Lives ofltifamous Men 167
gether different way of governing the latter and of formulating it. For ordinary life, a new mise-en-scene is born.
\\ e are familiar with its first instruments, archaic but already complex: they are the petitions, the Icttres de cachet or king's orders, the various internments, the police reports and decisions. I won't go back over these things, which are already well known: I'll just recall certain aspects that may account for the strange intensity, and for a kind of beauty that sometimes emanates from these hastily drawn images in which unfortunate men assume, for us who perceive them from such a great distance, the guise of infamy. The lettredc cachet, internment, the generalized presence of the police all that usually evokes only the despotism of an absolute monarchy. But one caimol help but see that this "arbitrariness" was a kind of public service. Except in the rarest of cases, the "king's orders" did not strike without warning, crashing down from above as signs of the monarch's anger. More often than not, they were requested against someone by his entouragehis father and mother, one of his relatives, his family, his sons or daughters, his neighbors, the local priest on occasion, or some notable. They were solicited for some obscure family trouble, as if it involved a great crime meriting the sovereign's wrath: rejected or abused spouses, a squandered fortune, conflicts of interest, disobedient young people, knavery or carousing, and all the little disorders of conduct. The lettredc cachet that was presented as the express and particular will of the I ing to have one of his subjects confined, outside the channels of regular justice, was nothing more than the response to such petitions coming from below. But it was not freely granted to anyone requesting it: an inquiry must precede it, for the purpose of substantiating the claims made in the petition. It needed to establish whether the debauchery or drunken spree, the violence or the libertinage. called for an internment, and under what conditions and for hov\ long a job for the police, who would collect statements by witnesses, information from spies, and all the haze of doubtful rumor that forms around each individual.
The system of lettre de cachet and internment was only a rather brief episode, lasting for little more than a century and limited to France. But it is nonetheless important in the history of power mechanisms. It did not bring about the uninvited intrusion of royal arbitrariness in the most everyday dimension of life. It ensured,