Marcela Castanheira studies power relations, including the use of lettres de cachet in pre-revolutionary France. In this blogpost, she discusses how these extrajudicial mechanisms of social control became integrated into the modern penal system, where they acquired legal legitimacy.
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Lettres de cachet were documents signed by the French king that, in most cases, ordered someone’s imprisonment without legal justification, trial, or right to defense. These were administrative – rather than judicial – procedures, typically requested by family members or neighbors of the accused with the aim of punishing individual behaviors deemed immoral by the community. Licentiousness, debauchery, vagrancy, stubbornness, drunkenness, infamy, gambling, violence, prostitution, threats – all these behaviors could prompt a request for a lettre de cachet.
Lettres de cachet could also be used to punish certain offenses technically covered by law but often overlooked in practice. This included the religious practices of witches and sorcerers deemed dangerous or dissident, as well as the arrest of watchmakers who staged history’s first recorded strike in 1724[1]. Additionally, these royal warrants could compel marriages or deprive individuals of specific rights.
Notably, cases where the king himself initiated these orders were rare. When he did, it was exclusively for matters of state—diplomatic, military, or administrative affairs, such as ministerial appointments—never to regulate individual conduct.
As noted, lettres de cachet were primarily instruments for ordering the confinement of unruly individuals at the request of their own families. If the petitioning family could afford the fee charged by the Crown, the individual would be sent to religious institutions, general hospitals, private boarding houses, or detention centers. Those without means, however, were exiled to the Islands — with no possibility of return or family reintegration.
When the disturbances caused by the behavior of spouses or children became unbearable, turning to the police to write to the king requesting an arrest order was a practical solution. Since literacy was not universal, and poorer families were generally illiterate, they had to rely on public authorities to put their domestic grievances into writing. After recording everything, the police would conduct an investigation in the neighborhood, questioning relatives, neighbors, tavern owners, and innkeepers to confirm the misconduct. They would then send the imprisonment request to the king’s minister or the king himself and receive back the lettre de cachet with the arrest order.
The mechanism was based on an exchange of favors — “you scratch my back, I’ll scratch yours”— since it resolved family problems while simultaneously maintaining public order. The common folk, the police, and the king all acted as regulators of morality.
As the entity that received and documented complaints, the police had the power to intervene in all aspects of social life: everything that happened in people’s daily lives, their behaviors, even seemingly trivial matters. They emerged to combat vagrancy, begging, and disorder, functioning as the pivotal intermediary between the people and the king. In doing so, it became the authority responsible for imprisoning individuals without judicial oversight.
Since administrative interventions carried out through lettres de cachet did not demand legal trials, they offered several advantages: I. they avoided scandal and the public spectacle of dramatic punishments by imprisoning and concealing offenders; II. they could punish even the slightest transgressions, reaching behaviors the law couldn’t address, such as a husband’s drunkenness or a son’s rebellion; III. they enforced a moral code accepted among families and their social circles; IV. and they allowed ordinary, overlooked individuals to be acknowledged by sovereign power, as anyone could request an arrest order.
The lettres de cachet represented a flexible, simple, and swift means of disposing of undesirable relatives, completely devoid of formalities.
It should come as no surprise that they were not only accepted but actively demanded by the common folk themselves. These royal warrants served as instruments for regulating everyday morality, controlling all forms of deviance from socially accepted norms – encompassing personal conduct, lifestyles, modes of speech, political aspirations, sexual behaviors, challenges to authority, and offenses against public sensibilities.
In the book Disorderly Families[2] by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault, we encounter ninety-four petitions for lettres de cachet — all submitted by impoverished families. The letters include passages such as: “a marked inclination toward debauchery”; “there is no depravity or excess to which she does not daily surrender herself”; “he wanders aimlessly, alone or in company”; “seeks only opportunities to steal and drink himself into perpetual drunkenness, having even stolen clothes from a laundress”[3].
When an imprisonment order was issued, the duration of confinement wasn’t predetermined or set by the king. The order would only be lifted when the confined individual demonstrated a change in their inclinations. Here we see the peculiar notion that to prevent potential crimes, one must imprison individuals until their tendencies are “corrected”.
This “correction” could take the form of education, healing, moral conversion, or religious repentance. Repentance serves as the strategic justification in these petitions—on one hand, it legitimizes imprisoning the individual until achieved; on the other, it authorizes their release once obtained. Families expected the accused to repent their wrongdoing and reintegrate into society.
This is evident in the complaint filed against Monsieur Leclerc by his own mother: “to attempt the correction of Monsieur Leclerc (…) may the discipline he endures render him more rational; his youth and talents compel his mother to try once more to reintroduce him to society”. And later, “the correction Monsieur Leclerc has just undergone has instilled in him profound remorse for his errors (…). He vows to reform his conduct and atone for the past, while wise and reasonable persons who retain some goodwill toward him pledge to oversee him and monitor his actions”[4].
Under the pretext of “correcting” individuals, the lettres de cachet of the Ancien Régime operated as a parallel justice system administered by the police—one that enforced imprisonment without trial, indefinite sentences, and punishments shaped by societal moral values.
The abolition of lettres de cachet—formalized by a 1784 ministerial decree—did not mark the end of their underlying logic. Imprisonment merely acquired legal veneer while retaining its social control function. The familial morality that once justified lettres de cachet migrated into penal codes. Behaviors previously condemned as personal nuisances became codified crimes: the 1791 French Penal Code, for instance, classified vagrancy and mendicancy as offenses against public order, punishable by incarceration. Thus, the bodily and behavioral control once exercised through lettres de cachet was now institutionalized in law.
The Legacy of Lettres de Cachet in the Contemporary Penal System
It would not be an exaggeration to identify points of convergence between the lettres de cachet regime and the contemporary penal system. Consider the case of Brazil.
Brazil has the third-largest prison population in the world – 888,000 inmates, including those under house arrest or electronic monitoring – trailing only the United States (1.76 million prisoners) and China (1.69 million). The statistics are revealing: with 488,000 available spots for 663,000 inmates, the system faces 32% overcrowding; only 18% of prisoners have access to education, and 23.9% to work; nearly 30% of Brazil’s incarcerated population awaits trial in provisional detention; 63% of prisoners are Black; and the most prevalent crimes are drug trafficking (24%) and property offenses (31%)[5]. These figures expose the chasm between the rhetoric of rehabilitation and the reality of the prison system.
Reality tells a different story, when the conditions of imprisonment are contradictory to the principles of rehabilitation and social integration: overcrowded and violent prisons with precarious conditions are far removed from any educational ideal; lack of public policies for former inmates condemns them to a cycle of marginalization; social stigma against ex-convicts creates barriers to employment; selective law enforcement, which punishes poverty-related crimes (theft and drug trafficking) more harshly and frequently, perpetuates social inequalities and reinforces race and class stereotypes. Therefore, the promise of rehabilitation collides with brutal structural realities.
Yet the legacy of the lettres de cachet in today’s prison system is unmistakable. Just as these royal warrants authorized detention without due process under the Ancien Régime, modern penal systems rely on pretrial detention—indefinitely imprisoning individuals before trial. Like their 18th-century counterparts, which targeted poverty-associated behaviors like vagrancy and begging, today’s punishment falls disproportionately on Black youth from marginalized communities, exposing the same racial and class selectivity. Contemporary policing practices—violent raids tolerated by societies that criminalize preemptively labeled “dangerous” groups (Black, poor, and marginalized populations)—complete this logic of surveillance and control.
The study of lettres de cachet helps us interrogate the logic underpinning modern penal systems. Where 18th-century imprisonment without trial “corrected” moral deviance at families’ behest, today’s state—cloaked in legal legitimacy—reproduces analogous practices: pretrial detention, the criminalization of poverty, and racially targeted police violence against Black and marginalized communities. The purported rehabilitative function of prisons masks a structure of social control that perpetuates inequality.
One potential path to dismantling this legacy lies in restorative justice, decarceration, and investment in social policies.
Marcela Castanheira holds a Bachelor’s and Master’s degree in Philosophy from the Federal University of Goiás (Brazil) and a Ph.D. in Philosophy from the Federal University of Minas Gerais (Brazil). She is a professor at the Federal Institute of Education, Science and Technology of Goiás (Brazil). Her research focuses on Political Philosophy, with special emphasis on the thought of Michel Foucault.
References
FARGE, A. FOUCAULT, F. Le désordre des familles, Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille au XVIII siècle. Édition életronique. Paris: Gallimard, 06 de maio de 2014.
FOUCAULT, M. A sociedade punitiva. Curso no Collège de France (1972-1973). Edição estabelecida por Bernard E. Harcourt, sob a direção de François Ewald e Alessandor Fontana. Tradução de Ivone C.Benedetti. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2015.
FOUCAULT, M. Os anormais. Curso no Collège de France (1974-1975). Edição estabelecida por Valerio Marchetti e Antonella Salomoni sob a direção de François Ewald e Alessandro Fontana. Tradução de Eduardo Brandão. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2018.
[1] FOUCAULT, M, 2018, p. 198.
[2] FARGE, A. FOUCAULT, M. 2014.
[3] FARGE, A. FOUCAULT, M. 2014.
[4] FARGE, A. FOUCAULT, M. 2014.
[5] Data from World Prison Brief, from Institute for Crime and Justice Research e da Birkbeck University de Londres, extracted from https://www.bbc.com/portuguese/articles/c0k4nmd3e2xo#:~:text=A%20popula%C3%A7%C3%A3o%20carcer%C3%A1ria%20em%20celas,mais%20de%2028%20mil%20detentas. Accessed: 16/04/2025.