How the Underworld Was Criminalized

AS SOME OF YOU know, I’ve been writing a book about the underworld. When I mention this to people who work outside of my academic field—or outside of academia entirely—it’s not uncommon for them to make the assumption that I’m writing a book about the mafia. For scholars of religious studies and theology the underworld tends to conjure mythical images of dreary or torturous afterlives. But for most other Americans, the underworld describes a secretive and mysterious world of crime.

In my own research I’ve been struggling to explain how the underworld transitioned from being a hell in which the damned were incarcerated to being a living, floating, network of criminalized activity. It makes a certain kind of intuitive sense, doesn’t it? There’s an obvious moralizing tension at play: the link is between crime and sin. As the geographical dimensions of heaven and hell fade away, in the face of secularization, the underworld just becomes a figure of present reality rather than the afterlife. But this doesn’t actually explain much, does it? There are still a lot of missing pieces.

I recently discovered a book that reveals the genealogy at work—that traces the history of this criminalized underworld. I’ve found the book convincing and engrossing enough that I wanted to share it with you. I actually think that many of you will be interested, even if you’re not all that curious about the underworld itself. If nothing else, we now have a president who proudly displays his own mug shot in the oval office. Is this a sign that the criminal underworld, itself, has just disappeared and been mainstreamed?

THE BOOK IS by a French historian of crime, Dominique Kalifa, and it has a rather off-putting and almost moralistic title: Vice, Crime, and Poverty: How the Western Imagination Invented the Underworld. The key to his argument is that the underworld—or what’s more commonly called the bas-fond in French—is a social imaginary. It’s a space where what’s real blends with what’s fictional. It’s a figure with social meaning, but which never quite loses its topographical or geographical meaning. It’s a floating social concept that plays a role in structuring lived relations.

The underworld as a social imaginary associated predominantly with crime is born, as Kalifa tells it, in the mid-19th century. The term bas-fonds shows up in print, for perhaps the first time, in Balzac’s novelette Z Marcas. It passes into broader circulation that year. In England the term underworld had been in use for a longer period. Kalifa traces an early print reference in the 17th century playwright Ben Jonson’s work. But it was used, until the mid-19th century, to refer to pagan afterlives, or hells. In the mid-19th century, the use begins to shift.

The social imaginary had, of course, already been growing and developing for centuries. Kalifa traces its emergence to major shifts in the way that Europeans were thinking about poverty and urbanization. One of the key transitions was the end of the Middle Ages. In the transition from the 12th to the 13th century, Kalifa argues, the idea of the “bad” or “undeserving” poor is born. While, in previous centuries, the church may have counseled its public to acknowledge the blessedness of the poor, society began to complicate and stratify in this century. Prior to the 13th century, European poverty had been more or less universal—the people as a whole were more or less poor. But with the growth of cities, and the money economy, this was becoming less true. At least for some. Poverty was no longer something to glorify or bless, but something to eradicate and banish. At least in theory.

In subsequent centuries the social figure of the “vagrant” was born: a person who exists in the world of poverty but makes his way, unwanted, into the fringes of wealth and order. Eventually this figure becomes more complex: species of the vagrant are born. There are suddenly numerous forms of beggars, thieves, and gypsies. By the 15th century, European law codes list lengthy taxonomies of socially marginal figures who should be kept at the edge of a village or city limits, if not incarcerated.

Another key shift is that cities, as we know them now, are also in the process of development. Almost without exception, the portions of these new urban zones inhabited by the poorest people were the geographically lowest. These were the portions of the city most likely to flood, to hold water and all that festers within it, and to become effectively unlivable. This was also where jails, prisons, and other units of containment were built. These were the very lower depths—the bas-fond—of the cities. Not quite under the ground, but almost. Land low to the ground becomes associated with poverty and crime.

Kalifa is pulling a lot from the work of Michel Foucault, for his history of crime. But he’s also deeply informed by literature. The work of Victor Hugo is especially prominent in this genealogy. Les Miserables is, for Kalifa, a document of the emerging social imaginary that he wants to trace. One of the phenomena that emerges in the work of Hugo is a zone of the city’s underworld described as the Court of Miracles—a place where the beggars and mendicants who spend their days working the city go at night to reveal themselves to one another as, in reality, quite fine and well. This Court of Miracles becomes, for a time, what Kalifa calls an “obsessive theme” in French literature, at least. And it begins to contribute to a broader sense that the poor who inhabit the bas-fonds or underworld are all little thieves and parasites, poised to suck out the wealth of the city above.

WHILE THE UNDERWORLD as social imaginary is a space of depravity and poverty Kalifa is at pains to stress that it also holds a deep allure and even a kind of eroticism for many. Those from the world above—writers, journalists, philanthropists, and even foreign aristocrats—are ineluctably drawn to the underworld. There are, of course, problems in the underworld that have to be solved. Poverty, for instance, is a problem to solve for philanthropists. But the underworld has to be probed, explored, and understood—even for these philanthropists—because there are said to be deserving and undeserving poor. The philanthropists must know how to determine which poor to give their money to. So there must be studies of these poor, in order to make this determination.

Those who venture into the underworld to describe and understand it represent it not only as a space of brutal poverty but also a space of thrilling danger. It’s the crime—including criminalized prostitution—that contributes to this allure. And, of course, this thrilling and dangerous space is often racialized. In Europe it’s inhabited by Roma, and other immigrants, who bring with them music (sounds) and food (smells, tastes) that have an allure all their own.

Kalifa writes about individuals—like Jack London, and even Charles Dickens (who ventures into the underworld night, with a friend who works for the police)—who make a name for themselves as writers through their underworld journeys. Their particular skill is revealing the underworld to their readers. London is among those who disguise themselves, in the hopes of experiencing the underworld in its own authentic reality. Of course, it’s an aim that most contemporary analyses treat with suspicion. But this sort of performance was incredibly commonplace. It becomes a major source of fodder for journalism and fiction.

There were those, of course, who didn’t feel safe venturing into the underworld all on their own. For these, Kalifa writes, there was the Grand Dukes Tour. After a Russian aristocrat apparently requested his own tour through the increasingly famous underworld of Paris, this is what these tours were called. Typically led by a member of the police, small mixed-gender groups of tourists from the world above would follow an itinerary through the underworld, so they could experience it for themselves. Initially, says Kalifa, these tours would begin at a shelter, where the poorest of the city lived. This close encounter with poverty provided its own shiver of danger. But this shiver was increased with travel to establishments of “ill repute” like a dance hall, or a cabaret, where the tour might run into a brawl while visitors had their erotic appetites fed. Eventually the visit to shelters was dropped from the itinerary, and tourists were funneled right to a cabaret. Naturally this gave rise to a whole series of business establishments, to sustain this economy. And these images from the underworld were also sourced and pillaged for themes for the burgeoning new mass media technology that was film.

These tours became especially important during the time of urban renewal in the late 19th century and were accompanied with a sense of nostalgia for all that was quickly being lost as the underworld of the city was sanitized and “cleaned up.” Those visitors from the world above seemed to sense just how much the lower depths of the underworld contributed to the life of the city as whole. It was that dark and dirty part of the city that made the upperworld sparkle and glimmer. Without it, there’s just not as much shine.

KALIFA ARGUES that the age of the underworld—or at least this particular instantiation of the underworld—really ran its course from the late 19th century to the end of the World War II. This underworld is already gone. One of the contributing factors in its demise was the rise of the social sciences, and a palpable shift in the meaning of poverty. There was a slow (though never complete) disengagement from some of the moral suppositions about poverty. The idea of unemployment also began to develop new distinctions between certain forms of poverty. New forms of activism celebrated the virtues, courage, and energy of the “lower class.” For many Europeans and Americans the imaginative geographical core of poverty began to move out of their own cities and into the “Third World.”

Meanwhile, crime itself was also going through its own changes. As the figure of poverty was increasingly decoupled from the figure of crime, criminals themselves seemed to take on their own forms of wealth and glamor in popular media. Film was responsible for this, in part, as was the coverage that trials like that of Al Capone received. But with Prohibition in the United States, and the development of drug trades, scandalous forms of wealth were often associated with those who made their money through criminalized activities. This was true in the United States, of course, with the rise of the mafia and Chicago gangsters. But it was happening with the Yaukuza, in Japan, and other crime networks all over the world.

For many people today, this is the only remaining vestige of the underworld. It’s the reason why, when I tell people that I’m writing about the underworld, this is where their mind travels. Of course, it also sounds totally outdated to make reference to these worlds, which exist—for most of us—in the mythical zone of film and TV. But most of us just don’t think much about the underworld anymore, anyhow. It sounds like an anachronism.

AS THE OLD social imaginary of the underworld was gradually dissembled, some traces of it remained active and at work. I think it’s equally true to say that in the modern urban form of the underworld that Kalifa invokes for us, traces of older underworlds—alluring and entertaining hells, of the sort that Dante wrote about in his Divina Commedia—also remain at work. Hellish spaces have an enduring, if somewhat perverse, appeal.

I wasn’t drawn to write a book about the underworld because I wanted to think about the mafia. But I can’t really dissociate my project from that social imaginary either, can I? Perhaps this is what I really love about the underworld, and why I really obsess over it. It’s a rabbit hole of signs and symbols—a rich black hole of social meanings that are cycled and recycled into our social worlds, destined both to disappear and to endlessly repeat themselves. It’s all there: life, death, crime, sex, poverty, wealth, dirt, roots, and eerie fungal traces that we can’t quite see. The underworld is infinitely more interesting than the world that draws back from it. Perhaps it always has been.