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

by John Torpey

In the course of these developments, rulers seeking to expand their domains and their grip on populations increasingly asserted their authority to determine who could come and go in their territories. For example, during the late medieval period in France, the legal concept of the “foreigner” shifted from the local to the “national” level (at this point the term can still only be applied anachronistically), and from the private realm to that of the state, as a consequence of the royal usurpation from the seigneur of the so-called droit d’aubaine, according to which foreigners had been defined as those born outside the seigneurie. This [shift] created for the first time a kingdomwide status of foreigner and, correlatively, an embryonic legal status of French citizen or national. The legal distinction between French citizen and foreigner thus originated in the late medieval consolidation of royal authority at the expense of seigneurial rights.