Lettres de Cachet and Social Control in the Ancien Régime, 1659-1789

Lettres de Cachet and Social Control in the Ancien Régime, 1659-1789 PDF Author: Brian Eugene Strayer
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

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Book Description
Lettres de cachet, one of many social control mechanisms of Old Regime France, needs reassessment today after two centuries of distorted interpretations portraying these royal arrest warrants as symbols of despotism. In reality, these private ordres du roi were preventive measures to control deviant elements in society (juvenile delinquents, prostitutes, the insane, etc.). These ordres enabled the King, police, and parents to preserve family honor, enforce socially acceptable behavior, and prevent crimes embarrassing to the family and disruptive to social harmony. This book examines the legal and administrative framework, police methods and procedures, family problems and concerns, and the actual lifestyles of inmates at some of the foremost carceral institutions of 17th and 18th century Paris from 1650 to 1789.

Lettres de Cachet and Social Control in the Ancien Régime, 1659-1789

Lettres de Cachet and Social Control in the Ancien Régime, 1659-1789 PDF Author: Brian Eugene Strayer
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN:
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 296

Get Book Here

Book Description
Lettres de cachet, one of many social control mechanisms of Old Regime France, needs reassessment today after two centuries of distorted interpretations portraying these royal arrest warrants as symbols of despotism. In reality, these private ordres du roi were preventive measures to control deviant elements in society (juvenile delinquents, prostitutes, the insane, etc.). These ordres enabled the King, police, and parents to preserve family honor, enforce socially acceptable behavior, and prevent crimes embarrassing to the family and disruptive to social harmony. This book examines the legal and administrative framework, police methods and procedures, family problems and concerns, and the actual lifestyles of inmates at some of the foremost carceral institutions of 17th and 18th century Paris from 1650 to 1789.

Moral Cupidity and Lettres de cachet in Diderot’s Writing

Moral Cupidity and Lettres de cachet in Diderot’s Writing PDF Author: Jennifer Vanderheyden
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 0429614810
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 235

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Book Description
This volume explores the influence of the lettre de cachet on both Diderot’s personal life and his works, beginning with an examination of Diderot’s experience as recipient of two such arrest warrants, followed by an analysis of his references to these warrants in three of his fictional works, Le Père de famille, Jacques le fataliste and Est-il bon? Est-il méchant?. A scrutiny of Diderot’s mémoire/lettre novel La Religieuse proposes that, on the basis of moral cupidity, or self-gain, Madame Simonin sends her daughter Suzanne two veiled lettres de cachet that demand her confinement to a convent. The exploration of a fascinating real-life case of Henriette-Émilie de Bautru, a young comtesse whose mother confined her to a convent as a result of a lettre de cachet also based on motives of greed, leads to an examination of the similarities between Suzanne and the Comtesse in terms of their illegitimacy, questioning of authority and subsequent rebellion. A consideration of writing and communication in La Religieuse as they relate to this rebellion leads to an investigation of Diderot’s admiration of the mystery of female genius and artistic creativity as discussed in his essay Sur les femmes. The works of Julia Kristeva, especially her Post-Scriptum addressed to Diderot at the end of her work Thérèse mon amour: Thérèse d’Avila, serve as a theoretical basis for an interpretation of Suzanne’s experience as victim of a lettre de cachet and her search for a psychological rebirth of her être caché.

Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana

Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana PDF Author: Erin Greenwald
Publisher: LSU Press
ISBN: 0807162868
Category : Atlantic Ocean Region
Languages : en
Pages : 241

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Book Description
"Between 1717 and 1731, the French Company of the Indies (Compagnie des Indes) held a virtual monopoly over Louisiana culture and trade. Among numerous controls, its administrators oversaw the slave trade, the immigration of free and indentured whites, negotiations with Native American peoples, and the purchase and exportation of Louisiana-grown tobacco. In Marc-Antoine Caillot and the Company of the Indies in Louisiana, Erin M. Greenwald situates the colony within a French Atlantic circuit stretching from Paris and the Brittany coast to Africa's Senegambian region to the West Indies to Louisiana and back. Focusing on the travels and travails of Marc-Antoine Caillot, a company clerk who set sail for Louisiana in 1729, Greenwald deftly examines the company's role as colonizer, developer, slaveholder, commercial entity, and deal maker. As the company's focus shifted away from agriculture with the reversion of Louisiana to the French crown in 1731, so too did the lives of the individuals whose fortunes were bound up in the company's trade, colonization, and agricultural mission in the Americas. Greenwald's microhistorical focus on Caillot provides an engaging narrative for readers interested in the culture and society of early Louisiana and its place in the larger French Atlantic world"--From publisher's website.

Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France

Tracing the Shadow of Secrecy and Government Transparency in Eighteenth-Century France PDF Author: Nicole Bauer
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3031122364
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
This book traces changing attitudes towards secrecy in eighteenth-century France, and explores the cultural origins of ideas surrounding government transparency. The idea of keeping secrets, both on the part of individuals and on the part of governments, came to be viewed with more suspicion as the century progressed. By the eve of the French Revolution, writers voicing concerns about corruption saw secrecy as part and parcel of despotism, and this shift went hand in hand with the rise of the idea of transparency. The author argues that the emphasis placed on government transparency, especially the mania for transparency that dominated the French Revolution, resulted from the surprising connections and confluence of changing attitudes towards honour, religious movements, rising nationalism, literature, and police practices. Exploring religious ideas that associated secrecy with darkness and wickedness, and proto-nationalist discourse that equated foreignness with secrecy, this book demonstrates how cultural shifts in eighteenth-century France influenced its politics. Covering the period of intense fear during the French Revolution and the paranoia of the Reign of Terror, the book highlights the complex interplay of culture and politics and provides insights into our attitudes towards secrecy today.

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility

Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility PDF Author: Chad Denton
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1498537278
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 181

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Book Description
The image of the debauched French aristocrat of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is one that still has power over the international public imagination, from the unending fascination with the Marquis de Sade to the successes of the film Ridicule. Drawing on memoirs, letters, popular songs and pamphlets, and political treatises, The Enlightened and Depraved: Decadence, Radicalism, and the Early Modern French Nobility traces the origins of this powerful stereotype from between the reign of Louis XIV and the Terror of the French Revolution. The decadent and enlightened noble of early modern France, the libertine, was born in a push to transform the nobility from a warrior caste into an intelligentsia. Education itself had become a power through which the privileged could set themselves free from old social and religious restraints. However, by the late eighteenth century, the libertine noble was already falling under attack by changing attitudes toward gender, an emphasis on economic utility over courtly service, and ironically the very revolutionary forces that the enlightened nobility of the court and Paris helped awaken. In the end, the libertine nobility would not survive the French Revolution, but the basic idea of knowledge as a liberating force would endure in modernity, divorced from a single class.

Montesquieu's Science of Politics

Montesquieu's Science of Politics PDF Author: David W. Carrithers
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers
ISBN: 1461640172
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 469

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Book Description
Montesquieu's The Spirit of Laws is one of a handful of classic works of political philosophy deserving a fresh reading every generation. The product of immense erudition, Montesquieu's treatise has captured since its first printing (1748) the imagination of an impressive array of intellectuals including Rousseau, Voltaire, Beccaria, Madison, Hamilton, Jefferson, Herder, Siey_s, Condorcet, Robespierre, Bentham, Burke, Constant, Hegel, Tocqueville, Emile Durkheim, Raymond Aron, and Hannah Arendt. In what constitutes the only English-language collection of essays ever dedicated to the analysis of Montesquieu's contributions to political science, the contributors review some of the most vexing controversies that have arisen in the interpretation of Montesquieu's thought. By paying careful attention to the historical, political, and philosophical contexts of Montesquieu's ideas, the contributors provide fresh readings of The Spirit of Laws, clarify the goals and ambitions of its author, and point out the pertinence of his thinking to the problems of our world today.

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows

Coquettes, Wives, and Widows PDF Author: Marcie Ray
Publisher: Eastman Studies in Music
ISBN: 1580469884
Category : Drama
Languages : en
Pages : 201

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Book Description
A revelatory study of how composers and dramatists of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France criticized and trivialized independent women in their portrayals of them in works of theater and opera.

The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France

The Family on Trial in Revolutionary France PDF Author: Suzanne Desan
Publisher: Univ of California Press
ISBN: 0520248163
Category : Family & Relationships
Languages : en
Pages : 475

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Book Description
Annotation A sophisticated and groundbreaking book on what women actually did and what actually happened to them during the French Revolution.

Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760-1815 [2 volumes]

Encyclopedia of the Age of Political Revolutions and New Ideologies, 1760-1815 [2 volumes] PDF Author: Gregory Fremont-Barnes
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 0313049513
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 944

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Book Description
By giving rise to new ideologies that in time transformed the political structure of much of the world, the American and French Revolutions stand as two of the most important political events in global history. The American establishment of a Republican government, and the gradual expansion of democracy that ensued, altered traditional political and social thought, thus shaping the later French Revolution and creating the core ethic of later American political values. The Enlightenment ideals of the French Revolution, as later spread by the armies of Napoleon, dissolved most traditional European notions of political authority. This encyclopedia offers current, detailed information on the people, events, movements, and ideas that defined the revolutions in France and America, as well as in other parts of the world during the late eighteenth-century Age of Revolutions. Besides numerous entries on various countries of Europe whose histories were affected by the French Revolution, such as Austria, Belgium, Germany, Poland, and Russia, the many entries covering the people, events, groups, and ideologies of Revolutionary and Napoleonic France include the following: Civil Constitution of the Clergy, Georges Jacques Danton, The Directory, Guillotine, Josephine, Empress of France, Law of Suspects, The Mountain, Prairial Insurrection, Tennis Court Oath, White Terror. Besides various entries covering American colonies/states, such as Maryland, New Jersey, North Carolina, and Virginia, the numerous entries covering the figures, events, and ideologies of the American Revolution and Early Federal Period of the United States include the following: Abigail Adams, Boston Massacre, Constitutional Convention, William Franklin, Lexington and Concord, Actions at Loyalists, Massachusetts Government Act, Edmund Randolph, Signers of the Declaration of Independence. Finally, the encyclopedia offers various entries covering important revolutionary figures and movements that were active in other parts of the world during the period 1760-1815, including the following: Simon Bolivar, Dutch Revolutions, Haitian Revolution, Hispaniola, Latin American Revolutions, Mexican Revolution, Pugachev Rebellion, Toussaint l'Ouverture. Besides over 450 clearly written and highly informative entries, the encyclopedia also includes primary documents, a chronology, an extensive introductory essay, a bibliography, a guide to related topics, and a series of useful maps.

Harsh Justice

Harsh Justice PDF Author: James Q. Whitman
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198035314
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 322

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Book Description
Criminal punishment in America is harsh and degrading--more so than anywhere else in the liberal west. Executions and long prison terms are commonplace in America. Countries like France and Germany, by contrast, are systematically mild. European offenders are rarely sent to prison, and when they are, they serve far shorter terms than their American counterparts. Why is America so comparatively harsh? In this novel work of comparative legal history, James Whitman argues that the answer lies in America's triumphant embrace of a non-hierarchical social system and distrust of state power which have contributed to a law of punishment that is more willing to degrade offenders.