The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State (Cambridge Studies in Law and Society)

by John Torpey

Despite the Assembly’s decisive steps to guarantee free circulation when it adopted the new constitution in September 1791, those involved in constructing the new regime in France recognized that they had to be in a position to “embrace” the subjects of the state when the need to do so arose. Accordingly, it was necessary for the state to be in control of birth registries that until then had been in the hands of the parish priest. Because the Catholic Church was principally concerned to tend to its own flock, however, the church registers frequently ignored the births of Jews, Protestants, and others. This simply would not do for modern states, which – unlike the Church – are territorial and membership organizations that must thus be able to distinguish between members and nonmembers, those with rights of access to the territory and those lacking them. On September 20, 1792, the government therefore decreed the establishment of civil status (l’état civil), a title denoting “standing” within a constituted political order. “From that moment on,” Gérard Noiriel has written, “an individual could only exist as a citizen once his or her identity had been registered by the municipal authorities, according to regulations that were the same throughout the national territory.”75 In doing so, the French state enhanced its capacity to “embrace” its citizens and to keep track of them in order to achieve its aims. On the same day, ironically, Goethe famously declared that “this date and...