Arbitrary royal detention letters were actually demanded by families and local authorities

Evidence

Now, it should be noted that, although this police supervision was entirely ‘in the hands of the king’, it did not function in a single direction. It was in fact a double-entry system: it had to correspond, by manipulating the machinery of justice, to the immediate wishes of the king, but it was also capable of responding to solicitations from below; the celebrated lettres de cachet, or orders under the king’s private seal, which were long the symbol of arbitrary royal rule and which brought detention into disrepute on political grounds, were in fact demanded by families, masters, local notables, neighbours, parish priests; and their function was to punish by confinement a whole infra-penality, that of disorder, agitation, disobedience, bad conduct; those things that Ledoux wanted to exclude from his architecturally perfect city and which he called ‘offences of non-surveillance’. — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 336

Categorization

• XREF: Directly parallels the reader’s core thesis: surveillance disciplines the non-disciplinary spaces and gaps between institutions, extending panoptic logic beyond institutional walls. — connects to: Pre-revolutionary French imprisonment was tainted by its ties to arbitrary royal power — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 193
• DEFINE: Defines ‘lettres de cachet’ and ‘offences of non-surveillance’ — key concepts for the reader’s panopticism analysis.

Related

• Pre-revolutionary French imprisonment was tainted by its ties to arbitrary royal power (similarity 0.85)

Broader Connections

• Pre-revolutionary French imprisonment was tainted by its ties to arbitrary royal power #qualifies (0.82) — Michel Foucault, Discipline & Punish- The Birth of the…, 193