an uncle, Randal finds himself cheated out of his in- heritance by his guardian. This experience, added to Randal's scathing critique of his own schooling, sends the protagonist toward a life of thievery, seemingly the only outlet for one who cannot stomach French society in any of its forms. Criminality in Darien's novel is explicitly linked to what the author perceives to be the impossibility of living within the strictures of a society lacking any intellectual or ethical foundation. The highly polemical tone of the novel is strikingly cap- tured by the following remark, made by a respected French magistrate, who baldly states the following: "We live in a criminally stupid world, our society is antihuman and our civilization is nothing but a lie."9

The novel is presented in the form of a memoir. The introduction, signed by Darien himself, explains that he went to Brussels on a lark to see King Leopold. The irony is suitably heavy here: "I had never seen a king. What good French republican would not understand my desire?" (7). He happens upon a manuscript in a hotel room in an establishment he has chosen by chance, realizing only later that he has accidentally booked a room in a den of thieves and criminals. The room in which he spends the night is actually the one used by Georges Randal himself, when he has occasion to be in Belgium. Darien is quickly fascinated by the story Randal recounts in the memoir, and as he reads it, he decides

9. Georges Darien, Le voleur (Paris: Seuil, 1994), 332. Any number of other passages could be quoted to illustrate this tone.



DAVID F. BELL 15

he will publish it. The publication is thus appropriately couched as a theft perpetrated against a thief. A tried and true literary ploy-to claim that the text one is publishing is presented exactly as it was found-is used to establish the fact that the reader is going to have access to the innermost thoughts of a hardened criminal, Randal, the narrator in the memoir. But this is no ordinary thief: Georges Randal is a thief with a social theory and a polished professional technique. The latter is what interests me here. As early as his first professional caper, the essential aspect of the criminal technique employed by Randal and his associates, in particular, Roger la Honte, his first partner in crime, is the quick getaway by train or by boat or by a combination of the two. After clean- ing out the study of a particularly unscrupulous industrialist in Brus- sels, making off with a large amount of cash as well as bonds and stock shares, the two collaborators get as far away as possible, as quickly as possible: "'The sea is as calm as a lake,' Roger la Honte said to me in the passenger lounge of a boat we took at Ostend, because we left Brus- sels on the first train. 'We are going to have a superb crossing and we will arrive at Cannon Street [in London] at five o'clock"' (128). What is striking is not simply the means used for the escape, but the stylistic manner in which Darien treats the getaway. No transition is provided in the narrative between the scene where the theft is accomplished and the next scene that finds the two thieves on a boat bound for England. It is as if the logic of this transition needs no explanation. The reader in 1897 accepts as a matter of course the fact that crime is inevitably cou- pled with the quick getaway by the fastest means, generally the train.

The literary technique is reminiscent of the one developed by Alexandre Dumas in Le Comte de Monte-Cristo. In order to emphasize the speed with which Monte-Cristo moves from one place to another and discovers information others are attempting to hide, in other words, in order to establish the count's ubiquity (an important charac- teristic of Dumas's protagonist), the novelist often cuts abruptly from one scene to the next, from one incident to another, more than occasionally placing his characters in geographical locations far-removed from where they were when the reader previously encountered them. No attempt is made to justify or even to indicate clearly the articula- tions between the sequences (one is tempted to see in this technique an early version of cinematic parallel editing or jump cutting). What some readers may consider to be a weakness of novelistic technique is ultimately a very effective means for establishing an atmosphere and a lifestyle associated with constant movement and speed. In the case of




Georges Darien's Le voleur, this absence of transition between inci- dents and places becomes a veritable stylistic tic-but always moti- vated from the perspective suggested here. In a fundamental sense, Georges Randal lives and dies by the telegraph and the railroad, by rapid exchange of information and rapid movements across borders. Sta- tioned generally in London, occasionally in Belgium, he awaits notifi- cation by telegram of a burglary project that might be interesting and feasible. Once his contacts and associates alert him, he jumps on the train, does the job, and jumps back on the first train out of the city where the burglary has been perpetrated: "As soon as I know," says one of his associates, "I will send you a telegram to alert you to be ready. The following day you will receive a second message that will indicate where you will meet me" (180). In London, several days later: "Re- turning home, I found the telegraph message I was expecting" (185). A brief meeting with his accomplice ensues, in a cab on the way to the train station, after which, "I barely had time to sit down before the train started up. ... [It] plunged rapidly ahead, stopping at nameless stations where gas lights flickered, where red signal lights kept vigil, where lo- comotives whistled, and then leaving the stations as fast as it could in the night. .. . I finally went to sleep" (189, 199).

Much as Randal might wish to be alone during the trip described here, he finds himself in a compartment with two other travelers, who attempt to strike up a conversation with him. To his horror, he discovers the next day that one of the travelers with whom he spoke was an executioner, sent to organize a guillotining in the very town where Ran- dal was going to burglarize a bourgeois household: "The executioner, that miserable, sad man, had boarded the express [in which I was rid- ing] to carry out a death sentence" (206).1o The train is used not only by the criminal, then, but also by the forces of justice in their most op- pressive form. The broad symbolism of this coincidence in the train is an indication of a more immediate reality: police agents use the trains as skillfully and as often as the criminals. If trains are a convenient and rapid means for escape, they are also perfectly adapted for organized police spying on the criminals who travel in them. The anonymity of public transportation, a powerful tool for committing crimes undetected, can be and is turned against the criminal. If the confined and increasingly paranoid space of these high-speed vehicles hurtling down the

10. It turns out that part of the cargo on the train was the scaffolding to be used to set up the guillotine.



DAVID F. BELL 17

tracks from one town to another, who is a police officer and who is simply an anonymous traveler?

This tense and dangerous atmosphere comes into stark relief later in the novel when Randal meets Canonnier, a notorious thief about whom Randal has heard much through his contacts in England. Ran- dal has gone by train to Malenvers with the traveling party of a corrupt politician, who is giving a speech in the town. Bored while awaiting an evening fireworks display, he decides to see what he might be able to steal in the town's richest hotel. As he enters one of the hotel rooms, employees of the hotel interrupt his plans momentarily, and he is forced to hide behind the curtain. When the employees leave, he is sur- prised to discover that another burglar, Canonnier, is hiding under the bed preparing his own theft within the hotel. The two thieves strike up a conversation, whereupon Canonnier explains that after having es- caped from the penal colony in Cayenne, he fled to New York and has only recently returned to France. The difficulty of his movements on French territory is vexing:

You know how well the stations in the capital are watched; they are veritable mousetraps. In fact, the absurd French railway network, which forces people traveling from Lyons to Bordeaux, or from Nancy to Cette [sic], to go through Paris, has as its sole reason for being to facilitate spying. Since I am known as the albino wolf even by the lowest of fools in the police department, I was sure to be followed and arrested within two hours if I had taken a normal train. (269)

The only way Canonnier was able to move about in preparation for an attempt to return to Paris unobserved was to attach himself to the very traveling party of which Randal was a member while it was en route to Malenvers: "I took the train at R ... this morning, the one you took to come here, and I'll leave tonight with the people's representatives and their entourage. It would be most surprising if the cops even thought about discovering me among these honorable characters" (269).

There is more, however. Canonnier has no intention of tempting fate any further than is absolutely necessary. In order to escape completely from the sharp eyes of the undercover agents in the trains, his ultimate ruse is to dress like them: "Moreover, I will dress like a first- class informant, and they will mistake me, if they even notice me, for one of their own colleagues in the Suiretd g6n6rale" (268). We have come a long way from tmile Gaboriau's murderer Nonl Gerdy, who was con- fident that the anonymity of train travel was enough to hide even the




personal effects he forgot in the train compartment on his way to murdering the widow Lerouge. Here we have entered into a subtle game of disguise and counterdisguise, in which the way the police and the criminals dress and act is a never-ending calculation. Canonnier is confi- dent that he can identify police spies, but he is also persuaded that he can dress and act like them. The success of his enterprise is attested by the fact that Canonnier's disguise actually fooled Randal, no mean an- alyst and observer in his own right: "'Well,' I said, 'I have to admit that even I took you for an informant' " (269).

The centrality of the railroad, a veritable fetish of Randal and his compatriots, is hammered home in a comic passage of Le voleur where Randal meets a prominent criminologist (the term used by Darien is criminaliste). A long discussion ensues concerning the criminal mind and physiognomy (A la Cesare Lombroso). Randal's interest and the the- ories he proposes in the course of the conversation (the criminologist ironically has no idea he is talking with a criminal ... ) win him an in- vitation to contribute to a new journal of criminology, La revue pini- tentiaire, a request that he accepts in a completely tongue-in-cheek manner. The article he composes is entitled "De l'influence des tunnels sur la moralit6 publique" ["The Influence of Tunnels on Public Morals"]. In it he argues that tunnels can provoke self-reflection capa- ble of radically changing behavior patterns: "I will demonstrate how this brusque transition forces one to return to one's inner being, to turn inward, to reflect, and I will show what beneficial results can often be brought about by such meditations, sudden and forcibly imposed" (241-42). He then argues that the character of citizens in various Eu- ropean countries follows from the number of tunnels found on the railroad lines in those countries. The irony of this passage in Le voleur is created not only by the fact that the criminal is taken here for the expert (his article is universally praised by the readers of the journal), but, perhaps more fundamentally, by the manner in which the article's ar- gument caricatures the types of reasoning one could find in popular criminology journals of the period.11 The choice of subjects for the article, railroads and tunnels, is intentional and is directly related to the central role played by rapid transportation in the novel as a whole.

Ultimately, Darien creates a thief who is an exemplary modern

11. This is undoubtedly a spoof of Zola's La bdte humaine as well, in which a murder takes place in a tunnel and in which Jacques Lantier is seized by a homicidal frenzy while traveling aimlessly on the suburban railway system in Paris one night.



DAVID F. BELL 19

criminal, no longer confined to a region-or even to a country. Rather, Georges Randal typically establishes his base in a place from which it is convenient for him to move very rapidly. His theory of criminality is international: "One has to help oneself in diverse languages and under different skies, to go from Belgium into Switzerland, from Germany into Holland, and from England into France. Theft must be international or not be at all" (165). The comparison with the Monte-Cristo is once again fascinating here. The Mediterranean is his world, a sea he knows like the back of his hand and on which he is the craftiest and fastest sailor of his day. He is a pirate, at least partially, in the sense of the term suggested by Carl Schmitt. The pirate is the prototypical out- law, the one who can use the sea for his own purposes precisely because uncharted waters are without boundaries and without law, beyond the edge of the world: "On the high seas there were neither barriers, nor borders, nor consecrated places, nor sacred locales, nor rights, nor prop- erty."12 Monte-Cristo circulates in the last corners of the Mediter- ranean that have not become the spaces of nations-nooks and crannies, the interstices of power. Three quarters of a century later, Georges Randal has constructed a world of crime around the train-ferry axis of Paris, Brussels, Ostend, Dover, and London. This world, carved out of the space of ever stronger nation-states and ever more controlled terri- tories, exists only virtually, as a function of train schedules that provide the thief with the means to move about freely, and of telegraph messages that bring partners together. The confines of this virtual space are dictated by the fastest and most convenient connections to be found at the time. Randal's world is a multinational one, in which a visionary criminal has understood that success in crime lies in being a proto-European, a citizen of a strange European Union avant la lettre: "I am-to use one of Talleyrand's expressions, modifying it slightly- a disloyal European" (165). A European Union does not yet exist, but it is nonetheless outlined faintly by the activities of the criminal, effac- ing national borders and transforming this still politically uncharted Europe into a space without internal boundaries. Paradoxically, then, the nation-state, which tightly controls its own territory and borders, simultaneously creates a transnational space whose characteristics are uncannily beyond measure. This is the province of speed and crime.

12. Carl Schmitt, Le Nomos de la terre dans le droit des gens du jus publicum eu- ropaeum, trans. Lilyane Deroche-Gurcel, ed. Peter Haggenmacher (Paris: PUF, 1988), 49.



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