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A Wide, Invisible Net: Administrative Deportation in Italy, 1863–1871

This article examines the legal history of domicilio coatto (forced residence), a system of summary police-administered deportation instituted by Italy’s Liberal government soon after national unification in 1861. Introduced in an emergency law in 1863, its limited purpose was to suppress a public-order crisis in the south. Within just eight years, however, forced residence had become a regular institution of Italian criminal justice. Not only did it remain as such until Mussolini’s seizure of power in 1922, but it also provided an important blueprint for confino di polizia, the Fascist variant of forced residence implemented in 1926. Focusing on the complex circumstances in which domicilio coatto emerged, the causes of its rapid transformation into a routine weapon of preventative policing, and the legal ideologies of its proponents, this article aims to explain why Italian legal experts crafted the highly repressive instrument and championed it as an essential, if not desirable, institution of ‘liberal’ criminal justice in the young constitutional monarchy. It argues that domicilio coatto was devised to be not simply an expedient for punishing political opponents, as scholars have long emphasized, but a regular instrument for thwarting what jurists and lawmakers considered to be the principal long-term threat to cementing Liberal rule: common crime. Such an interpretation sheds new light on the origins, objectives and historical significance of forced residence in Liberal Italy; at the same time, it offers a critical complement to the existing scholarship that has focused almost exclusively on the political uses of domicilio coatto.