Disorderly families
Subtitle: infamous letters from the Bastille Archives
By: [compiled by] Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault ; edited by Nancy Luxon ; translated by Thomas Scott-Railton ; afterword to the English edition by Arlette Farge
Contributors: Archives de la Bastille
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 331
ISBN-13: 9780816695348
Subjects: Social conditions; Families; Lettres de cachet; History
Other titles: Désordre des familles. English.
Description: "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 Regime 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"--
Notes: Translated from the French.

Includes bibliographical references and index.
Table of contents: title: Translator's Preface; title: Editor's Introduction; title: Introduction; title: 1. Marital Discord: Households in ruin ; The imprisonment of wives ; The debauchry of husbands ; The tale of a request; title: 2. Parents and Children: The disruption of affairs ; Shameful concubinage ; The dishonor of waywardness ; Domestic violence ; Bad apprentices ; Exiles ; Family honor ; Parental ethos of 1728: the rationale for sentiment ; Parental ethos of 1758: the duty to educate; title: 3. When Addressing the King; title: Afterword to the English edition / Arlette Farge.