John Torpey > Quotes

“As we have seen, the revolutionary governments, ​​beset by enemies domestic and foreign, real and imagined, sought to use passport controls and other documentary means – “fragments from the wreckage of the old order” – to regulate the movements of émigrés, counterrevolutionary brigands, refractory priests, itinerant mendicants, conscripted soldiers, and the foreign-born, among others. While these devices may have been effective in many instances, the chaos and disorder ravaging the country, the efforts of dissident groups, and the lack of a well-articulated bureaucratic apparatus simply overwhelmed the government’s capacity to assert a successful monopoly on the legitimate means of movement at this time.”
― John Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship and the State