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

by John Torpey

Not without reason, the revolutionary leadership regarded the émigrés – as potential enemies of the revolution in league with the king, reactionary priests and nobles, and foreign powers – as a profound threat to its survival.26 And of course there were many others who were viewed with suspicion, and hence as deserving of surveillance and sharpened control. A notion of “foreignness” underlay this attitude, but it was not the same as that now-familiar version that reflects the rivalries of narcissistic nation-states. In his famous pamphlet “What is the Third Estate?” of January 1789, the Abbé Sieyès had written of the nobility: “This class is assuredly foreign to the nation because of its do-nothing idleness.”27 This “political” rather than national definition of the foreigner owed everything to the fact that the revolution had burst upon the stage of world history by defining “the nation” principally in terms that excluded a slothful, parasitic nobility, rather than people from other countries.