Disorderly Families: Infamous Letters from the Bastille Archives

Description

First published in French in 1982, this first English translation of Disorderly Families contains ninety-four letters collected by Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault from ordinary families who submitted complaints to the king of France in the eighteenth century to intervene and resolve their family disputes. Together, these letters offer unusual insight into the infamies of daily life.

Arlette Farge is Director of Research in Modern History at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris and the author of more than a dozen books, including Fragile Lives and The Allure of the Archive. Michel Foucault (1926-1984) was a French philosopher and held the Chair in the History of Systems of Thought at the College de France. He is often considered the most influential political theorist of the second half of the twentieth century. His most notable works include History of Madness, Discipline and Punish, and The History of Sexuality, among others. Nancy Luxon is associate professor of political science at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of Crisis of Authority: Politics, Trust,and Truth-Telling in Freud and Foucault. Thomas Scott-Railton is a freelance French-English translator living in Brooklyn, New York, and previously translated Arlette Farge's The Allure of the Archive.

"Expertly edited, this thoughtful translation of Disorderly Families adds a central pillar to the English archive of Michel Foucault's work. A source of fascination for him since at least the 1950s, the Bastille lettres de cachets deeply influenced and shaped his analysis of power. As he discovered, these letters were what he and Arlette Farge would call a 'popular practice,' demanded from below, and not an arbitrary exercise of monarchical power-and they would become a key building block for Foucault's theory of power-knowledge. This exceptional English translation gives life to Foucault's-and Farge's-subversive desire to breathe life into these beautiful, infamous, and obscure lives."-Bernard E. Harcourt, Columbia University "An enlightening compilation that will leave historically inclined readers wanting to dig a little further into the archives."-Kirkus Reviews "Thirty-five years on, the study of obscure individual lives has become a valued feature of historical research and the source of new perspectives in the understanding of social and political contexts. [But quite apart from this change in the attitude of historians], the letters themselves seem to have aged better than the intellectual disagreements and academic disputes that accompanied their original publication."-Times Literary Supplement