Passports Please

Long before the days of cheap flights and Eurostar, early guidebook writers were encouraging easy travel around Europe.

Nineteenth-century devotees of Baedeker guides left home in search of sublime vistas, agreeable wayside inns, picturesque curiosities and stellar attractions. The guidebooks were full of wise advice – how the traveller might decently react to courtesy or deceit, whether a gentleman might be wiser to offer French gold or English sovereigns in this or that canton of Switzerland, and where and when a passport might be advisable.

So an 1881 Baedeker guidebook advised that “in Switzerland and Italy, as well as in Holland, Belgium, Germany, France and Austria, passports are now unnecessary.” The guide did add as a qualifier that gentlemen in possession of a passport might find the document sometimes of service in securing admission to private collections.

Many a nineteenth-century traveller, in preparing for a European tour, gave much higher priority to securing a Baedeker guide than they ever did to acquiring a passport.

But that halcyon period of passport-free travel, a sort of precursor of the modern Schengen system, was not to last forever. In 1879, the government of a recently unified Germany imposed a passport and visa requirement on travellers arriving from Russia – including its own returning citizens. Ostensibly the measure was introduced to protect the Reich’s citizens from disease, but events tell otherwise. The plague of early 1879 in parts of Russia was a short-lived affair but the passport requirement stuck for good. Fear over Russian and Polish immigration may have been the real cause for the new controls. This was after all the same Germany where Bismarck had worried about Prussia being tainted by Polish influences.

The new order affected many travellers. Anton Chekhov, a remarkable explorer of rural Russia and beyond, felt the need for a passport. In 1891 he wrote to his friend, Nikolai Leikin – editor of the deliciously eccentric St Petersburg magazine Oskolki (Splinters):

“Until last year I have always lived with my university diploma, which by land and sea has served me for a passport…but the police have warned me that one cannot live with a diploma, and that I ought to get a passport from ‘the proper department’. I have asked everyone what this ‘proper department’ means, and no one has yet given me an answer.”

Baedeker editors were also modifying their tone. Their casual advice about passports in 1881 had morphed into something sterner by 1905: “In Switzerland passports must be shown in o......