by Becky Taylor
Even such a brief look at how the economic changes of the nineteenth century affected Gypsies points to the complex way in which what we may broadly characterize as modernity affected their lives. While it is rarely helpful to point to a ‘Golden Age’ in any people’s history, there seems to have been a period in the early to mid-nineteenth century, between the crumbling of anciens régimes and the emergence of nation states, when what we might think of the technologies of rule were in flux. Put simply this was a time when the early modern solutions to the ‘Gypsy problem’ of banishment and extreme physical punishment fell out of use, while modern mechanisms of surveillance and regulation had yet to take hold.
As ever, this was not the same across the Continent, nor, as we shall see, was it a linear process. But it is clear that it was within these gaps, and at the edges, where Gypsies were most able to flourish, taking advantage of places where regulations were lighter or controls were lifted as much as they did new economic opportunities. And it was within the gradual disintegration of the ancien régimes and empires under the pressures of economic change and demands for political change and national expression, such gaps might open.
Just as the Enlightenment found expression in the revolutions of France and the United States, so too did it inform the nationalisms emerging as a popular force across Europe. Nationalism, often tied, but not always, to ideas of democracy, became something that challenged autocratic monarchies and the concept of the divine right of kings. Once again, such generalizations hide as much as they reveal: both the Dutch Republic and Britain’s constitutional monarchy were well established by the early eighteenth century, while it took the convulsions of the early twentieth century and of the First World War to dislodge the Russian Tsarist and Habsburg empires. While paying attention to such differences across place and time, overall the nineteenth century was to see the idea of the nation state becoming the dominant political ideology in Europe. Central to its success was the way in which the ‘nation’ was not only depicted as more ‘natural’ but more modern and powerful than empires.28 And yet, the idea of the nation state was far from natural. If France and Britain, both of which had emerged as relatively stable nations during the early modern period, still struggled with how to treat their peripheries, how much more was this the case for Germany, riven as it was by countless boundaries, competing histories and religious affiliations? Or the Balkan region, with its history of multi-ethnic and highly diverse communities?
If the ‘nation’ was a political construction, then, as we shall see, so too were the stories on which it so often relied. Indeed, the nationalism of the modern period was often a carefully constructed bundle of myths deployed by an emerging political class. In this revived, or even invented, folk myths combined with the emotional power of romanticism in order to produce a cultural rationale for a political idea that seemed to offer a powerful alternative to the injustices of empire. And it was no less powerful for being invented: by the end of the century, the Greek, Serb and Bulgarian wars for independence had become nationalizing projects, in which minorities, often Muslims, often also Roma, fell victim to the purifying violence of the Balkan nation-builders.29 As well as reshaping the political map of the region, these wars were a foretaste of just how destructive the collision of nation and identity might be: a collision which was to be writ large in the twentieth century.
What is perhaps unexpected, given the marginal position of Gypsies in societies across Europe, is the way in which they could form a key part of debates over and constructions of national identity. If we look at the Balkans we can see different ways in which emerging national movements might interact with particular Roma populations. The diversity which was the legacy of 400 years of Ottoman rule ensured that not only was there no one path to nationhood, but that the relationship between Gypsies and the Balkans’ other populations could play out very differently depending on the context. We need to remember that by the beginning of the nineteenth century there were between three and four times more Muslim Roma than Christian in the Balkans, and while both contemporaries and historians made attempts to distinguish between settled and nomadic groups, evidence suggests this could be profoundly fluid. And as we shall see, at various points Roma might identify, or be identified, as ‘Turkish’ or ‘Greek’ as much as ‘Gypsy’, ‘Bulgarian’ or ‘Romanian’.
Already by the early nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire was struggling to effectively rule its Balkan territories. A complex process of nation building that began with the Serbian uprisings of 1804–13 and fed into the political outcomes of the Congress of Paris at the end of the Crimean War profoundly challenged the centuries-old Ottoman ideology of disparate territories united under Islam.30 While the revolutionary 1830s and 1840s awakened a belief in the right and capacity of nations to determine their own fates, what was less clear was how those nations might be defined. Intellectuals across the Balkans, inspired by romantic nationalism, began to look to native traditions of language, religion and ethnic group for cultural inspiration and political solutions.31 At the same time, they also looked for inspiration beyond the region, particularly to France.
The political instability of the region, as well as the wider intellectual context of the time increasingly produced an atmosphere in which the foundations of serfdom and slavery were challenged. In Bucharest in particular we see how the tentacles of the Enlightenment and of ideas of liberté, egalité, fraternité spread via its sizeable French expatriate population. Crucial here were the writings and political activities of two such residents in the 1830s, Jean Vaillant and Félix Colson. Both French language tutors to the emerging national elites of the city, they not only introduced modern educational ideas, but alongside their French language teaching brought its Republican ideas to their charges. They rapidly became pre-occupied with the position of Roma slaves within Wallachian and Moldavian society, seeing it as indicative of not only the backward nature of the region as a result of Ottoman imperialism, but as a more general symbol of the need to throw off the yoke of oppression.32 Vaillant argued that slavery was based on the complicity of the entire social system: ‘the state sells them, the private entrepreneurs buy them, and the monks also sit around with their palms exposed’. He wrote vividly of an encounter with some enslaved Gypsies who were chained together at the leg and neck in a river mining sand:
Who are these beasts I see in the darkening dusk? Walking back and forth on all fours, like rats, when on two legs, like monkeys . . . certainly they’re not men; they’re animals. My God! They are people! Gypsies!33
Such awareness of the miseries of slavery were also articulated by key liberal reformers and nationalist politicians such as Mihail Kogălniceanu, who compared Roma slaves to the ex-African slaves of the Americas. His graphic descriptions of their circumstances were widely circulated and commented on within the emerging Romanian nationalist movement:
I saw human beings wearing chains on their arms and legs, others with iron clamps around their foreheads, and still others with metal collars about their necks. Cruel beatings, and other punishments such as starvation, being hung over smoking fires, solitary imprisonment and being thrown naked into the snow or the frozen rivers, such was the fate of the wretched Gypsy.34
By the late 1830s attitudes were changing more widely across society, to the extent that some nobles themselves began freeing their slaves: Barbu Ştirbei, who had auctioned 3,000 slaves in order to pay for palace renovations, was so ashamed by the public’s reaction that he suggested abolition. This fed into changing state policy, so that in 1837 the governor of Wallachia freed all state slaves, granting them the same status as peasants, and permitting them to speak Romani and practise their customs. In 1842 the ruler of Moldavia followed suit as part of a general efforts to lift the province ‘from the slough of primitive stagnation and instil modern ideas of government’. Two years later Moldavia’s church slaves were freed, and in 1846 Gheorghe Bibescu, the French-educated nationalist ruler of Wallachia, freed its church s
laves.35 All this formed the context to the 1848 Wallachian revolutionaries’ proclamation that included a denouncement against the inhuman ‘disgrace’ of slavery, setting the tone for the aspirations of a new Romania. While, as with all the European revolutions of 1848, the uprising had no short-term positive consequences, the 1850s saw the increasing independence of Wallachia and Moldavia.36 One way in which this was manifested was through the gradual acceptance among elites of the unacceptability of slavery within an aspirant modern European nation. Consequently in 1855 the prince of Moldavia banned slavery completely as ‘this humiliating vestige of a barbarous society’, with Wallachia following in early 1856. At the end of the Crimean War in 1864, the newly united Romania’s constitution guaranteed, in principle if not in practice, equal citizenship status for all Romanians, including the Roma.37
Ever complex, we need to avoid implying that all those emancipated willingly embraced their new status, let alone used it as means of escape. In fact contemporary documents reveal the unwillingness of considerable numbers of Roma to have their status changed from that of slave to ‘free’ citizen. Many were financially far better off paying a fixed annual tax than the far higher number of taxes chargeable to citizens, particularly when emancipation left them with no money, possessions or property.38 The petitions from that period of recently emancipated Roma offer us a more nuanced insight into their situation than the political propaganda writings of reformers and nationalist politicians. While such writers were right to point to the immorality of slavery, that emancipation was not backed up with material support for ex-slaves feeds the suspicion that Roma emancipation simply served a wider political and nationalist agenda. Once national liberation had been achieved, the material state of the Roma ceased to attract attention.
In Bulgaria, which had always had a closer relationship with the Ottoman Empire than the vassal states of Wallachia and Moldavia, the atmosphere of change and reform was manifested differently. Crucial here was the period of tanzimat (reorganization) which was exemplified in the 1839 Rescript of the Rose Chamber, a piece of empire-wide legislation which established ‘security of life, honour, and property, regardless of faith or ethnic background’. Broadly conceived, these reforms aimed to stem the growing tides of nationalism and external aggression through a process of modernization, and were heavily influenced by the Napoleonic Code and French law under the Second Empire. Between 1839 and 1876 successive measures were passed covering everything from changes to imperial uniforms to the abolition of slavery and the slave trade (1847), and educational, institutional and legal reforms.
However, both within the empire in general and for Roma in particular, the effects of the reforms were contradictory. While attempts were made to bring the civil status of Gypsies more in line with other subjects of the Empire, they did little to change their position in wider society. And yet, they were affected by the changes, although in perhaps unexpected ways. So, for example, during this period of crisis as local populations stopped carrying out specific roles and obligations these were taken over by local Roma. In Sliven after the tanzimat the annual duty to travel to Istanbul to graze the Sultan’s horses and mow the Sultan’s lawns became the sole duty of the Gypsies. Over the same period the proportion of state-appointed watchmen who were Roma increased significantly, as did recruitment into irregular police contingents. Their duty here was to suppress the growing number of uprisings in the provinces, and in this way they became involved in the looting and burning of Christian villages, which was seen as a legitimate perk for those putting down revolts.39
This suggests that unlike in Romania, where as we have seen nationalism dovetailed with the interests of Roma emancipation, in Bulgaria the growing nationalist movement seemed to exist in conflict with its Roma population. And indeed, as their role in the irregular police contingents suggests, this could be manifested in brutal and unpleasant ways. Such tendencies became more pronounced as Bulgarian nationalism swiftly became defined in relation to Orthodoxy, and was articulated both in opposition to Istanbul and to the Greek domination of the church hierarchy within Bulgaria. The granting of an autonomous Bulgarian bishopric in 1870 was viewed as a major triumph within the country, where it was seen as implicitly recognizing Bulgaria as a separate nation with rights to religious and cultural self-determination apart from Greece. And yet, this Bulgarization of the Orthodox Church served to marginalize Muslim Roma from claims of Bulgarian identity, while also providing a new outlet for anti-Roma prejudice. This gives context to the nationalist pronouncements of newly created Bulgarian bishops, who declared it was ‘a great sin to give alms to a gipsy or an infidel’. And of course, the large proportion of Roma, who were also Muslim, were doubly damned by such a pronouncement.40
The combination of social and economic uncertainty, emancipation and the profound political changes in the region spurred mass emigration within and from the Balkans, leading to one of the largest migrations of the modern period. For Roma it was a trigger for the migrations of Kalderashi, Lovari and other Gypsy populations out of the Balkans, profoundly altering the distribution of Gypsies across the globe. Although this period is often seen as the peak of European imperial ambition, unlike in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries where the movement of Gypsies across the Atlantic was closely associated with formal imperial projects, by now transatlantic migration was also an expression of the expanded opportunities offered by improved transport technologies and communication links.
Initially many Roma headed for Poland, but conflicts with Polish Gypsies and Tsarist policies spurred them to continue moving westwards, first into Germany and then France.41 These groups rapidly became closely associated with particular trades: the Kalderashi, coppersmiths from Wallachia and Moldavia, continued to live as metalworkers and cauldron makers after their arrival in France in 1867, while the Bosnian Ursari, as their name suggests, were known as bear trainers.42 Both these groups initially were seen as a novelty and attracted many curious visitors who were taken with how ‘their ragged clothing contrasted with the mass of gold and silver with which they bedecked themselves’.43 Their visit to Paris in 1872 prompted Emile Zola to write admiringly of their customs, fortune telling and physical qualities, but in more horrified tones of their ‘hideous’ clothing and living conditions.44
Yet for many this was just a small part of a longer journey across the Atlantic to both North and South America, most notably to Argentina. Until restrictions on the entry of paupers were brought in in 1882, which were used to turn back Roma, alongside thousands of others emigrating from the Balkans, thousands also entered the United States.45 Here emigrants continued peddling, hawking and finding work as musicians, while horse trading was one area where ‘some made large sums of money in this trade. They owned sales stables, racehorses, and supplied large contracts . . . Owing to the great demand in their country for fortune telling, many of the women earned large sums.’46 Demonstrating how they were able to combine traditional ways of making a living with new opportunities, those who did fortune telling used ‘modern methods of advertising’.
As in the Balkans, by the middle of the century in France, too, ideas of the place of Gypsies in relation to the French nation were beginning to emerge, suggesting that even in the land of liberté, égalité, fraternité, the relationship between the nation state and its nomads might be problematic. After the nationality law of 3 December 1849, which legalized the deportation of aliens, treatment of Gypsies became entwined with that of foreigners:
For a long time, the government has occupied itself with guaranteeing the safety of our population against the crimes and the depredations of bands of individual vagabonds and nomads known under the name of Bohemians . . . Prefects must thus concentrate themselves with the magistrates . . . [to enable] an energetic application of the police laws concerning vagabonds and dangerous foreigners.47
The Bohemians appear, in effect, in one or the other of these categories, often in both at the same time. Added to the sense of their for
eignness was the way in which they were positioned as ‘nomadic criminals’, whose movements had to be controlled in the same manner as those of other criminal elements. The 1851 coup which had preceded the establishment of the Second Empire (1852–70) saw the implementation of emergency measures allowing the transportation of offenders, ranging from Parisian insurrectionists to petty criminals, to Algeria or Guiana for periods of hard labour. At the same time a new, harsher system of surveillance was instigated, which included requiring suspects to remain at an ‘assigned residence’.48 The way this might be mobilized against Gypsies was spelled out by central government to prefects:
Once placed under legal surveillance, these individuals will find it difficult to escape repression, the government could, in assigning to each one of them a distinct and obligatory residence, disperse them and in this way break the associations of criminals which live by begging disguised in different forms, when they do not have recourse to marauding or to stealing. If they break their ban, they will fall under the decree of 8 December 1851 and could from then on be deported to Cayenne [in French Guiana].49
The tendency to lump together foreigners and Gypsies became more pronounced over the second half of the century, fuelled by the influx of foreign migrant workers to France, and the very visible presence of Balkan Roma groups. And yet the first significant state initiative to impose order on Gypsies, ambulant tradespeople and the mobile poor – a census undertaken on 20 March 1895 – in fact showed the gap between fear and reality. The anxiety of the time is expressed in the Minister of the Interior’s directive to the maréchaussée that showed that some Gypsy groups, particularly mobile Manouches, were believed to be acting as German spies: