Identification and Registration Practices in Transnational Perspective

People, Papers and Practices

J. Brown, I. About, G. Lonergan, J. Brown, I. About, G. Lonergan

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9780230354388
• eBook ISBN: 9781137367310
• Topic: Politics & International Relations
• Subtopic: International Relations
• Index: Politics & International Relations

This collection examines the subject of identification and surveillance from 16th C English parish registers to 21st C DNA databases. The contributors, who range from historians to legal specialists, provide an insight into the historical development behind such issues as biometric identification, immigration control and personal data use.

Part I

The Central State: Systems, Standards and Techniques

1

Individual Identity and Identification in Eighteenth-Century France

Vincent Denis

Introduction

Any work on the history of identification begins with a narrative,¹ and this one is no exception. In the middle of the sixteenth century, in the French Pyrenees village of Artigat, an unhappy young man called Martin Guerre, who had left his wife and children to serve in the army, came back home after several years of absence.² We know now he was an imposter, but the local community accepted him for a few years. When doubts were raised about his identity and the case brought to court, it proved very difficult to establish with certainty if this man was the true Martin Guerre: the judges had to make their decision after discussion of the testimonies of local inhabitants about the Martin Guerre who had left the village many years before – his accent, the size of his sabots or scars and marks on his skin that he was supposed to have. The case was eventually closed by the dramatic return of the real Martin Guerre. More than a century later, in 1832, Honoré de Balzac wrote a rather different tale in Colonel Chabert, a fiction, but echoing several cases of impersonation and missing people that took place in France after the turmoil of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon. In this novel, Chabert, an officer of Napoleon’s army, was reported as dead in Russia, and his young widow married a rich aristocrat at the beginning of a spectacular social ascent. The unexpected return of Colonel Chabert jeopardized all of this. But Chabert was unable to regain his identity and to be accepted by his fellows. Rejected by his wife, he faced a new legal order, based on papers, bureaucracy, état civil and actes authentiques. Eventually he finished his life in a hospice, his identity reduced to a simple number.

These two stories show us the essence of the act of identification: to establish the continuousness of an individual through time and space, by comparing some of his or her characteristics with previous data, material or immaterial.³ But they also indicate some fundamental gaps in the history of identification in France. In sixteenth-and seventeenth-century France, personal identity was based on interpersonal relationships, shared experiences and social bonds tied between the members of embedded communities, from family to the parish and the surrounding places. Conversely, a traveller venturing outside the sphere of interpersonal relations became unknown, and, deprived of this web of social ties, was no longer recognized, that is, identified. Balzac’s Colonel Chabert singles out the decisive role of written legal procedures and documents.

Between these two periods, the significance of identification in French society radically changed. Their comparison suggests a tremendous shift in the history of the procedures of individual identification. Shifts in identification in France had been linked with the development of the legal registration of births and deaths, and the institution of passports in 1792 for every traveller during the French Revolution. However, this narrative overlooks other practices of legal identification, which were very common, and does not explain how people moving outside their village or town could be identified with certainty before the French Revolution. In this chapter, I will argue that the state and especially the police, which faced increased mobility and urban expansion, introduced radically new standards of identification during the eighteenth century. They started applying new techniques and instruments to identify individuals, in order to know and control a lower class, which was becoming more and more anonymous. The eighteenth century was marked by the growth of written identification procedures, the development of the administrative machinery dedicated to them, and the extension of identification techniques based on written and impersonal certificates. But the ‘police’ were not a unified or central administration at that time. Different institutions shared the power to issue police regulations but also exerted police powers in a more limited sense, for the maintenance of order. It is thus important to consider the circulation of norms, instruments and techniques among protagonists, who contributed to the definition and enforcement of the rules of identification. This chapter will explain the emerging focus on written identification among the royal administrators and will describe the means the police used to introduce new identification techniques.

A breakthrough in the setting of new norms and instruments of identification occurred in France after the long reign of Louis XIV, as part of a series of reforms implemented by bold ministers and councillors of state, surrounding the young king Louis XV, aged 5. These reformers wished to transform the domestic administration of the kingdom, but of primary concern was the disastrous social and economic situation of the kingdom, after the War of the Spanish Succession (1701–13), itself preceded by twenty-five years of almost uninterrupted military conflict. This shift toward a more rational government, based on technical knowledge, bureaucracy and information, was part of a general transformation of the French central state in the 1720s, visible in such developments as the promotion of statistical knowledge or the creation of a body of royal engineers to build a national network of roads.⁴ For the administrators and those in charge of the maintenance of law and order, the practices of identification began to play a crucial role in the exercise of the government and the ordinary ‘police’, for maintaining order and the social cohesion.

A coherent model appeared under the Regency of Philippe of Orleans (1715–23), as the royal state was simultaneously challenged by the conjuncture of economic crisis, the plague of Marseilles and the demobilization of Louis XIV’s army.⁵ Between 1716 and 1724, a series of initiatives were adopted that touched on several domains of the royal administration, all of which included the use of new tools of identification. The parallels between administrative initiatives are instructive. The monarchical government applied similar measures for the limitation of mobility to resolve a variety of problems – to control the movements of vagrants, to arrest and punish beggars and recidivists from 1718 to 1725, to stop the desertion of soldiers with the royal declaration of 1716 and to prevent the spread of the plague beyond Provence.⁶

Reflecting on the practices of the army is particularly useful, as this was an institution that played a key role in this evolution. Inaugurating these new measures, the royal edict of 2 July 1716 had to address not only the challenge of demobilizing the immense army inherited by Louis XIV and its reorganization on a more rational financial and disciplinary basis, but also the problem of desertion.⁷ The new regulation established the formalities for both conscription and leave for each soldier: in fact, it regulated all aspects of soldiers’ movements – their conscription, their demobilization and the measures to be taken against desertion. This edict introduced standardized passes for temporary leaves from duty, called cartouches, and registers for better control of troop numbers, in which the officers had to write down the identity of each soldier at his enlistment. A copy of each register was to be sent to the War Offices with the names of deserters, which considerably simplified their research. Finally, soldiers would be obliged to present standardized leave certificates identifying themselves, so also permitting the identification of deserters who were not in possession of these certificates In 1716, all the soldiers were to be recorded in a vast series of standardized central registers, the contrôles des troupes, located at the court in Versailles. No soldier could leave his regiment without a printed, standardized certificate containing his name and physical description.

The measures implemented in the campaigns against begging, undertaken during the Regency, also contained rather strict provisions: at certain periods, official passports were obligatory for travel for beggars and even for the working population, first in several provinces, as in Auvergne in 1718, then in the entire kingdom.⁸ In 1724, in a renewed attempt to ‘eradicate mendacity [i.e., begging]’, a central register of the beggars and vagrants arrested in the kingdom was established at the General Hospital in Paris. This included their physical description – to ‘remove any hope of impunity’ for recidivists, according to one of its fiercest advocates, the Attorney General of the Parliament of Paris, Joly de Fleury.⁹

The struggle against the spread of the plague seems related to this shift. It led to the reactivation of traditional measures to control the movements of people and goods by identifying them and certifying their origin, using billets de santé – individual health certificates issued to healthy travellers by local police authorities that had been common in Europe since the sixteenth century at least.¹⁰ But the decisions taken after 1720 went far beyond previous actions. Entire provinces were put under the control of the sanitary police, coordinated from Versailles.¹¹ Heavily guarded sanitary cordons, called ligne or mur of the plague, were established to isolate the infected territories of south-east France.¹² The army enforced the control of a health certificate necessary to move around or leave the regions affected by contagion.

In each of the cases examined above, the measures implemented by the royal administration represent common features. So, in the absence of a deliberately planned project, a body of more or less coherent principles and techniques gradually appeared as a consequence of dramatic circumstances. The certificate and the register now formed an inescapable pairing. Deserters and vagrants were by nature difficult for the state to ‘capture’. The monarchy then concentrated its efforts on the identification of all the soldiers, prisoners, migrants and travellers in a given space. The new measures reversed the old logic of stigmatization. In each case, it was the lack of ‘papers’ that defined a member of a fringe group, enabling the state to distinguish the soldier from the deserter, the good worker and deserving pauper from the ne’er-do-well vagabond, the ‘healthy’ individual from the ‘potentially diseased’. This then was a case of reverse identification in which the administration identified the reverse or the opposite of the group they were actually attempting to discover, as with the soldiers for the deserters. This principle was probably not new. But its recurrent use by the French monarchy on an unprecedented scale was.

However, the progression of these measures was far from being linear. Once the fever for reform and the challenges of the Regency had passed, the majority of them were abandoned, such as the emblematic beggars’ central register. Only the contrôles des troupes kept on working, because the military administration had sufficient manpower to man it, and it remained of crucial importance to the French state – the War Department was probably one of the largest state institutions. But the legacy of the Regency did not simply fade away. The knowledge developed during this decisive period remained a repertory of experiments that could later be used by administrators, when they deemed it useful.

This set of administrative tools and norms resurfaced from the 1750s onwards, as France was plagued (or so it seemed to social observers of the time) by hordes of vagrants and unemployed idle young men, living rough in the city streets or stealing from private houses; it was a phenomenon that greatly worried the good citizens of the nation. Identification became a hot ideological issue too, since the old elites were complaining about the disorder of social appearances and the blurring of visible, social boundaries, established by reputation, clothe...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables and Figures
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• Part I The Central State: Systems, Standards and Techniques
• Part II Beyond the Central State: Community, Commerce and Economics
• Part III The Identified: Perception, Resistance and Negotiation
• Afterword: The Future of Identification’s Past: Reflections on the Development of Historical Identification Studies
• Bibliography
• Index