Incarcerare le popolazioni mobili: identificazione, scarcerazione ed espulsione nella Toscana napoleonica

Autore: Francesco Saggiorato
In: Meridiana. 101, 2021
doi:10.23744/4072
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Abstract

This essay aims to shed light on the close correlation between the identification procedures, the measures of arrest and administrative detention of individuals without passports, and the massive presence of seasonal workers within the prison spaces in Napoleonic Tuscany. Furthermore, it demonstrates how the study of the migratory phenomenon can serve as a prism to analyse multiple aspects related to social control, including the impact on the prison model coming from revolutionary France. The examination of the negotiation practices of release, as well as of the police measures of expulsion, reveals the limits of the administrative confinement of the migrant population in the overcrowded Tuscan prisons of the early Nineteenth-century. Finally, in the muddled division between «honest» and «industrious» workers, and suspicious travellers whose identity could not be verified, an insurmountable contradiction emerges in relation to the indiscriminate use of preventive measures against vagrants, refractory conscripts, and deserters.

Keywords: Mobile populations; Napoleonic police; Prison system; Administrative measures.