The persistence of these kinds of restrictions soon provoked the ire of a commentator named “Peuchet,” who was given space in Le Moniteur, one of the principal outlets for revolutionary debate, to publish a scathing indictment of “the slavery of passports” in mid-1790. Insisting that the French state had delivered up the individual’s “movements and his conduct to a surveillance as extensive as it is dangerous” and that every person should be free “to breathe the air he chooses without having to ask permission from a master that can refuse him that right,” Peuchet declared passports “contrary
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