Paper short abstract:

Called "nomads" then "gens du voyage" by the French administration, the so-called "Hungarian" Roma have been under a regime of surveillance for more than a hundred years. Roma do not see themselves as defined by the necessity to move, but as people strongly connected to the places where they stop.

Paper long abstract:

Initially called "nomads" then "gens du voyage" by the French administration, the so-called "Hungarian" Roma have been under a regime of surveillance for more than a hundred years: their mobility was deemed a danger to French public order. This paper will defend the thesis that the "Hungarian" Roma do not see themselves as people defined by the necessity to move, but as people strongly connected to the places where they stop. A stopping-place - yek than - is indeed a place where they can form a new kumpania.

The Roma conception of "travel" is therefore the result of a complex dialectic between, on the one hand, gathering and dispersing of kumpania and, on the other hand, administrative constraints. Not long after they arrived in late nineteenth-century France persecution began: the movements of those groups were to be registered in a carnet anthropométrique (anthropometric identity booklet) (1912), large family-gathering were banned (1935), their internment (1940-1946) and, more recently, their assignment to places reserved for so-called "gens du voyage" (2000). But in a country organized simultaneously along territorial sovereignty rules and the privatization of public spaces, the strength of kumpania (company) is that they have no territory of their own to defend and that their temporary dispersal is but a modality of their internal relational structure. That is to say that the dispersal is not the end of the group, but means its metamorphosis. Another configuration will appear later somewhere else. The essential thing for them is not to know where they go but with whom.