Lettres de Cachet by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault

With murky historical origins, the lettre de cache (often mistakenly glossed as “poison-pen letters’) were letters addressed to the king, letters that invoked his absolute power to intervene in problems of marital and family life by imprisoning family members on charges of theft, debauchery, drunkenness, infidelity, and other violations of civil order. Although some historians date the letters’ origins to the fourteenth century, or perhaps earlier, their use by the king to intervene personally in the exercise of sovereignty dates to the sixteenth century, and their frequency as a tool of royal administration increased in the seventeenth century. Often associated with the excesses of royal absolutist power, historians initially viewed these letters as the prerogative of the king and upper aristocracy. However, although some French notables were arrested in this way (notoriously, Diderot and the Marquis de Sade), most letters were penned by the poor and illiterate with the help of hired scriveners. Many of the dossiers contained multiple letters; they included either repeated attempts to imprison a family member, or additional testimonials from neighbors, the local cure, or police, or later requests that said family member be returned home. These requests for confinement were subsequently directed to and enforced by the local police – without any judicial interventions or possibility for self-defense. Taken as a whole, these letters offer a unique set of historical documents for a period (1728-1758) in which the royal court, regional parlements (courts of appeal), Catholic Church, and other elites dominate public record. They provide and window onto to the experience of ordinary lives touched by power.

 Families turned to the king at times when the authority of their internal hierarchy was powerless and when seeking recourse in the justice system was neither possible (because the matter was too trivial) nor desirable (because it would have been too slow, too costly, too shameful, too uncertain). An insistent demand for state intervention came into being. Was this demand stronger in modest or poor circles than it was in those where greater resources might have been available to resolve problems of this nature (a residence in the countryside or in exile for the scandalous wife or the spendthrift son, a convent where, through means of a pension or a dowry, a troublesome daughter could be imprisoned)? It is possible.

 It was always the king whose intervention was solicited and his administration that looked twice before intervening. That royal authority would pay attention to a small family drama, that would take sides with a father, a husband, a wife etc., doing so outside of the forms of rule-governed justice, that within a family it would enforce its own values, doing so through the police apparatus and its instruments of punishment was something that became not only allowed but actively sought after. The king as the protector and judge of family activities, this image whose symbolism is quite obvious, was at the same time a daily reality in which the feeling of security provided was shadowed by a growing anxiety towards this infinite arbitrariness* that was capable of striking at any moment. This explains why the practice of the family lettre de cache had by the end of the Ancient Regime come to seem as if it had reached a saturation point.

But in hiding the wrongdoer from the eyes of the world, imprisonment without a determined sentence permanently washed away the stain of guilt. This erasure is rather astonishing and required repentance to work. The king corrected, or so it was said, but he did not punish. And relatives did not make the mistake of arguing over this feature of correction that was also a way for the detainee to mend his ways, to regret his wrongdoings, and, through solitude, to find clarity and even, why not, innocence. Once again everything differed from the regular system: the family request for imprisonment was an site of repentance, something that ordinary justice was little interested obtaining. In the eighteenth century, justice whipped and banished, marked and scarred the body, and sent people to the galleys, without troubling itself over other forms of correction. This notion of correction was as absent from the legal system procedures as it was from its problematic. The physical suffering inflicted served a two-fold purpose; avenging the wrong done to society and making this visible upon the body of the condemned, striking the flesh of the delinquent enough for the punishment to become a spectacle, an intimidation, a lesson for others. The legislator was hardly thinking of guiding the criminal’s soul. The soul would only become important much later, during the nineteenth century, when criminality-obsessed philanthropists would lend prisons the atmosphere of convents, in which the guard’s eye as there to provoke repentance, fight evil, and compel amendment. Family requests for imprisonment calling for repentance prefigured the large philanthropic projects of the next century.

* The lieutenancy was caught up in its own dream- policing in the eighteenth century was build entirely around a dream: manufacturing the peoples’ happiness-taking advantage of its ability to dispatch lettres de cache, it appropriated royal intervention as a means of palliating its own weakness, disorder, incoherence, and lack of initiative. As we have seen, inspectors and superintendents tasked with investigations descended into neighborhoods and picked up all manner of information; nothing could be more random, precarious, and unjust than  procedures of this nature.. Thus “the order of the king” sprawled outwards, its tentacles extending everywhere that the lumbering justice system, which was so poorly adapt to insubordinate Parisian sociability,  had been unable to introduce itself. . .

Afterword

 In 1979 or 1980, I received a telephone call from Michel Foucault asking to meet me in regard to a potential collaboration. How can I express my surprise and emotion when faced with such are request? There were so many disparities between us: social status, age, book publications, international prestige, classes whose audience threatened to spill out beyond the large lecture hall at the College de France . . .

During our meeting, he explains that he wants to publish a fair number of requests for imprisonment sent to the king and to write accompanying interpretations and analysis. At this point I understand that he appreciates the way in which I read “these manuscripts from the past” from poor families who addressed the king in an extraordinarily direct way, without the intermediary of ordinary justice. I had, of course, read, in 1975, his article  titled “Lives of Infamous Men,” which conveyed his admiration for and emotional attachment to the grievances addressed to the highest power in the kingdom. With rigor, emotion, and lyricism, he spoke of lives illuminated solely by ‘the light of justice,” thanks to which they were able to be preserved. The intelligent, controlled and impassioned lyricism of his opening sentences touched me enormously. He spoke of men and women of vies breves, brief lives, a term he preferred to nouvelles in the literary sense of the term. The unique and unfailing beauty of his writing gave a specific tone to the text. For Foucault, those singular lives were also vies poems, life-poems. Speaking of emotion in those days represented a real break from the traditional way of writing about history. He wrote: “I admit that these ‘ short stories’ suddenly emerging from two and a half centuries of silence, stirred more fibers within me that what is ordinarily called literature .  .  . If I made use of documents like these . . . it was doubtless because of the resonance I still experience today when I happen to encounter these lowly lives reduced to ashes in the few sentences that struck them down.”

Reading about the emotional and physical resonance  Foucault experienced was a revelation for me, encouraging and comforting. All the more so because, as a woman, known for being sensitive, my perspective as an historian was often put into doubt, sullied by attributes that historical science didn’t want to understand and on which it has casually shut its door. Having chosen to focus my research on judicial archives, the road ahead was sometimes difficult and combative. It was necessary to maintain, in the most intelligent way possible, that spoken words, the unique situation of every human being, their discourse formed ‘events’ that could be social or religious, political or affective, and more often than not filled with emotion. . .

As for me, today, I’d like to address the reader directly. I want to share – all these years later – a few disarmingly simple musings and memories:

I remember his laugh

I remember his conviction when talking about singular lives and making them actors in history

I remember his love for cinema

I remember love for his black cat

I remember his erudition, his passion for books, literature, reasoning, the desire to convince, the subversive desire (volunte)
I remember his appetite for thinking outside the box, for breaking down barriers between disciplines

I remember his appreciation for the disparate, which deconstructed what we call “the real” ( le reel)

I remember his desire that we each learn the fable of obscure lives

I remember that he always spoke of true lives
I remember his vocabulary: strategies and power

I remember how much he like ruptures and discontinuities, rifts and cracks

I remember what he thought of those in power and the “characters out of Celine  trying to make themselves heard at Versailles.”
I remember his writing to which I don’t want to append any adjectives given that, for me, it is the writing of history.
I remember his fierce love of the shameful and shameless
I remember his activism and his fight for the prisons
I remember the lifelong lesson he imparted on me that the quelconque, the whatever, was only able to appear under the impetus of power
I remember that the quelconque is so serious that it must know how to defy power

I remember meeting and working with Michel Foucault.