Lettres de cachet

In the case of organized bodies, lettres de cachet were issued for the purpose of preventing assembly, or to accomplish some other definite act.

In this respect, the lettres de cachet were a prominent symbol of the abuses of the ancien régime monarchy, and as such were suppressed during the French Revolution.

Historian Claude Quétel has interpreted these confirmations as indicating that the lettres were not as arbitrary and unjust as they have been represented after the Revolution,[1] and he hence speaks of a Légende noire.

The principle can be traced to a maxim which furnished a text of the Pandects of Justinian: in their Latin version, "Rex solutus est a legibus", or "The king is released from the laws".

In addition to serving the government as a silent weapon against political adversaries[3] or controversial writers[citation needed] and as a means of punishing culprits of high birth without the scandal of a lawsuit, the lettres de cachet had many other uses.

In 1648, during the Fronde, the sovereign courts of Paris,[b] by their Arrêt d'Union, procured their momentary suppression in a kind of charter of liberties which they imposed upon the crown, but which was short-lived.

The treatise was published after his liberation in 1782 under the title Les Lettres de cachet et des prisons d'etat and was widely read throughout Europe.

Lettres de cachet were abolished after the French Revolution by the Constituent Assembly, but Napoleon reestablished their penal equivalent by a political measure in the decree of 8 March 1801 on the state prisons.