Abstract
The treatment of Gypsies in the judicial system of Germany and Italy helps to explain the executive authorities’ decision to turn to the state of exception as their primary mode of dealing with them. The judicial system served both as a key player in the campaign against Gypsy populations and a hindrance to its implementation. Ultimately, the inability of the judicial system to lay the groundwork for the complete denationalization of Gypsy populations caused frustrated executive authorities in both countries to strip Gypsies of the basic protections provided by law, so that they could dispose of them more easily. Judicial authorities, in spite of their own intentions to support national authorities in their quest to keep out Gypsy populations, often ended up protecting the very people targeted. Gypsies themselves were aware of the fact that judicial proceedings could often protect them from the worst excesses of executive power, and used the law to protect themselves when they could. Gypsies’ use of the law as a form of resistance led increasingly frustrated executive authorities to utilize the state of exception provided for in the law, which freed them from judicial interference.
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Notes
Thanks to Taylor and Francis, Ltd for permission to reprint this chapter from an earlier publication: Jennifer Illuzzi, “Negotiating the State of Exception: Gypsies’ Encounter with the Judiciary in Germany and Italy, 1860–1914,” Social History 35 (2010): 418–38.
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Susan Ashley, Making Liberalism Work: The Italian Experience, 1860–1914 (Westport, CT: Praeger, 2003), 118.
Cesare Lombroso, Crime, Its Causes and Remedies, trans. Henry Horton (Montclair, NJ: Patterson Smith, 1968), 39–42.
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John C. Torpey, The Invention of the Passport: Surveillance, Citizenship, and the State, Cambridge Studies in Law and Society (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 3–5.
On the Gypsies of Jesi, see Leonardo Piasere, “Sigismondo Caccini e gli Sinte rozengre,” in L. Piasere (ed.), Italia Romani, vol. 1, (Rome: CISU, 1996), 119–78.
James C. Scott, Weapons of the Weak: Everyday Forms of Peasant Resistance (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1985).
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© 2014 Jennifer Illuzzi
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Illuzzi, J. (2014). The Courts, 1861–1914. In: Gypsies in Germany and Italy, 1861–1914. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401724_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137401724_6
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