Lettres-de-cachet Sentence Examples

As to the marquess, his use of lettres de cachet is perfectly defensible on the theory of lettres de cachet, and Mirabeau, if any son, surely deserved such correction.

After a period of work in Holland he betook himself to England, where his treatise on lettres de cachet had been much admired, being translated into English in 1787, and where he was soon admitted into the best Whig literary and political society of London, through his old schoolfellow Gilbert Elliot, who had now inherited his father's baronetcy and estates, and become a leading Whig member of parliament.

Considered solely as French documents, lettres de cachet may be defined as letters signed by the king of France, countersigned by one of his ministers, and closed with the royal seal (cachet) .

While serving the government as a silent weapon against political adversaries or dangerous writers and as a means of punishing culprits of high birth without the scandal of a suit at law, the lettres de cachet had many other uses.

Protests against the lettres de cachet were made continually by the parlement of Paris and by the provincial parlements, and often also by the States-General.

At the beginning of that reign Malesherbes during his short ministry endeavoured to infuse some measure of justice into the system, and in March 1784 the baron de Breteuil, a minister of the king's household, addressed a circular to the intendants and the lieutenant of police with a view to preventing the crying abuses connected with the issue of lettres de cachet.

See Honore Mirabeau, Les Lettres de cachet et des prisons d'etat (Hamburg, 1782), written in the dungeon at Vincennes into which his father had thrown him by a lettre de cachet, one of the ablest and most eloquent of his works, which had an immense circulation and was translated into English with a dedication to the duke of Norfolk in 1788; Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les Lettres de cachet d Paris (Paris, 1904); and Andre Chassaigne, Les Lettres de cachet sous l'ancien regime (Paris, 1903).

The police, instituted in 1667 by La Reynie, became a public force independent of magistrates and under the direct orders of the ministers, making the arbitrary royal and ministerial authority absolute by means of lettres de cachet (qv.), which were very convenient for the government and very terrible for the individuals concerned.

True, they had the unpleasantness of often witnessing acts of odious despotism, ' lettres de cachet ', etc.

In the case of organized bodies lettres de cachet were issued for the purpose of enjoining members to assemble or to accomplish some definite act; the provincial estates were convoked in this manner, and it was by a lettre de cachet (called lettre de jussion) that the king ordered a parlement to register a law in the teeth of its own remonstrances.