Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives

Drunken and debauched husbands; libertine wives; vagabonding children. These and many more are the subjects of requests for confinement written to the king of France in the 18th century. These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France’s Ancien Régime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect 94 letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes.

Gathered together, these letters show something other than the exercise of arbitrary royal power, and offer unusual insight into the infamies of daily life. From these letters come stories of divorce and marital conflict, sexual waywardness, reckless extravagance, and abandonment. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most arrestingly, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order.

Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault were fascinated by the letters’ explosive qualities, and how they both illustrated and intervened in the workings of power and governmentality. Disorderly Families sheds light on Foucault’s conception of political agency and his commitment to theorizing how ordinary lives come to be touched by power. This first English translation is complete with an introduction from the editor, Nancy Luxon, as well as notes that contextualize the original 1982 publication and 18th century policing practices.