Roma of Europe — The dead ends of mental extraterritoriality

An American journalist reported in the Times Literary Supplement a scene she had witnessed during a stay in Poland in 1996. Some villagers were complaining of the presence of “Gypsies,” the new owners of sumptuous dwellings. Frustration, raised to the level of a national malady, is now exercised against “Gypsies,” complementing the habitual acrimony toward “Jews.” This does not mean that the destinies of the Jews and the Roma should be conflated in a tautological vision of the minority condition in Europe. But it is not surprising to see a “Gypsy question” reappear, symbolizing all the anxieties in the face of a twofold phenomenon: the disappearance of the popular systems of neighborliness and the fear of uncontrolled Eastern migrations.

The time of angelic declarations on the virtues of a well-tempered cosmopolitanism has passed, and we are witnessing the prodromes of a simultaneous shaking of the historical identity of the nations that make up the European space. Thus one may observe that any modification of the continental system reactivates an imaginary of European mobility complementary to the manufacture of national identities. The ill-mastered conception of intra-European mobility (note the hyphen) oscillates between the will to reconsider the rootednesses most firmly established by History and the will to favor the circulation of elites. In other words, the internal fronts of the pax europeana are not fixed, and this period of uncertainty favors the viscous resurgence of behaviors from the interwar years.

The Roma also reveal uncertainties about the contours of European civilization: they are perceived all at once as a wandering nation unjustly persecuted and as poor, prolific families “useless to the world.” But whether it proceeds from a benevolent conception of the freedom to come and go at will, or whether it affirms the necessity of making a social archaism disappear, this vision presupposes a mobility consubstantial with the Roma. Nothing makes this transhistorical imaginary representation yield — not even the statistics, which say that three-quarters of the 8 million Roma of Europe have not moved for a long time. In other words, to picture the Roma with a caravan is as obsolete as to imagine the French with the braided hair of the Gauls.

The contradictory pressure between the conventional discourses on freedom of circulation and the exacerbation of administrative and social normativities brings a new threat to bear on the existence of the Roma of the former Soviet-bloc countries. Good intentions have not prevented the generalization of physical assaults of an extreme violence rarely punished. The contrast is great between the neighborhood ostracism that verges on ethnic or social cleansing and the voluntarist action of the members of Romani organizations, the political expression of a movement widely relayed by the European institutions. Thus, in a declaration made in Strasbourg on 8 April 2003, the Deputy Secretary General of the Council of Europe, Maud de Boer-Buquicchio, urged the Roma to participate fully in the changes under way and “thus to master their own destiny.”

This vision, marked by the neoliberal “Kominternism” that holds sway within the European institutions, thus suggests to the “Rightless” that they seize hold of politics to assert a right of minorities. But for the time being, the multiculturalist perspective ensures neither promotion nor protection; above all, it favors the proliferation of experts. The transnational labeling of the Roma as a “risk group” for the High Commissioner for Refugees and as a “minority in distress” for Médecins du Monde contributes, with the best of intentions, to the dead ends of the “fantasmatic extraterritoriality” of the Roma of Europe.

Since the beginnings of the Modern Era, the Roma have taken root in the various regions of Europe without the antiquity of their establishment granting them the credit of native belonging. Yet the Bohemian presence is attested by the documents that mention the appearance, between 1407 and 1422, of “people calling themselves Egyptians of Little Egypt” (Egipto minor or in Parvo Egipto) in regions as diverse as Sweden, Poland, Germany, the Netherlands, England, Flanders, France, Italy, Spain, and Portugal. For lack of systematic studies, the reasons for the first migrations are unknown, but the horsemen who presented themselves before the surrounding walls of the medieval towns as “dukes and counts of Little Egypt” were not the vanguard of a troop of soldiers ravaging the countryside, even if the women, laden with gold jewelry, already had the unfortunate habit of telling fortunes.

A historical inscription, of which I could give many examples, justified the presence of the Roma in the transnational space of peregrine Christendom. Thus the company of Count Thomas, which seemed to be returning from Compostela, presented itself on 23 May 1435 to the customs officers of Jaca and Canfranc, who asked its chief to pay the customs duties for the possession of silk garments, four purses of gold and silver, and five horses. Count Thomas paid nothing, for he produced the authenticated copy of a safe-conduct granted at Zaragoza, on 8 May 1425, by Alfonso V of Aragon. It stated that Count Thomas could return to his country and cross the lands of the Kingdom, leave and return freely across the borders. The king even asked that assistance be lent to the honorable count, driven from his country by the infidels on account of his Catholic faith.¹

The Roma companies presented letters of protection from the Emperor, from the kings of Bohemia, and the skillful forgery of letters from the pope obtained in Rome by their chief, Duke Andrew. Originating from a distant land they called Little Egypt, they were expiating a temporary apostasy on the pope’s recommendation. The Roma let an imprecision hover over their geographical origins that likened them to the “Saracens” — which, in the medieval mind, did not necessarily mean infidel, but always pagan. Thus the municipal authorities gave gratuities to the troops “for the love of God,” while the men of the Church called for the excommunication of the women who told fortunes. The Egyptians, arrived in Paris on 27 August 1427, according to the account of the Bourgeois de Paris, received the visit of the Bishop of Paris. The latter admonished the public who crowded around the Egyptian women to have their future foretold, and he recommended excommunication for “Tous ceulx et celles qui ce faisoient et qui avoient aveu et montré leurs mains” [“All those, men and women, who did this and who had confessed and shown their hands”].²

Mobility justified by penitence pleased princes occupied in combating, in the name of Christendom, the infidels and the heretics. But the argument lasted only a time. The pilgrimage was forgotten and the localization of infidel origin retained. From one end of Europe to the other, the learned galaxy exchanged its first impressions of the Egyptians. It formulated all sorts of hypotheses. The Egyptians surely came from the eastern part of the known world: Egypt perhaps, India already, the Ethiopia of Prester John, or the Bulgaria of the Bogomil sectaries. They spoke a strange language, and at that time no mention failed to deplore the pretension of the Egyptian women to foretell the future the better to deceive a credulous people.

The commentaries on the true nature of this “malefic brood” transformed the oscillation of the borderlands into a central visibility warning the Princes and the Churches against a major danger to “public tranquility.” The uncertainty of their origins and a dubious Christianity conferred upon the Egyptians the floating identity of a wandering and suspect “nation,” while the safe-conducts and letters of protection continued to ensure the cross-border circulation of the companies of Egyptians or Bohemians. Thus, for the French jurist Guillaume Terrien: “Ce sont gens errans et vagabons, ramassez de toutes les nations qui se dient Aegyptiens ou Bohemiens, et que ceste penitence enjointe à leurs predecesseurs et à leur postérité, pour s’estre revoltez de la foy chrestienne, de peregriner ainsi comme ils font, et passer d’un pays en autre. Gens larrons, se meslans de deviner et principalement leurs femmes, abusans les simples gens en leur disant leur bonne aventure par la chiromancie, et inspections de leurs mains” [“These are wandering and vagabond folk, gathered from all the nations, who call themselves Egyptians or Bohemians, and upon whose forebears and posterity this penance was enjoined, for having revolted from the Christian faith, to wander as they do and pass from one country to another. Thieving folk, given to divination, and chiefly their women, deceiving simple people by telling them their fortune through chiromancy and the inspection of their hands”].

The counts of Little Egypt metamorphosed into a kind of war enterprise in the service of the nobility, along the shifting lines of the troubles. There where princely authority asserted itself with difficulty, the “households” of Egyptians prospered in the shadow of the castles, with the disadvantageous reputation the companies had acquired through their manner of living, borrowed from their protectors. Such was the French modality, that of Northern Italy and of the front lines of the Spanish monarchy’s state of war for control of Flanders. A powerful patronage was expressed in the sponsorship of the little “Bohemians” by the highest nobility of the time. It ensured, at once through military legitimacy and genealogical inscription, a self-consciousness that explains the anthropological permanence of the Roma lineages, traced from the model of the Western nobility.

But there were other ways of entering into “Romaness” that do not presuppose mobility. Thus the history of the settlement of Southern Italy and of Spain is gradually coming to light. Without our knowing the exact reasons, the Cingari were among the Balkan migrants of the Greek rite transported by the Venetian ships. It is possible to reconstitute, thanks to the parish registers, the genealogical permanence of these families, for the Catholic baptisms imposed by the precepts of the Council of Trent follow, after an interruption, the older registration according to the Greek rite. One can still observe today, in the Good Friday processions, the presence of a Bohemian woman — a figure of abundance covered in jewels and gold — who distributes chickpeas, confetti, and sweets.

The two modalities of establishment — the selective form of the “Egyptian companies” and the mass form of the Balkan migrations — are found again in the Iberian Peninsula. Demography associated the Gitanos and the Zingari with the “prodigious multitude” of “ceste estrange espèce d’hommes” [“this strange species of men”] of which Peyssonel spoke in the eighteenth century with regard to the Roma of the Ottoman Empire.³ Number ensured the confusion between the proliferation of the bad poor and the suspicion of infidel origin, and transformed the Gitanos into a pernicious category, vehemently denounced in Spain, in Portugal, and in the South of France as an internal social scourge. At the very moment when Prosper Mérimée was composing the novella Carmen, the serious Société Royale des Antiquaires de France was publishing the extracts from an unpublished history of Roussillon, from which it emerged that the “race des Gitanos, étrangère à la Catalogne et au Roussillon, où elle se trouve en permanence partie domiciliée dans les principales villes, partie se déplaçant sans cesse et n’ayant aucun établissement fixe, ni feu ni lieu” [“the race of the Gitanos, foreign to Catalonia and Roussillon, where it is permanently found, partly domiciled in the principal towns, partly moving ceaselessly and having no fixed establishment, neither hearth nor home”] forms “une bande d’individus de race transplantée” [“a band of individuals of transplanted race”], recognizable by their character of strangeness and “leur physique qui est une peau enfumée” [“their physique, which is a smoke-darkened skin”].⁴ Romani settlement therefore does not prejudge structural mobility.

Moreover, to set out to beg one’s bread is a normal and recognized act in poor societies. It does not oblige the one who has been able to remain at home to make himself the benevolent host of all the world’s miseries, but neither does it render suspect, on principle, the one who takes to the roads. And yet we all have it in mind that the modern State has had, in essence, the mission of hunting down suspect mobilities. In fact, one ought not to confuse wandering with mental mobility, and one ought to disconnect the historical problematic of the repression of vagabondage from the organicist association that makes of the incriminated categories so many marginals. The new approach to mobility proposed by the Enlightenment and pre-Romanticism modified the apparatus of mental representation of the Bohemians by consigning to oblivion the baroque system of aesthetic integration through the complementarity of opposites. The appeal to the European Enlightenment accounts rather well for the place — modest, after all — accorded to the Roma in the new impetus toward virtuous mobility. The new affirmation of the intrinsic value of real and symbolic circulation would make it possible to transcend bodies, appearances, and ranks, and cosmopolitanism was to ensure the peace of the world. But “to have the use of the world,” as Kant puts it, presupposes “entering into the game.” Progress would come from the adherence of all to the superiority of civilization over barbarism. The pedagogy of the Enlightenment compels one to think the symbolic and real limit of mobility and of the European space, by suggesting at every moment the dangers of the negative slope. The effort to present the virtues of mobility and of travel was threatened by the insidious subversion of a delinquent counter-society, a ferment of internal dissolution of civilization.⁵

The tension between these two interpretations of mobility — the one valorized, of a peripatetic civility, and the other, more disquieting, of miscegenation, disorder, and contamination — explains the constant swing between the valorization of the image of the Tsigane enamored of freedom and the denunciation of the suspect promiscuity of families who know nothing of “good housekeeping.” Moreover, the impossible assignment of the Romani (Gypsy) language within the branch of the Indo-European languages added to the confusion. The use of a language clearly distinguished from a “jargon” presupposed a degree of civilization at once belied by the repugnant practices of a savage tribe. How could it be that there existed, within civilized Europe itself, people furious enough to refuse the contagion of civility that contact with one who is your superior implies by its very nature? The best-intentioned observers proposed, as a solution to this paradox, that one admit the Indian origin of the language but associate it with belonging to an inferior caste. Herder spoke of the “abject Indian caste” while mentioning the interest there would be in enlisting in the army “these brave inhabitants of the woods,” targeting the monopoly — denounced by Schiller — of the sovereign in the sale of mercenaries. Kant took care to distinguish legitimate divination from vaticination: “comme les Tsiganes d’origine indoue qui appellent lecture des astres la prédiction par les lignes de la main. (…)” [“like the Gypsies of Hindu origin who call the prediction by the lines of the hand a reading of the stars. (…)”].⁶ The defeat of the Aufklärung and the surge of primitivism that marked the end of the eighteenth century accentuated “the pathetic entry of the Gypsies into Western letters,” in the phrase of Fernand Baldensperger.

Goethe’s Götz von Berlichingen (1773) stages a medieval knight, inaugurating an “old German” genre of the pre-Romantic generation. The young Adelheid arrives out of breath in the midst of a Bohemian encampment. A young Zigeuner embraces her at the very moment when the hero, Franz von Sickingen, finding her in this “terrible society,” draws upon himself the following reply: “Sie ist dem Menschen freundlicher, als sie scheint” [“She is more friendly to man than she appears”].⁷ The refuge toward the forested spaces of the “vagabond tribe of the Zigeuner” will not make of them good Savages, but Romanticism developed the idea of a possible conciliation between radically different worlds, provided only that each accept the journey toward the promised land of European civility. The Roma were then reproached with muddying the cards, with laying bare the oscillation of the borderlands entailed by the twofold dimension of the imaginary of mobility: a universalist and emancipatory ambition guiding the steps of Humanity toward the ethereal spaces of universal benevolence; and that other, far less dreamy, of bringing the masses to heel through the differential management of familial, social, and cultural reproduction.

The enlightened journey ensuring the peace of the world was transformed into a utopian primacy of the original language ensuring, in one and the same movement, national identity and intra-European communication through translation. Understanding among peoples would come from the translation of national ideals by reference to the horizon of the Indo-European cross-border. Now the failure of this myth explains the dramatic advent of the essentialist ethnopolitics of the twentieth century. This myth was constructed on the Aryan-Semitic couple, and it excluded the Semitic ensemble from the outset — except that this ensemble was not clearly defined and that its geography varied from one author to another. The thinkers of the Indo-European myth sought to give philology the mobilizing power of the philosophy of the Enlightenment. However, the affirmation of a community of origin through language and the anthropological differentiation at work in the national constructions of the nineteenth century constituted a conundrum that led to competition among language, people, and nation, and not — as is often said — to their confusion. Thus the Bohemians, in spite of their solid family lineages still present at the present hour, were never incorporated into the common stock of the European nations. At the same time, the vulgar dialectic of administrative assignment obliged everyone to choose his camp, for whoever wished to hold his rank.

A fin-de-siècle mental representation, singularly contemptuous or violently hateful, withdrew all credit of peripatetic civility from the Bohemian families by forging the myth of the nomad set against the so-called sedentary societies. This new administrative and sociological construction commuted the Zigeuner into an “asocial,” the Bohemian into a “foreign nomad.”

In France, the implementation of the 1912 law in the interwar years modified the police culture of interception. The forced residence of the “nomad” populations, decided for the coastal and frontier départements in September 1939, does not have the same meaning as the implementation of family internment, in the autumn of 1940, on a German order, which led the nomads and their families into the internment camps — more than 6,000 persons of French nationality. But these two actions were undertaken on the sole basis of the gendarmes’ identification of the possession of the anthropometric booklet. There is here a common disposition of mind of the administration, of the prefectures and gendarmeries, of the town halls and municipal services, that crosses the demarcation line of the change of political regime between the Republic and the French State: the same diligence in flushing out families known to all, in order to lead them, children included, into internal exile. Who then remembers that Henri-Georges Clouzot immortalized the décor of the “nomad” camp of Saliers as a Mexican village in the film Le Salaire de la peur (The Wages of Fear) before undertaking the material destruction of the camp under the terms of the film contract?

In Germany, the police offensive against the popular economy and itinerant trade had begun at the end of the nineteenth century, and it is surprising to see the use the Nazis made of the tradition of police control over suspect mobilities. On the one hand, Himmler’s reorganization in 1936 of the security police (Sicherheitspolizei), which comprised the Gestapo and the Kripo, translated into institutional terms the twofold vocation of the criminal police and gave a dynamic of radicalization to the persecution of the Roma. One section dealt exclusively with Gypsy affairs, multiplying the files and the investigations for “preventive” placements in concentration camps. On the other hand, Heydrich considered, in 1939, that henceforth persons who traveled to earn their living — peddlers, horse dealers, or musicians — would no longer be regarded as “asocials” by the sole fact of their itinerant way of life, while at the same time promulgating a decree against the Bohemian women who told fortunes. This sudden interest in so marginal an activity, in the midst of an enterprise of total war, would raise a smile if the foreseen sanction were not terrifying. It in fact entailed, from 1943 on, systematic transfer to Auschwitz.

We here approach the shores of extermination. A tautological vision that would picture the Roma victims of the Nazi extermination as marginals who had broken every tie with social life would harm the understanding of the prodromes of the policy of family liquidation conducted by the Nazis. In a letter of 2 August 1945 addressed to Kurt Blumenfeld, Hannah Arendt uses the image of the wandering Bohemian to characterize her own situation of exile: “When one has furniture, one can very well grow accustomed to taking people as part of one’s furnishings. But when one exists without furniture — that is, like Bohemians — the thing is certainly more difficult.” At the same time she associates the latter with the “peoples in general” whom the Nazis wished to destroy: “Jews, Poles, Gypsies.”⁸

There are two ways of approaching the delicate question of the comparison of the racial victims of the Reich. If one compares the results of the German enterprise of annihilation, the genocide of the Jews is unique by the innumerable character of the victims and the urgency brought to liquidating them. But there exists a relation between the total extermination of the Jews of Europe and the selective extermination of the Roma of Europe, for only the Jews and the Roma were the object of a family hunt that was to efface from memory even the trace of their names. I was struck by the fact that the deportees all recalled, with a particular emotion, the liquidation of the Zigeunerlager, the family camp of Auschwitz, even as the daily gassing of the Jews of Hungary was being carried out. As for the survivors of Theresienstadt, the families were directed from inside the camp, and not from the ramp, into the gas chambers for collective asphyxiation on that night of 1 to 2 August 1944.

The absence of clear choices stands in the way of the collective appropriation of the territories of extermination. Thus the European States accepted to see one of their spaces — that of Yugoslavia — coldly re-engage in a ferocious internal war, without even the alibi of an insurmountable social crisis. This war of proximity has been analyzed as the aftermath of a distant past. It was also the foretold chronicle of a certain specifically European tolerance for liquidating neighborhood violence.

We know that the corporation of historians does not readily let go of a dominant paradigm, especially if its protagonists had some difficulty in forging it. The Roma entered (at the margin) the historiography — in full expansion in the years 1960–1970 — of the repressive practices of the modern States and of the suppression of “marginals.” Bronisław Geremek noted the change of behavior of Christian Europe, welcoming the Bohemians as pilgrims before hunting them down as vagrants. He saw in this conduct a change in the image of poverty, but did not call into question the principle of a consubstantial social marginality. This historical perspective has the drawback of focusing the entire lens on the formation of a “persecuting society” that would leave no dynamic historical fluidity to minority groups.

Now no one is reducible to his image. Singular modalities of historical inscription favored the conditions of the family reproduction of the Roma. The Roma system seeks to recreate, in all circumstances, the conditions of its autonomy and of its reproduction. The Romani language can be a remarkable means of constructing values founded on the capacity to adapt to all situations without modifying anything of the surrounding system. But its use is not indispensable for maintaining the Roma manner of seeing the world. The force of attraction of romipen, the Roma vision of the world, comes from its capacity to ensure a powerful construction of the self outside any learned culture, any communal institution. All sorts of formulas can favor this determination to remain what one is, for the properly Roma cultural traits are not constituted by fixed elements, confined within tradition, determined by geographical origin, the exercise of certain professions, or systematic nomadism. The Roma system is a collective and individual mode of being that has allowed, across the centuries, families with no support from elites to avoid the trap of the physiological and moral degradation that threatens every poor population.

The current rise of intolerance is the product of unrecognized historical legacies. After the First World War, the dismemberment of the Empires and the Wilsonian application of the principle of nationalities scarcely profited the Roma, constrained to adapt to the new state frameworks that no longer coincided with the traditional family territories of the Kumpania. The pursuit of “ethnic exclusivism” by the successor States of the Habsburg Empire and the Ottoman Empire left scarcely any place for these groups, few in number, dispersed, and without territorial demand. One does not understand the importance of the Gypsy question in these countries — so different from one another — if one holds to a sociological analysis in terms of social marginality. The Roma constitute an example of those complex political stakes that mark the cleavages between antagonistic conceptions of national anchorings through the nesting of tolerated minorities. Moreover, the ideological survivals of communism maintained a vigorous hatred of cosmopolitanism, regarded as a pretension to hold together what does not wish to be held together, so as to prevent the “ethnic equilibrium” from constructing itself. Conscious of the problem, the Romani leader Nicolae Gheorghe declared in 1992, in support of the request for non-governmental-organization status for the Romani Union before the Helsinki Conference: “In the hour of the pan-European rule of law, the Roma, a European people without a nation-State, choose no other homeland than Democracy.”

The European construction ought, at the very least, to favor a positive discourse of intra-European mobility that would, in time, render the criterion of nationality obsolete. Now the European imperial construction possesses neither center nor periphery. It proceeds by the agglutination of preexisting ensembles. As a result, the very notion of transnationality has become suspect. It carries the emotional charge of the cosmopolitanism of yesteryear. It is not certain that Europe will reconnect with itself in the virtuous pursuit of regulated circulation and the mastered exchange of its men and its goods. The history of the Roma is inscribed in the cross-border imaginary of Europe, but it is no more the product of an anthropological invariant than of a fantasmatic discursive category, for the “hidden grammar” — in Paul Veyne’s expression — of circulation in Europe keeps its mysteries.

Notes