Free and unfree labour

Session 1 : jeudi 2 novembre, 10h30 -12h30 

New approaches to the “Free and unfree labour” question

Spaces of Slave Labour in Late Medieval Venice

Juliane Schiel

In medieval Europe, „free“ and „unfree“ was no conceptual pair and the noun and concept libertas had no antonym like “unfreedom” – neither in Latin nor in the vernaculars. Nobody was “free” in the feudal system of the European Middle Ages: farmers tilled the fields of their lords, landlords received their power and authority from the king and the king was accountable to God. And even though during the urbanisation process the free imperial city and the free town citizen were invented, at least parts of someone’s rights and properties remained embedded in complex relationships of (inter)dependency.

Yet, some were more unfree than others, of course, and slave labour, regaining in importance in the late medieval urban context, certainly belonged to the most unfree forms of bonded labour at the time. But although slaves can be distinguished from other indentured labourers by the fact that they were sold, bought and eventually freed, their living and working conditions overlapped with those of waged household servants, of journeymen in handicraft business or a vassal in agriculture. Their legal status differed from non-slaves, but their work world and living environment were closely intertwined with those of other bonded people.

In my book project, I portray slave lives in late medieval Venice (1350–1500) by confronting administrative and juridical documents, ordinances and proscriptions with narrative sources and by describing four different spaces of slave agency: (1) social environment, (2) contexts of labour, (3) religious spheres, and (4) worlds of justice.

At the ELHN Conference in Paris, I would like to present and discuss my second book chapter on different spaces of slave labour. The chapter will be divided in three subchapters: (a) household service, (b) handicraft, (c) sex and body industry.

(a) Household service: In late medieval Venice, slaves usually lived under the same roof with their masters’ family and other household servants. They prepared meals, did the cleaning up, carried out errands and looked after the children.

(b) Handicraft: Many of the non-noble Venetian citizens used their slaves clandestinely (because transgressing guild laws) as helpmates in their workshops. These slaves gradually learned the trade of their masters and became trained assistants illegally employed and competing the fellow guild members.

(c) Sex and body industry: Female slaves appear as sex partners of their masters, as (host) mothers of their masters’ children and as wet nurses of their mistresses’ children or the children of their masters’ relatives, friends or neighbours to whom they were rented out for breastfeeding services. In all three sections, I will highlight individual cases and try to sound the source material, first, on interactions between slave labour and other forms of bonded labour and, second, on the choices slaves had in their specific work world and on their specific scope of agency in these fields.

Juliane Schiel is senior researcher at the History Department of the University of Zurich and currently works on slave labour in the late medieval Venetian Empire. She studied history and French in Heidelberg, Oxford and Berlin and received her PhD at the Humboldt University of Berlin in 2010. Her monograph “Mongolensturm und Fall Konstantinopels” was published in 2011. One year later, she was visiting researcher at the University Ca’Foscari of Venice and organised an international conference on Mediterranean slavery at Zurich. She co-edited the multi-lingual volume entitled “Mediterranean Slavery Revisited” (2014) and the special issue “Europas Sklaven” (2015) of the German speaking journal WerkstattGeschichte and published numerous articles on Venetian slavery.

Historical Network Research as a productive approach to researching the social situation of trafficked people in the Holy Roman Empire?

Rebekka von Mallinckrodt

I work on the legal and social situation of trafficked people in the Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation in the long eighteenth century. A practical and also characteristic problem when doing research on this topic is the lack of laws specifying the legal status of these people, who in most cases were purchased or kidnapped outside the empire and brought back to Germany. Because of this legal grey area, which existed in other European countries at that time as well, I assume that masters (employers/owners) deliberately avoided explicitly defining the status of trafficked people. As a result, earlier researchers concluded that these people became integrated to a large extent, or rather, that they transitioned into the country’s existing forms of dependency and bondage (serfdom, servant status), thereby assuming that their slave status was annulled upon entering the country. Aside from individual bureaucratic and legal verdicts that explicitly contradict such hypothesis, in my view such a perspective trivialises the social situation of these people – including the many cases where the legal status of the trafficked people is unclear (and will probably remain so, given the source material situation). Historical Network Research can therefore aid in revealing significant differences in the situation of trafficked persons on the one hand, and serfs, servants and other unfree/dependent persons on the other. Furthermore, the varying degrees of integration into social networks can also explain why the emancipation of trafficked people probably had less of an impact on their social position than a change in legal status might lead us to expect.

Rebekka von Mallinckrodt is professor of Early Modern History at the University of Bremen. She currently leads the ERC Consolidator Grant project “The Holy Roman Empire of the German Nation and its Slaves” (2015-2020). The project pursues a conceptual discussion of the extent to which (and under which circumstances) it is plausible to speak of slavery in relation to persons trafficked to the Holy Roman Empire and which new perspectives such a discussion opens up for historical research. Related to the project, she has published: ‘There are no Slaves in Prussia?’, in Felix Brahm/Eve Rosenhaft (eds), Slavery Hinterland. Transatlantic Slavery and Continental Europe, 1680–1850, (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2016), pp. 109–131.

Control of the city’s workers: Municipal Law and the free and unfree labour in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil (1830-1838)

Paulo Cruz Terra

This paper intends to verify how labour and workers appeared in the Municipal Law in Rio de Janeiro during the Imperial period, more specifically between 1830 and 1838. I investigate what occupations were present in the legislation, the distinctions established between enslaved and “free” workers and how the City Council tried to regulate and control the labour in this city that was the Capital of Brazil. 

I analyse the Law Codes produced in 1830 and 1838, respectively the first the last one of the Imperial period, and the debates of the city councilmen presented in the City Council Annals and newspapers. It is important to connect the process of the legislation´s construction and the social and political context. In this sense, in 1838 it was possible to verify a greater preoccupation of the City Council to control the enslaved workers, which were related to the rise of the transatlantic slave trade – Rio would be the city with the largest slave population in the Americas in 1850 –, and a great number of riots in all over the country.

The City Council Law regulated labour mostly in two directions. In one hand, it tried to control different aspects of an occupation´s execution. In this sense, there was a huge control over the workers involved in the sale of meat and it was determined, for example, rules from the transport to the conditions of sale. In another hand, the City Council determined the necessity of taking a licence to work. In 1838, the masters were obliged to take a license to their “escravos de ganho” (money earning slaves). These slaves worked in different occupations, such as carriers and food vendors, and were supposed to give a stipulated amount of money to their masters on a daily or weekly basis.

Clarifying ‘unfreedom’ and ‘coercion’: a contribution from socio-legal theory.

Robert Knegt

Discussions on specific types of ‘unfree’ or ‘coerced’ labour are to some extent haunted by problems of analytical clarity. ‘Freedom’ and ‘unfreedom’ are sometimes used as if they were descriptive of an objective situation, in cases where it might be better to describe them as ‘folk concepts’ that have their effects by being mobilized in practical interactions. I will argue that labour history could profit from conceptual tools developed in socio-legal theory. We could then view labour relationships as consisting of interactions that are continuously produced and reproduced, and always having three dimensions: of signification (communication of meaning), of domination (power) and of legitimation (normativity) (elaborating on Giddens 1984). Taking these dimensions seriously and developing them further will  allow us to better account for situations that otherwise appear to be problematic - in which, for instance, the formal unfree position of ‘slave’ goes along with a substantial autonomy in making business transactions, or for cases in which people ‘freely’ choose to be serfs.

The empirical base that I use for my analysis, consists of reports on the position of German textile workers in the second and third quarters of the 19^th century, found to be involved in the gradual transition from the relative autonomy of crafts workers, to an increased dependency of getting entangled in putting-out systems, to their final enclosure in the centralized production of factories. This is, as will become clear, also a history that has to be written not only in terms of domination, but also of the other fundamental dimension: of normativity and legitimation.

Paulo Cruz Terra has finished his PHD at Universidade Federal Fluminense in 2012. His thesis about the transport workers in Rio de Janeiro, between 1970 and 1906, won a prize and was published. Actually he teaches Brazilian History at the Universidade Federal Fluminense. He is researcher of the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations project, developed by the International Institute of Social History and participated of the project Labour Relations in Portugal and the Lusophone World, 1800-2000, developed at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa. He has published an article about free and unfree labour at the International Review of Social History, and has been publishing in important Brazilian journals, such as Revista Brasileira de História.

Forced Labour as an International Issue during the Early Cold War Years

Luca Polese

My paper concerns forced labour as the core of a global ideological fight raging during the early Cold War years. In Washington, a campaign against forced labour in the Soviet Union was launched in Autumn 1947. It was framed within the discourse on human rights whose main reference was at that time the United Nations’ Charter and later the Universal Declaration of human rights, approved by the General Assembly in December 1948. I am currently working on the papers of the Commission Internationale contre le régime concentrationnaire and the papers of the ILO/UN Committee on forced labour. Such a documentation is my point of departure to explore the political as well as the ideological nature of many definitions of forced labour produced during the early stages of the Cold War.

Indeed, a Cold War taxonomy on forced labour soon emerged, operating a distinction between systems of forced labour such as the Soviet Gulag (of course, compared to the Nazi lager), persistance of forced labour in the Western empires and employment of forced labour in authoritarian anticommunist States.  Such a classification was grounded on the teleology of Western freedom. Indeed, Western “free labour” was perceived to be on the move both in the old Western empires (most of them had signed the ILO’s Covention n. 29 in 1930) and in the authoritarian anticommunist States. Franco’s Spain was asked to to open prisons and camps to the inquiries of international commissions. The Gulag was different: it embodied the regressive purposes of a military State that had restored ancient forms of oppressions such as serfdom and slavery.

However, these Cold War classifications soon clashed with the actual direction that the members that the ILO/UN Committee, whose president was the indian Mudaliar, impressed to the investigation. Moreover, after Stalin’s death, the Soviet Union searched for a new international role. The dismantling of the Gulag began, and the Soviet leaders played a new political game. In 1954, the Soviet Union joined the ILO with the goal of twisting the “forced labour issue” in a more anticolonial fashion. As a whole, my paper looks at “humanity” and “human rights” (such as free labour) as part of ideological discourses within which power politics operates with definitions and classifications.

Luca Polese is Associate Professor at the University of Salerno (Italy). He is author of books and articles concerning the Italian democratic Left. Among them, La nazione perduta. Ferruccio Parri nel Novecento italiano (Bologna, Il Mulino, 2004) and La democrazia divisa. La sinistra democratica dal dopoguerra alle origini del centro-sinistra (Milano, Unicopli, 2011).

He currently works on a broader subject such as Forced labor in Soviet regimes as an international issue during the early Cold War Years (1947-1953). In 2015 he was visiting scholar at the Institut d'études politiques de Paris(Sciences po). He was among the organizers of the conference La trasformazione delle reti transnazionali culturali nella guerra fredda  which was held in Salerno in March 2015. A first result of his research was presented at the International Congress of Historical Sciences, held in Jinan, People’s Republic of China in August 2015. He published an article on  “Ventunesimo secolo” with the title David Rousset, the CICRC and the inquiry into forced labor in Mao’s China. He participated with a paper on these topics to the conference Fair is Fair. International Perspectives on Social Justice, held recently in Padua (15-17 September 2016).

Session 2 : jeudi 2 novembre, 14h - 15h30 

Moments (or degrees) of coercion

Moments (or degress) of coercion of slaves and captives in the Papal States (1750-1850)

Giulia Bonazza

The paper aims to demonstrate the moments (or degrees) of coercion of slaves and captives in the Italian area, particularly in Rome in the second half of the 18th Century - first half of the 19th Century. In the Papal States, captives and slaves frequently worked in a first step in the dock of Civitavecchia on galleys, but after the baptism they obteined a better working condition even if they were not legally free. They were employed as soldiers in Sant’Angelo Castle or in the wadding factory of Civitavecchia. For this reason the baptism was also a form of agency or an exit strategy from the unfree working condition and it was also a fundamental step to have the possibility to become legally free. The “profitability” of the exchange between baptism and possible freedom constitutes an interesting aspect, in relationship to which the sources are contradictory. On the one hand, after the baptism, generally, slaves did not obtain freedom but they were employed at Saint Angelo Castle, so freedom was convenient particularly for the Catholic Church because before the baptism, slaves were maintained for a year in the House of catechumens. On the other hand, in some rare cases the slaves already worked in Saint Angelo Castle before baptism. In every case slaves were employed in positions of greater responsibility only when they were baptized. These examples demonstrate that there were different moments of coercion; more, they were not directly linked to the juridical concept of free and unfree condition.

Giulia Bonazza is currently Maw Weber Fellow at the European University Institute. In her new project she investigates the involvement of Italian nobles families in the Atlantic trade in the 18th and 19th Century. Giulia finished her PhD in July 2016 at Cà Foscari University Venice and EHESS Paris with a thesis entitled Essere Schiavi. Il dibattito abolizionista e le persistenze della schiavitù negli Stati Italiani preunitari (1750-1850)/ Être esclave. Le débat abolitionniste et la persistance de l’esclavage dans les Etats italiens pré-unitaires (1750-1850). For my Master, she studied in Bologna University and Paris 7 Denis Diderot and defended a thesis on the interconnections between the Santo Domingo Revolution and the French Revolution through the journal Le Créole Patriote (1792-1794).

The paradox of free and unfree labour in the burgeoning welfare state: forced labour instead of unemployment. Sweden 1920s-1960s

Yvonne Svanström

This paper will investigate the complex relationship between unemployment and forced labour in late 1800s’ and the first half of the 1900s’ Sweden, placing Sweden in an international context. Focus will be on vagrancy through a gendered lens. For centuries vagrancy was under the criminal code, and individuals were incarcerated in prisons, work houses and fortresses until they could obtain legal labour or being taken into care; something that could take many years.

As in many other countries the legislation was used against both women and men, and during the period of regulated prostitution in Sweden it was also used as the legislation that set in if women did not abide by the regulation. In 1885 the legislation was mitigated, and those without “honest work” could be given two warnings, and were then sentenced to forced labour if the offence reoccurred. This was when the industrialisation was really taking off in Sweden and a restructuring of society was in the making. The legislation, however, was kept in Swedish society until the 1960s.

This paper will focus the period 1920-1960s. As in many European countries the interwar years and the depression with structural unemployment and hardship was tangible, even if Sweden had not taken part in the First World War. The post-World War Two period was the beginning of the so called “golden years” of the Swedish economy. Still, however, it was under “penalty” to be unemployed. From a gendered perspective this paper will investigate the paradox of a burgeoning welfare nation, which on the one hand experienced a labour force shortage which led to state organised labour force migration into the industry, and on the other hand used the vagrancy legislation where women and men were sent to forced labour for being unemployed.

The paper will be using different sources such as state official investigations, police records, newspapers and novels.

Yvonne Svanström is Associate Professor in Economic History at Stockholm University. Her research has mainly concerned institutions and practices concerning prostitution, trafficking and domestic services. She has also done some work on how to use contemporary fiction as source material for economic historians. Latest work: “From Contested to Consensus: Swedish Politics on Prostitution and Trafficking”, i red. Eilís Ward and Gillian Wylie, The Politics of Neo-Abolitionism: prostitution, feminism and the state, (Routledge, 2016).

Controlling the labour force in pre-1959 Tibet

Jeannine Bischoff

Tibet around 1900 was scarcely inhabited and as most of the Tibetan plateau lies above 3,000 metres the conditions for agriculture and cattle breeding were accordingly harsh. Previous to 1959, around 90% of the Tibetan population was bound to estates hereditarily. Legally speaking a termination of this bond was non-negotiable. Due to the general labour shortage, however, this legal bond was fragile. In reality, runaways never had problems to find a new estate taking them in. Hence, despite the non-negotiable bond estate lords had to make sure to keep the amount of workforce available to them stable. While on the one hand they were entitled to extract labour from the peasants bound to their estates by birth, they on the other hand also had to ensure their economic wellbeing to keep them satisfied enough to stay. Accordingly, this paper argues that estate lords were due to these legal and social realities caught in a “balancing act between coercion and protection” towards the people bound to them. Based on obligation contracts, this analysis aims to presenting different means of negotiating moments of coercion on Tibetan rural estates at around 1900.

Jeannine Bischoff is a doctoral student at Department for Mongolian and Tibetan Studies of the University of Bonn, Germany. Her research focuses on Tibetan Social History and is based on administrative documents concerning the rural communities attached to Kundeling monastery, in Central Tibet, before 1959.

To which extent under coercion? Convicts’ and illegal migrants’ labour in Spain (1975-2015)

Fernando Mendiola

This paper will deal with the different modalities of unfree labour that have existed in Spain after Franco’s dictatorship. We will start from the taxonomy developed by the Global Collaboratory on the History of Labour Relations, and will focus on category 8 (Obligatory labourers, which according to the taxonomy includes convict labour) and category 15 (Indentured labourers for the market). Anyway, we will see that in both categories boundaries between freedom and unfreedom are not always clear, and that diferent grades of coercion can be observed within them.

Regarding convict labour, we must take into account that the Francoist system, created during the Civil War, in 1938 – the Redemption System – was maintained until the new Penal Code in 1995, albeit with significant changes that raise important questions about the degree of obligatory nature of convict labour. Those questions do not disappear after 1995 and although working  in prison was kept apart from the length of the time in prison, everyday reality shows that an important degree of coercion still remains in convict labour after 1995.

The situation of illegal migrants is very different, with a lot of them being bounded to debts in order to pay the expensive clandestine journeys. The illegal status of these persons and their employment make the study of such situation very difficult, however, we by using prioritarily qualitative sources we will address the issue.

As a result, we hope to enhance our knowledge about how different degrees of coercion operate in labour markets in contemporary global capitalism.

Fernando Mendiola is Professor in Modern History at the Public University of Navarra. He obtained his Ph.D. with a research about industrialisation in Navarre and during the last years he has been researching on forced labour in Franco’s Spain, dealing with different aspects, such as oral memory, economic impact and the politics of memory.

His main publications related to unfree labour are: ‘Reeducation through work? Mountain roads in the Spanish concentration universe (Western Pyrenees, 1939-1942), Labor History, 55, 1 (2014); ‘Forced labor, public policies and business strategies during Franco’s dictatorship: an interim report, Enterprise and Society, 14, 1 (2013) and Esclavos del franquismo en el Pirineo, Txalaparta, 2006 (together with E. Beaumont).

Session 3 : jeudi 2 novembre, 16h-17h30

Working group meeting

Session 4 : Vendredi 3 novembre, 14h-15h30

Free / un free military labour  - joint session with "Free-unfree labour" working group

Devshirmes and Unfree Labor System in the Ottoman Capital

Gulay Yilmaz, Akdeniz University, Turkey

Devshirme practice had been the main source of military conscription for the Ottoman Empire from its establishment to the 18^th century.  It was a system to levy the sons of Christian subjects of the empire and to train them in order to use them in military and administrative positions. Before these boys were placed as soldiers they also had obligatory duties that have not yet been fully examined. These boys were used as skilled or unskilled laborers in state workshops, construction zones, urban production ateliers, and in urban agriculture throughout the application of the system.

This paper has two aims: first to investigate these laborers by gathering as much information as possible regarding their origins, working conditions and earnings; secondly, to elaborate on the extent of the unfree labor produced by devshirme boys. This approach will help us to think the military organization of the empire and the labor history of the Ottoman capital together. I argue in this paper that the devshirme system was also used as an unfree labor system by generating laborers working within Istanbul.

Military labour in the Republic of Venice: militiamen, sappers and oarsmen between agency and coercion (XVI-XVII centuries)

Giulio Ongaro, University Bicocca, Milan, Italy

In the early modern period, rural subjects of the Republic of Venice were involved in various ways in the military structure of the state. They had to give up their private activities (in the fields, but also in mines and rural workshops) in order to serve as militiamen, sappers and oarsmen. Men enrolled in the rural militia had to participate in periodic reviews and drills, and sometime to serve for few months on the batterfield or – more often – as garrison in the fortresses. Sappers instead had to serve in the building of the fortresses themselves, leaving their houses for many months, or in the construction of trenchs and galleries in wartime. It was a more prolonged and dangerous involvement, such as the oarsmen one. Rural inhabitants could not generally avoid their enrollement, even if they could pay a substitute; they received a salary for their service, but in spite of this they can be considered ”tributary workers”, because each rural community was forced to enroll a prearranged number of men.

However, beside the salary the participation in the state military machine led to other important consequences for rural militiamen, sappers and oarsmen, with relevant repercussions on the social and economic equilibria of the communities. In fact, they enjoyed personal tax exemption – in a period of significant increase in direct taxation – and their military position reinforced their role in the community. Especially the rural militia became an expression of local powers, a transference of the local social structure and of local patronages and conflicts within the (armed) military structure. We can assume that rural militia had a more important role within the local context than from a military point of view; a “coerced” service became an instrument of individuals and group in order to strengthen their position within their community.

Army/Nation, Labour/Service: the problem of universal conscription in the Nineteenth Century

Jacopo Lorenzini, Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici

Few concepts in history are more overflowing with rhetoric, than the ones revolving around XIX Century universal conscription. Many countries, inside and outside Old Europe, invested their military institution with unifying, nationalising, political and cultural homogenising missions. Therefore conscription, up to then a pretty technical issue, became the pivot of massive nation-building (or re-building, as in the French case) operations. However, conscription was also an economic issue: the term “universal” masked the impossibility to enlist every male individual. Even more: some governs did not want to have to deal with huge “popular armies” at all – still, they needed to take advantage of the symbolic and administrative paraphernalia related to Prussian-style militarised society.

All of these problems put the concept of conscription in a very difficult historiographical position. To be enlisted as a citoyen was a service to the Nation, or a normal – and often undesired – employment? Were the armies of the late XIX Century truly mirrors of their respective societies? What was the position of the different military and political élites? We will try to compare some national cases to find out about this key issue.

Session 5 : Vendredi 3 novembre, 11h-12h30

Free / un free military labour  - joint session with "Free-unfree labour" working group -suite

The Finnish fortification works 1940–1941 as an example of military labour

Otto Aura, University of Helsinki, Finland

In this proposed paper I present the Finnish fortification works 1940–1941 as an example of military labour. In Finland’s point of view, World War II included three separate wars, the Winter War (1939-1940) alone against the Soviet Union and then the Continuation War (1941-1944), alongside with Germany, against Soviet Union. The last war was against the Germany, the Lapland war (1944-45) after peace treaty with Soviet Union in September 1944. The time between Winter War and Continuation War, the so-called Interim Peace, is the timing of this paper.

Just after the Winter War ended, Finnish High Command decided that the new borders of Moscow Peace Treaty had to be fortified. Finland had over 1000 kilometres of shared border with the Soviet Union. The area seen as most vulnerable was to be heavily fortified with concrete fortifications (as was done in France, Belgium etc.). The task was enormous and needed quite a lot of labour. The highest peak at a certain moment was 35 000 and the cumulative number was somewhere near 50 000. This labour had twofold meaning. It was for national defence and also a cure for unemployment.

This was on type of military labour. It was contracted by the High Commands Fortification Office and the salaries were standardised. Work was either hard manual work or something that needed occupational specialisation (e.g. stone- and concrete workers). The gendered division of labour was quite clear. The management, professionals and odd-job men and were almost all-male whereas typists and other office assistants were women - and catering was provided by all-female Lotta Svärd –organization. Labour was free to move but was also under some restrictions. 

In the summer of 1941 began the so-called Continuation War as Finland started the offensive against the Soviets, alongside with Germany. This meant a sudden shift for the fortification workers as wartime legislature was implemented. A high amount of the labourers was called to arms; the rest were kept in their work under the law on obligatory work. In the proposed paper I will present how the military labour of fortification works transformed from free to unfree military labour.

In the proposed paper, I will present one example of military labour. I will start at the Winter War’s experiences and move forward to take a look on different aspects of fortification works in Finland, for example how was it organized, how did the military get the labourers needed, the division of gender, and skilled-unskilled labour. The ending point is the beginning of the Continuation War and the turn from free to unfree labour.

Forced Labour postwar needs : militarized disciplinary units in Spain (1939-1945)

Juan Carlos García-Funes, Public University of Navarra, Spain

The military bureaucracy organized since the coup of July 1936 launched concentration camps system that, among other things, organized a forced labour system for prisoners of war. Those who were classified as disaffected or doubtful affects the lifting military, were intended to forced labour militarized units. This system didn't finish with the end of the civil war, introducing certain transformations. In the aftermath of the war this system was framed in disciplinary units for young people who had to fulfil military service and who were classified as disaffected, and young leaving paroled from prison.

In this paper we present some preliminary results of an ongoing investigation on worker soldiers in war, compared with the forced labour of prisoners during the war. We attend to temporal and geographical reasons of it, in order to understand the logic of forced labour in the Iberian Peninsula and northern Morocco. In addition, we propose a concrete analysis of specific units, to come closer to movements in and out of work (evasions, mortality, licensing ...) to help us understand better functionalities and concrete developments of these disciplinary battalions.