That Dazzling, Momentary Wake’ of the lettre de cachet:

Abstract

Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle is a volume edited by Ariette Farge and Michel Foucault, published in October 1982 by Gallimard. The book collects together ‘poison-pen letters’ from eighteen-century France, written to state institutions by ordinary men and women who wanted their ‘deviant’ or disgraced family members to be confined in a hospital, an asylum or a prison—the famous Bicêtre and Salpêtrière among others. Some of the responses given by the official institutions and the police dossiers are also included in Farge and Foucault’s collection. There are commentaries throughout by the two scholars, along with a postscript entitled ‘Quand on s’addresse au roi’ (‘When One Writes to the King’).