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

by John Torpey

Then, just a week after slamming shut the gates to departures of French citizens from France, the Assembly also decreed that foreigners and French merchants would be free to leave the kingdom. Before doing so, however, foreigners were to be in possession of a passport supplied by the ambassador from their own country or by the French ministry of foreign affairs, whereas the French merchants were required to obtain a passport from their own or the nearest district capital. In order to avoid a repetition of the sort of disguised escape attempted by the king, article 7 of the decree mandated that “all passports are to contain the number of persons to whom they are given, their names, their age, their description, and the parish inhabited by those who have obtained them, who are obliged to sign both the register of passports and the passports themselves.”