Social disciplining and combat agains vagrancy in Ancien Régime

Abstract

The control of vagrancy takes different faces throughout different ages. The police legislation in the beginning of the early modern times, inspired by religious morality, focused on the restraint of gambling, drunkenness and migration of workers, which were regarded as sources of sins and social disturbances. The age of Reform Absolutism changed these forms of social restraint when the economical factor assumed a central role. Under liberalism, a new vindication was needed for the maintenance of vagrancy control apparatus.