by Becky Taylor
In fact, the round-up also revealed the limitations of the state. So secret had it been that while the detention of Gypsies had gone relatively smoothly – there is one report of three people being killed trying to escape during the Seville operation but no others – the prisons were not prepared, and rapidly became unworkably overcrowded. Their arrival at the arsenal of La Carraca (Cadiz), for instance, also raised a whole series of problems, including the lack of accommodation for both prisoners and troops guarding them, and how the absence of building skills among the prisoners resulted in unforeseen and prolonged delays in naval construction.
More than the practical difficulties, the round-up also revealed the problematic nature of bureaucratic desires to define and categorize people and how everyday experience contradicted stereotypes and popular understandings of ‘Gypsyness’. In this, officials wrestled with some of the issues faced by their counterparts in the Third Reich two centuries later, as they dealt with appeals from people who did not see themselves as Gypsies but had been defined as such. It rapidly became apparent that the roundup had been indiscriminate in nature, as a number of arrestees appealed their incarceration:
Sir, the new Castilians, who are imprisoned in the arsenal at Cartagena bow to Your Majesty’s royal feet. [. . .] They humbly beg Your Majesty to deign to mercifully attend to their humble pleas, and grant them freedom so they can remove their abandoned property; and join their poor wives, children and families, who are equally dispersed with the affliction of being separated from one another, having by nature and love such close links as those of blood and marriage: Your most unfortunate vassals respectfully hope for Your Majesty’s royal generous mercy . . .44
Soon after the round-up a committee was convened in order to consider the cases of those who had letters or official documents proving their non-Gypsy status, sales of property in these cases were suspended, and by the end of October it was acknowledged that there had been mistakes. An instruction was then issued which accepted the existence of Gypsies who, ‘out of tiredness, fear or repentance’, observed the pre-existing laws governing them, and consequently they ‘never could, nor should have been included in that royal decision because, being innocent, they are exempt from any charge and any punishment’. At this point what we see is the division of the incarcerated into ‘good’ Gypsies, who led relatively assimilated lives and held letters testifying to their good character and ‘bad’ non-conformist Gypsies, who were variously described as delinquent, guilty, disobedient, offending, pernicious and deviant.
As in the Austro-Hungarian Empire however, we also see a gap between the desires of central government and the actions of local authorities. Even those designated as rightly incarcerated and set to forced labour were sometimes treated leniently by magistrates, who felt that attempts to escape were ‘excusable’ on the part of people so lacking in prospects. And the everyday practicalities of managing the convict population – which was made up of a significant proportion of the ‘old, crippled and valetudinarian’ – also caused complaints from those required to set them to work. So, in 1762, for instance, the authorities of El Ferrol wrote to Madrid requesting the release of those ‘who, absolutely unfit for any form of work, are constantly in hospital and give rise to costs for their upkeep and treatment without yielding any profit’.
The combination of the large number of appeals and the often ineffective nature of the workforce contributed to the central government moving towards pardoning and freeing all those caught up in the round-up. Begun as a means of releasing the unproductive workforce, so the state would not have to bear the cost of their upkeep, by 1763 it appeared it would become a general pardon on the decision of Charles III who had ascended the throne four years earlier. Matters were delayed, however, as state prosecutors demanded that the issue of ‘unproductive’ Gypsies became tied up with the wider question of what to do with them after release, insisting that measures be put in place to regulate their lives and behaviour. It was not until July 1765, sixteen years after their initial arrest, that all the internees were released. The effect of the round-up on Spain’s Gypsy population was nothing less than catastrophic: of those who survived most had experienced deportation, internment, been subjected to forced labour, punished and hurt. As a result the community’s inner structures had changed completely, and Caló, the distinctive language spoken by Spanish and Portuguese Gypsies, disappeared. This episode has rightly been called the ‘dark Age of Enlightenment’.45
The debate over their place in Spanish society continued, however, and resulted in two men, Pedro Valiente and Pedro Rodríguez, being given the task of drawing up a report that could be used as the basis for future legislation. Finished in 1772 their work reveals a central truth of the treatment of Gypsies in Spain: while laws had pushed towards assimilating them, popular feeling worked against this, treating Gypsies as outcasts who were only able to exist within a highly circumscribed field. Stressing the importance of education, the report also asked for all economic activities to be open to Gypsies, and to ban the use of the word ‘Gitano’ or even ‘New Castilian’. While their findings were not universally accepted they did form the basis of the legislation of 1783 in which Gypsies were given equal citizenship but denied a separate identity. With most trades made accessible to them and all places except Madrid and the royal palaces now open as places for them to live, this represented something like progress. But, as with the reforms in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, they came with demands for conformity: nomadism and Caló were banned, and certain trades – including some of the mainstays of their community such as innkeeping, trading at fairs, shearing and clipping animals – were closed to them.46
These measures continued to be enforced vigorously for the rest of Charles III’s reign, but more patchily after his death in 1788. Here, as elsewhere in mainland Europe, we can see the fragility of these emergent states, with policies being very much tied to the will of individual ministers or monarchs, as well as the acquiescence of the localities. So, similarly in France in the final years of the ancien régime, banishment also became a less favoured response to Gypsies, as it was noted that it was ‘not capable of containing people for whom life is a type of voluntary and perpetual banishment’. By the Revolution the main piece of legislation targeting Gypsies was still the decree of 1682, but as we have seen, its main effect was to break up larger groups into smaller ones, and to push Gypsies to the geographical margins of France. That over a quarter of the Gypsies in the French galleys in the mid-eighteenth century had been born abroad – mainly in the Netherlands, the Rhineland and Switzerland – suggests that opportunities for Gypsies were seen as being better in France than neighbouring parts of Europe.47
By the 1770s consideration was being given by central government to sending them to the Americas, possibly Guiana, although we need to be aware of the gap between intention, policy and implementation.48 Conditions deteriorated rapidly in France from the 1770s, and we need to contextualize treatment of Gypsies within responses to the more general social disorder stemming from the poor harvests and crises of the peasantry and urban poor. This period undoubtedly saw increasingly repressive edicts against vagabonds, beggars and ‘disreputable persons’ (who were estimated to make up 10 per cent of the population by 1791) and which resulted in nearly a quarter of ‘delinquents’ condemned to death and around one-fifth sentenced to the galleys in perpetuity. And yet at the parish and local levels, the understanding of priests and officials of the abject poverty of the population and their need to engage in migrant labour in order to survive meant that proclamations from the centre were habitually ignored in the provinces.49
AS THE EVENTS OF THE REVOLUTION overtook first France and then the rest of Europe the capacity of all states to deal with their Gypsy, vagrant and marginal populations reduced rapidly. Priorities shifted back to the simple survival of regimes and schemes for the improvement of populations disappeared under the tread of Napoleon’s armies. This does not mean, however, that the changes that
occurred from the seventeenth century disappeared, rather that they were put on hold. What shifted in this period was not so much that Gypsies were regarded differently by the states and societies in which they lived, for however much they had made their lives within all the different national and cultural contexts of Europe’s nations they were still seen as outsiders, still largely mistrusted and marginalized. Rather, what changed was how states saw themselves. The ideas of the Enlightenment suggested that government could exist for the good of its population, and reforms could be put in place to educate, protect and improve the populace. This however, came at a price for those living on the margins of society.
FOUR
Nationalism, Race and Respectability
WITHIN THE BROAD SWEEP of European history, the nineteenth century is often depicted as a time of transition from the early modern world of the ancien régime to the post-agrarian and modern nation state. Fuelled in part by population growth and rapid economic change, it was also the product of new ways of conceiving society. So at the same time as large-scale political arguments over the place of monarchs, nation states and democracy were raging across the Continent, industrialization and urbanization – driven by and driving the transport revolution of canals, railways, steam and improved roads – began to rapidly alter how cities and the countryside felt, looked and functioned. People, goods and ideas were able to move between places more easily: social control of the mass of the population by the elites was challenged as much by the emergence of a wealthy and significant middle class as by the explosion of the urban population and an articulate and increasingly organized labour movement. At the same time travel and migration, which had always been a feature of existence, became less daunting, and it is no coincidence that this was the period of mass emigration from Europe to the New World.
Such profound change did not go unchallenged, nor did the world being lost go unmourned. Over the century, elites and their allies developed ways of responding to the altered world they faced: as in the past revolutions were resisted and revolts suppressed, but increasingly it was accepted that resistence and suppression were insufficient tools for social control. And so as well as fledgling democratic systems, technologies of state expanded to increasingly regulate not just the physical environment, but people’s lives, their right to cross boundaries and their right to remain. At the same time as these innovations and the creation of now familiar systems of government, there was also a looking back at the world that was being lost. Consequently, the nineteenth century was also a time in which writers, artists and commentators evoked a prelapsarian world of unchanging rural bliss in order to counter the squalor of mushrooming urban life and industrial filth they encountered on a daily basis. As ever, we cannot think of these developments as all marching together at the same rate of change or in the same manner: they were more noticeable in western than eastern Europe, and in cities and industrial areas than the countryside. But sometimes rapidly, sometimes haltingly and patchily, over time what came to be thought of as ‘modernity’ made its presence felt across the Continent.
And where in all this did the Gypsies fit? If we were to believe the writings of gypsiologists and other contemporary writers, the nineteenth century’s relentless modernity represented a decisive attack on their primitive existence. Yet, from what we have seen so far of their history, it would be a surprise if suddenly they were no longer affected by the broader changes and processes felt by wider society. We shall see how from some angles the nineteenth century might be depicted as one of the easiest for Gypsies since their arrival in Europe, as the grotesque punishments of the early modern period fell out of use, while rapid economic change brought new markets and possibilities for livelihoods. But modern ways of articulating bigotry, new forms of regulation on the part of ever expanding states, developments in policing and surveillance systems, as well as new ways of codifying insiders and outsiders by newly formed nation states all meant that we need to be wary of thinking in terms of unproblematic progress.
If the world was changing rapidly, the stereotypes surrounding Gypsies remained consistent, although they did take on a new urgency. Taking their lead from Grellmann, across Europe writers increasingly crafted the image of Gypsies as a pre-civilized race, sensual and unrestricted, existing in stark opposition to modern man with all his self-inflicted limitations and obligations.1 Depending on one’s perspective this was either a positive attribute or something to be stamped out. The Romantic movement saw them as the last refuge against the horrors of the modern world: the writer Paul de Saint-Victor was not alone when he admitted that
often the imagination, tired of the chains of social life, takes wing on its dreams to collapse under [Gypsies’] tents and enrol in their bands. The day they disappear, the world will lose not just a virtue, but a poetry.2
Within German-speaking Europe Tetzner’s History of the Gypsies (1835) set the tone, depicting them as the ‘sputum of mankind’, who had descended on Europe ‘like a punishment from god, like a swarm of locusts’:
The character of these people is an embodiment of wickedness, carelessness, loquaciousness, cowardice – that is why they are bad soldiers – revengefulness, crapulousness, ridiculous arrogance, deceitfulness and laziness which creates further vices are the main characteristics of a Gypsy’s soul.3
His tropes and prejudices were to be taken up and repeated by authors across the following decades, until they had reached the status of indisputable fact. Encyclopedias of the day propagated a mix of these exotic and negative stereotypes: the Encyclopédie Catholique (1839–48) asserted that ‘it is not rare to see father and daughter, uncle and niece, brother and sister living together and mixed-up in the manner of animals’; while La Grande Encyclopédie (1886–1902) noted how their ‘demeanour is, in spite of the wild air of them, and often remarkable character of native elegance’. Almost inevitably, it was commonly asserted that Gypsy women dabbled in prostitution: the Encyclopédie Nouvelle (1835–41) was simply one among many in suggesting how they ‘sing, dance, get mixed up in fortune telling, steal occasionally, and do worse again just so long as they get their profit’.4
The reality of Gypsies’ lives was of course simultaneously far more mundane and diverse, and is a point worth emphasizing. From the Roma factory workers of Sliven in Bulgaria, to the successful Polish Gypsy voivodes (dukes or governors) noted by Grellmann, from the long-established Gypsy districts of Spanish cities, to nomadic extended family groups crossing the Continent trading and working as they went, for every example of what ‘a Gypsy’ might be we can find a counter example. This diversity in part came from the different positions that had been imposed upon them and which Gypsies had established for themselves across the Continent since their arrival in the fifteenth century. It was also the product of the massive disparity in Europe’s economies: industrializing and urbanizing Britain, north-eastern France, the Low Countries and the German Ruhr all produced rapidly growing cities driven by mass migration and an increasingly restive proletariat. In contrast, huge areas of rural Europe continued to revolve around the agricultural calendar, peasant culture and governed by firmly embedded feudal hierarchies. Consequently, Gypsies were as much a part of the seemingly unchanging round of peasant life as they were of the flows of migrants between and within districts, cities, regions and countries.
Crucially the improved road system, which gradually extended right across the Continent, meant that from the 1830s onwards the caravan – vardo in English Romani – become the practical and attractive, as well as ultimately iconic, mode of dwelling for many Gypsies. Improved communications also began to reshape their relationship with the economy. At the beginning of the century poor transport meant Gypsies and other travelling people were commonly welcomed in remote rural areas, not simply because they supplemented the goods and services available to the population, but because they also provided news, gossip and a diversion from the normal round of life.5 Over time this role became challenged by improved postal services
, wider newspaper circulation, higher levels of literacy and, by the end of the century, the spread of telegraph and telephone networks. However, we also need to remember how geographically patchy these changes were, with Travellers being recorded as still performing this kind of role in the 1930s in parts of upland Scotland, and in the west of Ireland as late as the 1960s. Undoubtedly, however, the areas where they were a central part of the everyday economy became more marginal as the nineteenth century went on.6
More generally, the round of Gypsies’ nomadic life across the Continent continued, with many of their main staples of work – metalwork; horse trading; basket and sieve making/wickerwork; pilfering and begging; shows and spectacles; and fortune telling – remaining roughly consistent.7 And at times governments might even recognize the economic role played by them and other ambulant traders: in 1811 an enquiry led to the issuing of more permits for travelling traders across France, while five years later the minister for the interior instructed prefects to fully enforce the law of October 1798 which guaranteed freedom of trade. As in earlier periods, we also see evidence of local elites refusing to comply with orders from above on the grounds that local Gypsies were valued for the contributions they made to the community. In 1820, the mayor of Saint-Jean-de-Luz explicitly asked for their exemption from general surveillance measures ordered in a prefectoral circular of 20 August 1820: