Une histoire de l'identite

Vincent Denis has produced an engaging and highly topical history of identification in early modern France. After all, the issue of passports, visas and the sans-papiers remains at the centre of an ongoing and highly controversial debate in the European Union about measures to reduce Europe's swelling number of illegal immigrants. In a sense, Denis has laid out the historical background to the discussion by tracing the growth of personal identification systems from the death of Louis XIV to the fall of Napoleon. It turns out that France has been dealing with the problem of sans-papiers for around 300 years, though the ‘foreign’ population under surveillance has changed considerably. The story that Denis tells is that French monarchy, the First Republic and the First Empire all became increasingly concerned with identifying and tracking individuals on French soil. Focusing on archives in Besançon, Bordeaux, Clermont-Ferrand and Paris, Denis uncovers an abundance of material on the multiplicity of forms of identification used in the eighteenth century: passports, merchant papers, identification cards, military cards, certificats de vie et moeurs and aveux for the poor, begging certificates, livrets for journeyman artisans, billets de santé for persons of sound health who survived pandemics, cartes civiques, cartes de sûreté and certificats de civisme during the Revolution and civic registry books for travellers or individuals who relocated to new cities. Taken as a whole, Denis argues, these multiple forms of identification reveal a new found, secular concern for individuating members of society and monitoring their travels and whereabouts. Denis terms this process ‘savoir de l’Etat’. This impulse to track and identify even extended to the morgue, where Denis shows that police investigators employed new tactics to identify anonymous corpses. He also argues that the numbering of houses in Paris from the 1760s onward (i.e. addresses) created another level of identification by associating individuals with particular buildings.

Ancient history · Art · Empire · Ethnology · French revolution · Genealogy · Humanities · Identification (biology) · Immigration · Political science · Population · Sociology · Demography · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law