Citizenship and Those Who Leave: The Politics of Emigration and Expatriation

1. Leaving: A Comparative View

1 leaving: a comparative view John Torpey In the early stages of the French Revolution, the Constitution of 1791 promulgated the norm in liberal democratic societies that citizens were to be permitted to leave their homes in pursuit of better opportunities elsewhere. Although most of us have come to take this norm for granted, its prominent place in the catalog of revolutionary freedoms signaled a major innovation . Freedom to depart was a matter of the greatest importance to vast numbers of people who confronted one or another form of restraint on their mobility, whether in France or elsewhere. Indeed, the freedom to move about internally or to emigrate beyond the borders of one’s country has remained a matter of the greatest significance in political struggles down to our own day. In contrast to what we might regard now as their more usual function of regulating entries, passports and related paperwork have frequently played an important role in regulating departures as well. These documents merit attention because, beyond the mere adoption of strictures, they are among the papers that have been crucial to implementing restrictions on movement by helping to establish identity. And they reflect an essential but largely unstudied aspect of modern states: namely, their efforts to construct and enforce durable identities that facilitate their “embrace” of their own subjects/citizens, and the states’ resulting ability to establish, maintain, and enhance their control over particular territories.1 The use of passports and similar pieces of paper to constrain departure is closely connected to the history of “unfree labor,” but such documents may also be employed when states seek to restrict mobility in order to undermine what they view as political or other kinds of opposition or unruliness. As Aristide Zolberg has noted, the relative relaxation of constraints on departure was crucial to the surge of migration that created the modern world, as Europeans poured across the Atlantic in a growing stream during the nineteenth century.2 Prior to this “great Atlantic migration,” paradoxically , millions of Africans traversed the “middle passage” without escaping severe limitations on their movements. Their contribution to the peopling of the Americas had little to do with emigration in the sense of individual decisions to move in search of improved life chances. They came as slaves and, having arrived in the New World in chains, remained largely immobilized . Despite the trend toward a loosening of restrictions on leaving, the persistence of constraints in many parts of the world during the nineteenth century helped to determine the composition and timing of other elements of the migrant streams generated during the advance of modern industrial societies. Those kept from leaving—who might have contributed substantial numbers—would have to await the coming of the twentieth century before they began to move in large proportions. the french revolution and the freedom to depart Constraints on departures, including passport requirements, were an important fact of life for the vast majority of the subjects of prerevolutionary France. The battle to abolish passport controls in the late eighteenth century was thus part of the larger struggle against what the revolutionaries regarded as the ancien régime’s tyrannical grip on French society. In this regard, the revolutionaries objected to a 1669 edict of Louis XIV that had forbidden his subjects to leave the territory of France, and they objected to related requirements that those leaving the kingdom be in possession of a passport.3 The matter of passport restrictions on movement appeared among the many complaints regarding royal government that were presented to the estates general convened at Versailles in 1789.4 These protests led to a relaxation of controls on movement immediately after the fall of the Bastille on July 14. The result of this relaxation of restrictions, according to a historian of the revolutionary emigration, was that “Frenchmen were free to go and come as they pleased” during the initial revolutionary period of 1789–1792.5 As the leaders of the revolution came to feel more besieged, however, they sought measures to curtail this extensive freedom to move about. The situation in France changed dramatically with the flight of the king on June 21, 1791. In a state of shocked alarm at the king’s attempted escape, France’s National Assembly mandated a complete halt to departures from the kingdom .6 Yet just a week later, the assembly decreed that foreigners and French merchants would be free to leave only if they were in possession of a passport supplied by...