Disorderly families : infamous letters from the Bastille Archives / Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault ; edited by Nancy Luxon ; translated by Thomas Scott-Railton ; afterword to the English edition by Arlette Farge.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Farge, Arlette, author, author of afterword, colophon, etc.

Foucault, Michel, author.

Contributor:

Luxon, Nancy, editor.

Scott-Railton, Thomas, translator.

Archives de la Bastille.

Standardized Title:

Désordre des familles. English.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Archives.

France--Archival resources.

France.

Physical Description:

1 online resource (344 pages)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Minneapolis, Minnesota : University of Minnesota Press, 2016.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

Translator's preface

Editor's introduction

Disorderly Families

Introduction

1. Marital discord

2. Parents and children

3. When addressing the king

Afterword to the English edition / Arlette Farge.

Notes:

First published as Le désordre des familles : letters de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIIIe siècle by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, by Gallimard/Julliard, 1982 and 2014.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (ebrary, viewed December 27, 2016).

ISBN:

9781452951935

1452951934

OCLC:

967109555