Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault (review)

This book collects lettres de cachet (letters of arrest) from myriads of dysfunctional families, as we would call them now. So potent is their threat, however, the body politic itself appears to be suffering an apocalyptic death of a million cuts. In fact, they are specially formulaic petitions to the King and/or his local representatives, to intervene and order the arrest of debauched husbands or wives, wayward children, bad apprentices, violators of family honor, all disruptors of affairs, who have not been brought to justice via the normal system; or, if facing possible legal actions by the usual process, have evaded final judgment and are still free to wreak havoc with the lives of ordinary people. An entire rhetoric of how to address the king is on display in these letters, and the third section of the book lays it out. The other two sections of the book concern "Marital Discord" and "Parents and Children," the vast majority of the topoi of this genre. One cannot help envisioning a new Dickensian novel when reading these letters.

These materials arise out of the confluence of Michel Foucault's previous work on what he termed in a notorious 1970s essay to be "lives of infamous men." This epithet refers to dangerous people that the prison system two hundred or so years ago originally incarcerated and later sought to reform. Arlette Farge happened to be working on similar materials, focused upon this discursive practice of lettres de cachet, and the two decided to combine interests. This book, much delayed, first appeared in French in 1982. It is now available in English with a useful introduction by the editor explaining the history of their collaboration and that of the general context in which the letters were originally composed. There is also a special "Afterword" by Arlette Farge that reviews the project from the hindsight of the intervening many years.

What we see in miniature in these letters is how royal power presents itself as the court of last resort for the people whose lack of class position, wealth, and personal or family influence in the established legal system of village, town, city, and region, means that their grievances only slowly, very slowly get heard and often get dismissed in the meantime, with the objects of their proposed legal action free to continue their violent interruptions of everyday lives. Royal power is thereby both restrictive with respect to these "infamous" offenders and empowering of the people they have victimized, all to the enhancement of the King. Here we have a pre-modern source for what rationalized power structures of modern disciplines perform in a more pervasive, saturating, and efficient manner. In the nineteenth-century and after, under the secular democratic regimes, this two-handed sword of the justice system, repressive and empowering, becomes the norm in western societies across every field of human experience, as Foucault's most influential book Discipline and Punish argues so well. For scholars of critical theory and of Foucault this latest volume is of value for this genealogy of the power concept, so that we can see the historical continuities, as well as the ruptures, which inform Foucault's oeuvre.

In the third and final part of Disorderly Families, "When Addressing the King," in what sounds mostly like Foucault's voice, the co-writers characterize how lettres de cachet supplement with their writing the legal system. The latter concerns itself with punishment laid upon the body with visible marks of whippings, hard labor, and other forms of violence. Repentance is not in the picture, neither is reformation. But imprisonment via lettres de cachet is a different form, and requires a different attitude and rhetorical expression:

A request for imprisonment [of an improvident offspring in this instance] was therefore a living site assembled out of action and desire, where the production of its author's self-image...