Le Coz was very much on the side of those who wished to restore passport restrictions. During the course of the parliamentary debate that his pleas initiated – a debate that extended over several days and generated considerable passion and eloquence – Le Coz would dub passports the “Argus of the patrie.”49 (In classical mythology, Argus was a monster with many eyes who was therefore regarded as a good watchman.) It is perhaps noteworthy that Le Coz coined this phrase almost simultaneously with Jeremy Bentham’s proposal in the early 1790s of what Karl Polanyi called Bentham’s “most personal
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