Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives

344 Pages·2017·2.311 MB·English

by  Farge, Arlette

DISORDERLY FAMILIES
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DI S O RD E RLY
FA M I L I E S
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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
University of Minnesota Press
Minneapolis
London
Originally published in French as Le Désordre des familles: Lettres de cachet des Archives de la Bastille
au XVIIIe siècle, by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault. Copyright Gallimard/Julliard, 1982
and 2014.
Cet ouvrage a bénéficié du soutien des Programmes d’aide à la publication de l’Institut
Français. This work received support from the Institut Français through its publication
program.
Copyright 2016 by the Regents of the University of Minnesota
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval
system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopy-
ing, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Published by the University of Minnesota Press
111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290
Minneapolis, MN 55401- 2520
http://www.upress.umn.edu
A Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.
ISBN: 978-0-8166-9534-8 (hc)
Printed in the United States of America on acid- free paper
The University of Minnesota is an equal- opportunity educator and employer.
22 21 20 19 18 17 16 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This book was prepared in collaboration with
Christiane Martin, who devoted herself to it until the
end of her life. This task was completed by Éliane Allo,
assistant at Collège de France. We thank her for her
help and her important contribution to this project.
ARLETTE FARGE
and
MICHEL FOUCAULT
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Contents
Translator’s Preface · ix
Editor’s Introduction · 1
Disorderly Families
Introduction · 19
1. Marital Discord · 29
LETTERS
Households in Ruin · 51
The Imprisonment of Wives · 65
The Debauchery of Husbands · 80
The Tale of a Request · 100
2. Parents and Children · 123
LETTERS
The Disruption of Affairs · 139
Shameful Concubinage · 158
The Dishonor of Waywardness · 170
Domestic Violence · 192
Bad Apprentices · 208
Exiles · 216
Family Honor · 224
Parental Ethos, 1728: The Rationale for Sentiment · 231
Parental Ethos, 1758: The Duty to Educate · 242
3. When Addressing the King · 251
Afterword to the English Edition · 267
Arlette Farge
Notes · 275
Glossary of Places · 315
Name Index · 319
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Translator’s Preface
Translating these requests for lettres de cachet presented several challenges— or
at the very least decisions. To translate them from French into English I first
had to address the question of which English. After some consideration,
the three main options seemed to be (1) to translate them literally, directly,
preserving the archaic French syntax and language; (2) to render them in an
equivalent eighteenth- century English; and (3) to bring them into modern
English, my native language. Each of these choices had something to recom-
mend it. The first would leave the lightest footprint and result in the most
“authentic,” albeit somewhat cumbersome, translations. Taking the second
approach would offer the modern English reader the closest approximation
of what French readers experienced when Le Désordre des familles was origi-
nally published in 1982— texts that were written in an outdated but not
unfamiliar style, one that would correspond the closest to the era that had
shaped both these letters and their authors.
If the first course could perhaps be said to be most authentic to the texts,
adopting the third method would be the most authentic with regard to my-
self. I was not raised in a culture that spoke eighteenth- century English, and
therefore I could only craft a likeness, at worst a simulacrum, of it— like an
actor whose Scottish accent bears no relation to how people actually talk
in Aberdeen, but rather reflects a Hollywood idea of how a Scotsman should
sound. And so I should translate these requests into the language in which
I speak and write. After all, when they were written, were not these appeals
composed in the vernacular of the time?
But the incompatibility of these three paths, which appeared so stark when
viewed at the level of abstraction, softened upon contact with the documents
themselves. These elements were not mutually exclusive so much as in ten-
sion, or various considerations to navigate by, to keep in mind, while being
guided by the same central concern that had motivated the people who had
written— or dictated to a public scribe— these requests: making them heard.
Not just in their written pleas, but in all that these pleas revealed about
them lies a concern that is not merely linguistic but is also individual. If all
the requests were literally translated into the same clumsy English, or liter-
arily rendered into smooth English (be it eighteenth or twenty- first century),
the difference between a letter written by an educated government clerk and