| Lettres de cachet, one of the social control mechanisms of the ancien regime, need 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 French society. Based on the King's divine right role as father of his people, these ordres enabled him to reinforce the parents' authority at home to preserve family honor, enforce socially acceptable behavior, and prevent delits embarrassing to the family and disruptive to social harmony.;Besides revealing the legal and administrative rationality developing within the Bourbon manarchy, these ordres highlight the humane concerns of a rationally oriented police force in Paris attempting to enforce order, morality, and respect for authority to prevent serious delits among youth. The police and carceral officials developed streamlined procedures to implement placet requests from parents for short-term detentions of delinquents at convents, hospitals, prisons, and insane asylums to control or rehabilitate junvenile offenders. Statistical and descriptive analyses of the 5,280 Bastille inmates' records reveal that detainees from all social classes received abundant food, clothing, medical care, writing, and exercise privileges, and that 75 percent of them stayed less than 10 months, with 90 percent released before two years. Efforts to rehabilitate the insane and prostitutes, however, succeeded less well. While religious institutions like Saint-Lazare and Charenton effected some cures of the mentally handicapped through diet, exercise, baths, medication, and counselling, state institutions like Bicetre and Salpetriere merely "kept" them in spartan conditions. As for prostitutes, while royal edicts sought to control their behavior, police used them for spies, and public attitudes condoned their profession as a social "safety valve" for male aggression.;Finally, despite the philosophes' outcry against lettres de cachet after 1770, reform-minded ministers and young, progressive jurists actually attempted to ameliorate abuses in the system, but met stiff opposition from families and venal officials until the Revolution, when these ordres were abolished in 1790. |
