The workshop aims to create an original dialogue, both comparative and transnational, around a topic that is relatively new for the period 1870-1914, namely armed groups. This subject will be considered in relation to political violence and with a relatively flexible geography: Euro-Mediterranean spaces, understood in a broad sense.  The main question to be addressed is the relationship between armed groups and the legitimate use of violence, by analyzing similarities, differences, transfers and their influences on the social world at large (associations, coteries, clans, the nation, etc.), throughout the Euro-Mediterranean region between 1870 and 1914.