Lettres de cachet

In the evolution from religious (inquisitorial) to medical (psychiatric) methods of social control, there was an intermediate step consisting of the ostensibly therapeutic use of the powers of the king as benevolent despot or ruler exemplified by the French lettre de cachet, this transitional—royal—form of social control was simultaneously religious and secular, magical and scientific. Inasmuch as the lettre de cachet is the immediate historical precursor of the contemporary petition for commitment, some comments about it are in order here. 

A lettre de cachet (literally a letter bearing a seal) was a document bearing the seal of the king or of one of his officers, authorizing imprisonment without trial of the person or persons named in it. The uses of lettres de cachet, which enjoyed their greatest popularity from the beginning of the fifteenth to the end of the eighteenth centuries, are summarized in the Encyclopaedia Britannica as follows ... 

Social control by means of the lettre de cachet thus constitutes a transitional stage between control by means of the old, religious Inquisition and the new, psychiatric one. The procedures of all three institutions rest on the same principles of paternalism only the identity of the father, in whose name control is exercised, differs. In the case of the Inquisition, it is the Holy Father, the Pope in that of the lettre de cachet, it is the National Father, the King and in that of Institutional Psychiatry, it is the Scientific Father, the Physician. 

Lettres de cachet. In Encyclopaedia Britannica, Vol. 13, p. 971. Chicago Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc., 1949. 

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