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"Farge, Arlette"
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Disorderly families : infamous letters from the Bastille Archives
\"Drunken and debauched husbands; libertine wives; vagabonding children. These and many more are the subjects of requests for confinement written to the king of France in the eighteenth century. These letters of arrest (lettres de cachet) from France's Ancien Regime were often associated with excessive royal power and seen as a way for the king to imprison political opponents. In Disorderly Families, first published in French in 1982, Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault collect ninety-four letters from ordinary families who, with the help of hired scribes, submitted complaints to the king to intervene and resolve their family disputes. Gathered together, these letters show something other than the exercise of arbitrary royal power, and offer unusual insight into the infamies of daily life. From these letters come stories of divorce and marital conflict, sexual waywardness, reckless extravagance, and abandonment. The letters evoke a fluid social space in which life in the home and on the street was regulated by the rhythms of relations between husbands and wives, or parents and children. Most impressively, these letters outline how ordinary people seized the mechanisms of power to address the king and make demands in the name of an emerging civil order. Arlette Farge and Michel Foucault were fascinated by the letters' explosive qualities and by how they both illustrated and intervened in the workings of power and governmentality. Disorderly Families sheds light on Foucault's conception of political agency and his commitment to theorizing how ordinary lives come to be touched by power. This first English translation is complete with an introduction from the book's editor, Nancy Luxon, as well as notes that contextualize the original 1982 publication and eighteenth-century policing practices\"-- Provided by publisher.
Book
The Sounds of Enlightenment Paris
What are the relationships between historians and the sounds produced in the spaces and times they study? This article stresses the absence of historiographical interest in noise, due to the silence of the archives regarding matters of sound. It reviews the attempts at devising sonograms of historical periods, such as the eighteenth century. It highlights daily sounds and noises and it seeks out their traces in the domains of work, economy, religion, politics and royalty. Churches and hospitals, in particular, were home to harrowing sounds. Voices are also important data for historical enquiry, such as children's voices, peddlers’ tunes and street songs.
Journal Article
The allure of the archives
Arlette Farge's 'Le Goût de l'archive' is widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combining through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinary intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. In this book, she conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into previously unknown dimensions of the past.
Book
The Allure of the Archives
Arlette Farge'sLe Goût de l'archiveis widely regarded as a historiographical classic. While combing through two-hundred-year-old judicial records from the Archives of the Bastille, historian Farge was struck by the extraordinarily intimate portrayal they provided of the lives of the poor in pre-Revolutionary France, especially women. She was seduced by the sensuality of old manuscripts and by the revelatory power of voices otherwise lost. InThe Allure of the Archives, she conveys the exhilaration of uncovering hidden secrets and the thrill of venturing into new dimensions of the past.Originally published in 1989, Farge's classic work communicates the tactile, interpretive, and emotional experience of archival research while sharing astonishing details about life under the Old Regime in France. At once a practical guide to research methodology and an elegant literary reflection on the challenges of writing history, this uniquely rich volume demonstrates how surrendering to the archive's allure can forever change how we understand the past.
eBook
Foucault against himself
In his private life, as well as in his work and political attitudes, Michel Foucault often stood in contradiction to himself, especially when his expansive ideas collided with the institutions in which he worked. In Francois Caillat's provocative collection of essays and interviews based on his French documentary of the same name, leading contemporary critics and philosophers reframe Foucault's legacy in an effort to build new ways of thinking about his struggle against society's mechanisms of domination, demonstrating how conflict within the self lies at the heart of Foucault's life and work. Includes a foreword written especially for this edition by Paul Rabinow, Professor of Anthropology at the University of California (Berkeley) and an influential writer on the works of Foucau he is the co-editor ofThe Essential Foucault. Foucault against Himselffeatures essays and interviews by: Leo Bersani, American Professor Emeritus of French at the University of California (Berkeley) and the author ofHomos; Georges Didi-Huberman, French philosopher and art historian; his most recent book isGerhard Richter: Pictures/Series Arlette Farge, French historian and the author ofThe Allure of the Archives; Geoffroy de Lagasnerie, French philosopher and the author ofLa derniere lecon de Michel Foucault.
eBook
The Inventory Room Is Sepulchral
The inventory room is sepulchral. Someone decided that central heating wasn’t needed here, so cold damp air is continually drifting down from the high ceilings. Prison-issue gray iron tables line the length of walls stacked high with volumes. Their purpose is to allow for the consultation of the inventories that contain the serial numbers under which a sought-after document is stored. In the middle of the room there is a table, as austere as the others, although perhaps slightly larger. An impassive archivist is sitting there. Beside a window opening on to the garden, a staff person is numbering pages
Book Chapter
Captured Speech
The judicial archives reveal a fragmented world. The majority of police interrogations consist of questions whose answers are incomplete and imprecise, quick snippets of speech and life whose connecting thread is difficult to make out.
On the other hand, the more one becomes interested in the archives, the more expressive these trivial complaints about trivial matters become—people quarreling over stolen tools, for example, or over some dirty water splashed on their clothes. Because they led to police reports and interrogations, these signs of minor disorder have left behind a trail. These personal matters where almost nothing was said, but
Book Chapter
She Has Just Arrived
She has just arrived. She is asked for a card that she does not have. She is then told to retrace her steps to the other room, in order to obtain a day pass. In this next room, she is asked to present a different card, this time one she has. She takes the pass, returns to the first room, and presents it to the reading room supervisor, who takes it. She waits for him to give her a place number, but he does not look up again. So she whispers to him, asking where she should sit. The supervisor,
Book Chapter
Traces by the Thousands
Whether it’s summer or winter, you freeze. Your hands grow stiff as you try to decipher the document, and every touch of its parchment or rag paper stains your fingers with cold dust. The writing, no matter how meticulous, how regular, is barely legible to untrained eyes. It sits before you on the reading room table, most often a worn-out looking bundle tied together with a cloth ribbon, its corners eaten away by time and rodents. It is precious (infinitely so) and damaged; you handle it cautiously out of fear that a slight tear could become definitive. You can tell
Book Chapter
On the Front Door
On the front door there is a sign listing the library’s hours. There is no way for the uninitiated to know that they do not necessarily coincide with the hours the documents are available for consultation. Lower down on the sign, one can find a list of holidays, as well as the accompanying days the library will be closed before and after weekends. It’s a long text, unostentatiously typed on plain paper bearing the letterhead of the Ministry of Culture, posted so discreetly that one rarely notices it at first glance. Which is exactly what happens to our reader. Pushing
Book Chapter