Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives

by Arlette Farge, Michel Foucault, Nancy Luxon (Editor), Thomas Scott-Railton (Translator)

Overview

The first English translation of letters of arrest from eighteenth century France held in the archives of the Bastille

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 eighteenth 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 French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect ninety-four 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 impressively, 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 by 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 book’s editor, Nancy Luxon, as well as notes that contextualize the original 1982 publication and eighteenth-century policing practices. 

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781452951928
Publisher:	University of Minnesota Press
Publication date:	01/01/2017
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	328
File size:	480 KB

About the Author

Arlette Farge is Director of Research in Modern History at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris and the author of more than a dozen books, including Fragile Lives and The Allure of the Archive.

Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and held the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège de France. He is often considered the most influential political theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. His most notable works include History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, among others.

Nancy Luxon is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust,and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault.

Thomas Scott-Railton is a freelance French-English translator living in Brooklyn, New York, and previously translated Arlette Farge’s The Allure of the Archive.

Table of Contents

Contents
Translator’s Preface
Editor’s Introduction
Presentation
The King’s Orders
At the Family’s Request
1728–1758: A Survey
1. Marital Discord
Putting and End to One’s Misery
The Pact Broken
Debauch: Masculine Spaces, Feminine Spaces
The Gaze of Others
The Imprisonment Obtained or the Beginning of a Story
Obscure “Police Clarifications”
The Singular Status of Repentance
Documents 1. Marital Discord
Households in Ruin
The Imprisonment of Wives
The Debauch of Husbands
The Tale of a Request
2. Parents and Children
Conflicts of Interest
Disturbance
“Conflicts at the Threshold”
Departure for the Islands
The Honor of Families
Parental Ethics
Documents 2. Parents and Children
The Disruption of Affairs
Shameful Concubinage
The Dishonor of Waywardness
Domestic Violence
Bad Apprentices
Exiles
Family Honor
The Parental Ethos of 1728: The Importance of Sentiment
The Parental Ethos of 1758: The Duty to Educate
3. When Addressing the King
From Use to Abuse
Representation and Secrecy
The End of Lettres de Cachet
Afterword
Arlette Farge
Notes
Index to Names
Index to Places

Editorial Reviews

"Expertly edited, this thoughtful translation of Disorderly Families adds a central pillar to the English archive of Michel Foucault’s work. A source of fascination for him since at least the 1950s, the Bastille lettres de cachets deeply influenced and shaped his analysis of power. As he discovered, these letters were what he and Arlette Farge would call a ‘popular practice,’ demanded from below, and not an arbitrary exercise of monarchical power—and they would become a key building block for Foucault’s theory of power-knowledge. This exceptional English translation gives life to Foucault’s—and Farge’s—subversive desire to breathe life into these beautiful, infamous, and obscure lives."—Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia University

"An enlightening compilation that will leave historically inclined readers wanting to dig a little further into the archives."—Kirkus Reviews

"Thirty-five years on, the study of obscure individual lives has become a valued feature of historical research and the source of new perspectives in the understanding of social and political contexts. [But quite apart from this change in the attitude of historians], the letters themselves seem to have aged better than the intellectual disagreements and academic disputes that accompanied their original publication."—Times Literary Supplement

From the Publisher

2016-11-20
The first English translation of letters from the Bastille archives reveals a compelling array of domestic difficulties in French families across the board.Much is known about the conditions in which both bourgeois and working-class Parisians lived in the moments leading up to the revolution in 1789. We know about the state of politics, and we have some idea of how daily life ran its course. However, we know little about the intricacies of domestic life. This collection of 94 letters, first published in French in 1982, reveals many of those details. In her introduction to these letter troves, which helps provide context for this English version, Luxon (Political Science/Univ. of Minnesota; Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust, and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault, 2013, etc.) explains that in discussing the book's original iteration, Foucault considered the letters "a model of writing, or a game, created by the staging of a plea and then guttural cry—a game between the public audience and the eruption of a sort of spontaneity…‘flash existences' or ‘poem-lives.' " In fact, what Foucault and Farge (Director of Research, Modern History/Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; The Allure of the Archives, 2015, etc.) have assembled is a kind of catalog of lives that explores the various facets of interpersonal relationships through short, haiku-esque linguistic glimpses. The letters as presented­—and translated by Scott-Railton—explore the various points of view that make up family settings: spousal relations, parents and children, and royal submission. "The family secret became an object to appropriate; thus, spreading the secret…all the way to the king, was a manner of retrieving honor," explains Foucault. An enlightening compilation that will leave historically inclined readers wanting to dig a little further into the archives.

Kirkus Reviews