by Becky Taylor
If we were to look for one Enlightenment text that epitomized the tension between the belief that all humans might be improved and the assumption that some ‘races’ were innately doomed to inferiority, it would be hard to do better than Heinrich Grellmann’s Dissertation on the Gypsies. Grellmann, who worked at that seat of the German enlightenment, Göttingen University, was long credited with making the link between Romani languages and an Indian origin for Gypsy peoples. While more recent research has shown how his work was more a synthesis of the insights of his contemporaries, his Dissertation nevertheless rapidly became the cornerstone of subsequent scholarly work on Gypsies in both Europe and America.26 His book set out to be ‘equally useful for entertainment, as for the promotion of the knowledge of manners and mankind’, and covered the history of Gypsies, their language and their place in European societies.27 Although the linguistic findings are often seen as the most important part of the work, in fact his descriptions of the position of Gypsies right across Europe became the standard accounts of their lives for well over a century.
As well as being at the forefront of emerging scholarship on Gypsies, Grellmann is particularly interesting in the way in which he struggled to resolve the conflict in his thinking between the roles of ‘nature’ and ‘nurture’ in creating ‘Gypsy character’ as well as designating their place in society:
Neither time, climate, nor example, have in general, hitherto, made any alteration. For the space of between three and four hundred years, they have gone wandering about, like pilgrims and strangers: they are found in eastern and western countries, as well among the rude as civilised, indolent and active people; yet they remain ever, and everywhere, what their fathers were – Gipsies. Africa makes them no blacker, nor Europe whites; they neither learn to be lazy in Spain; nor diligent in Germany: in Turkey Mahomet, and among Christians Christ, remain equally without adoration. Around, on every side they see fixed dwellings, with settled inhabitants, they nevertheless, go on in their own way, and continue, for the most part, unsettled wandering robbers . . . Let us reflect how different they are from Europeans; the one is white, the other black. This clothes himself; the other goes half naked. This shudders at the thought of eating carrion, the other prepares it as dainty . . . Perhaps it may be reserved for our age, in which so much is attempted for the benefit of states and mankind, to humanise a people who, for centuries, have wandered in error and neglect.28
Here, in his preface he quite clearly sets out the ways in which Gypsies were fundamentally and irredeemably separate from Europeans. And yet, at the same time, part of the function of his work was to push ideas of reform, to ‘humanize’ them: while the ‘error’ of which he writes was clearly that of the Gypsies themselves, the ‘neglect’ was that of society. Given this preoccupation it is no surprise that a large portion of his work was given over to the actions of the ‘enlightened despots’ of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Maria Theresa (1717–1780) and Joseph II (1741–1790), who enacted ‘civilizing’ reforms within a context of compulsion. Both these monarchs set into motion a number of policies aimed at the Gypsy populations of their territories.
Maria Theresa’s edicts centred around attempts to forcibly assimilate Gypsies into the wider population and its perceived norms of behaviour. The first decrees, stemming from 1768, were focused on Hungary, which held a significant Gypsy population, and aimed at regularizing their lifestyles and denying a separate cultural identity or existence:
[Gypsies were] prohibited from dwelling in huts or tents; from wandering up and down the country; from dealing in horses; from eating animals which died of themselves, and carrion; and from electing their own Wayda [voivode] or Judge. It was intended to extirpate the very name and language of these folks, out of the country. They were no longer to be called Gipsies, but New Boors (Uj Magyar), nor to converse any longer with each other in their own language, but in that of any of the countries in which they chose to reside . . . They were to procure Boors clothing, to commit themselves to the protection of some territorial superior, and live regularly. Such as were fit for soldiers, to be enlisted in the regiments.29
In 1773 these orders were made more ‘rigid’ so that
no Gipsy should have permission to marry, who could not prove himself in condition, to provide for, and maintain a wife and children. That from such Gipsies who were married and had families, the children should be taken away, by force, removed from their parents, relations or intercourse with the Gipsy race, to have a better education given to them.30
And in fact Grellmann gave detailed accounts of how children over the age of five were taken away on two separate raids ‘between five and six o’clock in the morning’ in December 1773 and April 1774 in order to be rehomed and ‘usefully educated’:
Among the former was a girl fourteen years old, who was forced to submit to be carried off in her bridal state. She tore her hair for grief and rage, and was quite beside herself with agitation, but she has now [1776] recovered a composed state of mind.31
And yet, despite Grellmann’s whole-hearted endorsement of the measures, overall these new regulations were not enforced either enthusiastically or systematically in the localities as he would have liked, dependent as they were on particular overseers and other officials to see them through. Here we see the emergence of one of the themes which is to become increasingly important in our story: that of the tension between the desires of central governments and informers and the preoccupations of local governments who were usually required to implement the policies. Although as states became more modern and citizens were no longer physically required to set aside days of labour to build scaffolds, central states still required resources from and ultimately the will and support of local authorities in order to implement its desires. And in the context of limited resources, and indeed often without an agreed sense of what the state was for, local authorities could prove to be enduringly obdurate in the face of change.
In continuing to push for the assimilation of Gypsies, and a denial of their separate identity, Joseph II built further on his mother’s reforms. From the time of his co-regency, but particularly from 1780 when he ruled alone, he put in place a number of measures that again aimed to reduce Gypsies’ visible differences and bring them in line with what were perceived as the norms of society. So, they were ordered to send their children to school and receive religious education; they were to ensure their children no longer ran around naked ‘to prevent annoyance and disgust in others’; and that children of the opposite sex should no longer sleep in the same bed. These ‘New Magyars’ were to work for an employer and stop horse dealing – only gold panners were to own their own horses – and were to labour on the land. And then there was a host of measures aimed at removing any visible signs of their ethnic difference:
In diet, apparel and language [Gypsies] were required to follow national usage, eat no dead cattle, sport no multi-coloured garments, and refrain from speaking their own tongue. They should no longer let themselves be seen in mantles whose only purpose was to cloak stolen goods.32
Here we can see how both the material basis for their lives, as well as the outward expressions of their culture and ethnicity were seen as equally important targets for reform: it was not enough that they were to work like Hungarians, they were to eat, speak and dress like them too.
We need to set these attempts to turn Gypsies into ‘industrious and useful citizens’ and of ‘winning this poor and unfortunate people for virtue and the state’ in the broader context of the reforms of the period. Far wider in scope than tackling the ‘Gypsy problem’, Joseph II initiated a range of measures designed to create a workable modern centralized state out of the shambling and highly diverse institutional structures inherited, and only partially reformed, by his mother.33 Wide ranging in their reach, the reforms included abolishing serfdom, putting limitations on the amount of violence that could be used in the punishment of subordinates, improving educational facilities, regulating poor relief, prohibiting c
hildren under nine years from working in factories and improving the employment conditions of servants. While very much inspired by the Enlightenment, this does not mean change took the same form as the liberté, egalité, fraternité of the French thinkers of the early revolutionary period. Rather, equality was taken to mean conformity, a conformity that was to be enacted under a monolithic and centralized state. It was driven by expectations that people would abide by certain ‘norms’, and so although a number of edicts increased toleration for Jews, they went hand in hand with legislation insisting that Jews must bear a German family name, must speak and write German and, in public at least, not speak Yiddish.34 So, as with Gypsies, assimilation rather than toleration of difference was ideology underpinning the reforms.
Similarly, and given what we have already seen regarding the treatment of the poor and vagrants over the early modern period, there are unsurprising parallels with the measures enacted against beggars and ‘loafers’. Joseph’s reforms included the creation of a new network of facilities for the poor, with local authorities in combination with parish churches keeping count of the numbers of poor and distributing alms on Sundays to the needy. At the same time as increasing and regularizing access to alms for the ‘deserving’ poor, there was a significant hardening of attitudes towards those seen as ‘undeserving’. Measures enacted under Maria Theresa were hardened by Joseph II, so that both itinerancy and lack of steady employment became punishable offences.35 All these actions speak of a state that was trying to extend its reach, to use its power to improve the lives of its subjects, but also to control and regulate their behaviour.
While Grellmann was largely in praise of the reforms, his work also demonstrated his ambivalence: there was a very real struggle in him between his rationalist and his racial beliefs. So in relation to two of the regiments of the Hungarian army in which an eighth of the soldiers were newly conscripted Gypsies, he discussed not only the official attempts to assimilate them, but his disquiet:
In order to prevent either them, or any other person from remembering their descent, it is ordered by the government that as soon as any of them join the regiment, he is no longer to be called a Gipsy. Here he is placed, promiscuously with other men, and by such a wise regulation, may be systematically rendered useful. But whether he would be adequate to a soldier’s station . . . is very dubious . . . he can defy hunger, thirst, heat, cold and other inconveniences [which] make him uncommonly qualified for a military life: on the other hand . . . How could a regiment, composed of people, without heart or courage, who would be overcome with fear and dismay, on the least appearance of danger, would give up everything, and only think of saving themselves by flight, ever perform any great action?36
Here we see something of his assumptions around racial characteristics – innate cowardice and physical endurance – while also stressing how ‘Men may be formed to anything’, and how banishment, that time-honoured strategy for dealing with Gypsies, needed to be understood as both ineffectual and wasteful:
an increased population is more advantageous than a smaller one . . . Every man has taxes to pay, and powers to exert, the Gipsies none of the least; if he does not know how to make use of them, let the state teach him, and keep him in leading strings until the end is attained . . . [for] when he has discontinued his Gipsy life, consider him with his fecundity and numerous family, who being reformed, are made useful citizens, and we shall perceive how great want of economy it was to throw him away as dross.37
Attempts to make Gypsies a productive section of the population were perhaps most systematic in the Habsburg lands under Joseph: although his death in 1790 and then the chaos caused by the Napoleonic wars rapidly caused them to fall into disuse. Yet, they are important because they can be seen as the spearhead of similar policies across Europe, so by the late eighteenth century we can track a growing tension in policy towards Gypsies with authorities vacillating between older ideas around banishment and repression and newer policies aiming at reform and assimilation.
Spain here is a case in point, as the eighteenth century saw the use of banishment and forced labour alongside measures aimed at assimilating Gypsies and denying a separate ethnic identity. In part this needs to be tied to the establishment of the Bourbon dynasty in Spain and their subsequent reforms that aimed at a far higher level of centralization, with a consequent reduction in the autonomy of the separate regions.38 As in the Austro-Hungarian Empire one of the motivating features of the changes was a desire to make unproductive and marginal groups more useful to the state and society in general. This was part of the thinking that lay behind the edict of 1717, which reaffirmed previous restrictions and decreed that Gypsies were only to live in one of 41 specified towns (with sentencing to the galleys for men and flogging for women the punishment for defiance). The limits of its success can be seen in the fact that 1746 saw another 34 towns being included in the list, at a ratio of one Gypsy family per 100 inhabitants, suggesting that up to this point at least Gypsies had largely continued living where they wished, irrespective of the supposed regulations.39
Where the efforts of the authorities over the past century and a half had been more effective, however, was in almost completely eradicating nomadism among the Gypsies of the peninsula: it appears by the mid-eighteenth century they were almost completely sedentary. This meant that the next measure targeting Gypsies – the ‘great round-up’ of 30 July 1749 – was far easier for the state to carry out. The round-up aimed to eliminate Gypsies completely as a separate group, by incarcerating men separately from women and children and setting them to forced labour. Rather than being consigned to the galleys, which had been abolished in 1748 as a result of improvements in naval technology, labour was to be diverted to the building of ports and arsenals as well as to the Spanish garrisons of North Africa and the notorious mercury mines of Almadén. Boys aged between twelve and fifteen were to be placed in apprenticeship in order to be initiated into ‘useful’ trades, or were to be entrusted to the Navy if they showed an aptitude for maritime activities.40 Overall the aim was to destroy Spanish Gypsies as a separate group: the ex-prime minister, the Marquis de la Ensenada, who was central to the success of the project, had personally declared ‘that this category of people will disappear’.
Here it is worth pausing for a moment to think about the implications of both the ambition and actions of the Spanish state, and drawing on the insights of Zygmunt Bauman who conceptualized the change from early modern to modern states as a shift from ‘game-keeping’ to ‘gardening’. Gamekeepers, as he saw it, keep a general eye on the land under their care, unable to make more than a few broad-brush interventions to affect the populations under their jurisdiction; gardeners on the other hand pay close attention to working both the land and choosing their plants, deciding which are desirable and need cultivating, and which are weeds.41 This insight allowed him to argue that the Nazi regime, rather than being an aberration of modernity, was in fact its most logical expression, and it also allows us to look at the actions of the Spanish state in a broader historical context.
As on the other side of Europe in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, ideas of the Enlightenment were feeding through into state practice: in a whole range of ways states were seeing that they might exist not only to wage war and control territories, but might actively intervene in order to make their populations more prosperous and productive, as well as more taxable and orderly. While these changes may have had many beneficial implications for those in mainstream society, this was at the expense of those on the margins. While superficially banishment of all Gypsies from the kingdom might seem little different from the round-up, there were two crucial differences: by the mid-eighteenth century the capacity of the state to carry out its actions was greatly increased, and so it was not simply an expression of desire, but an order for action; and secondly there is a difference between banishment and incarcerating all Gypsies simultaneously, holding men and women separately with the express aim of breaking and ending Span
ish Gypsy ethnicity and culture in all its forms. Consequently, while we will see how for various reasons it failed in its ambitions, and while the word is anachronistic in this context, the 1749 round-up needs to be seen as genocidal in intention if not in outcome.
The surviving documentation makes it clear that it was Gypsies as a whole ethnic group which was the target, rather than ‘antisocial’ or other elements within it. When discussing the different options for removing the problem of Gypsies from society, the opinion of Ferdinand vi’s Jesuit confessor was sought. He replied:
The means proposed by the governor of the council to root out this bad race, which is hateful to God and pernicious to man, seem good to me. The king will be making a great gift to God, Our Lord, if he manages to get rid of these people.42
And yet there was some confusion over who ‘these people’ might actually be. Documentation from the round-up demonstrates the extent to which mixed marriages between Gypsies and the rest of the Spanish population were relatively common. Debates over what to do in such cases resulted in the central council clarifying the rules and deciding that the husband’s background was to take precedence in all cases. Although seen as separate from and outside of Spanish society, the need to construct these rules demonstrates that things were not as clear-cut as Spanish elites would have liked to believe.
What is notable about the round-up is the scale and efficiency of the exercise: while manifestly not laudable, it is nevertheless testament to the growing competence of Spain’s state apparatus that in the course of one night 881 Gypsy families were arrested and incarcerated. Overseen by the Marquis de la Ensenada, the operation was planned and executed under strict injunctions of secrecy: centralized records and the insistence that Gypsies were only settled in certain towns made finding them and planning the operation easier; delegation of the bulk of the work to local magistrates and the Captaincy General of Valencia and his troops ensured there was an adequate body of men to enforce the action. Furthermore the whole operation was financed by auctioning the goods of the detainees. The proceeds covered everything from the hiring of the carts and draught animals used for the journey, and the food needed during their journey to the irons, chains and ropes used to prevent them from escaping. Again, the records give us an insight into the lives of Gypsies in Spain in this period: while much of the property was of little value, in some cases Gypsies are shown to have owned or rented housing, animals used in farming, and trade tools, such as those used by blacksmiths; they seem often to have also been property owners.43