In the case of organized organizations, letters of stamp were issued to prevent the assembly or to perform another specific act. The provincial states were thus summoned (summoned to the assembly), and by a letter of stamp (in this case a letter of jussipri) or by personal representation in a bed of justice, the king ordered a parliament to register a law, although that parliament refused to adopt it. The Comte de Mirabeau wrote a damning indictment against the lettres de cachet while he was imprisoned in the dungeon of Vincennes (by lettre de cachet, which his father had received). The treatise was published after his release in 1782 under the title Les Lettres de cachet et des prisons d`État and read throughout Europe. During the French Revolution, the use of lettres de cachet was abolished by the Constituent Assembly in March 1790. Initially, these orders were given orally, but later customary law was changed so that the order had to be written and signed by the king or bear his seal. So letter of seal. The power exercised by the king on these various occasions was a royal privilege recognized by ancient French law, and can be attributed to a maxim that provided a text of Justinian`s digests: «Rex solutus est a legibus». This meant, in particular, that if the king intervened directly in the good administration or administration of justice by a special act of his will, he could decide without observing the laws, and even in a direction contrary to the laws. This was an early conception, and in the early days the command in question was merely verbal; hence some letters patent Henry III of France in 1 576 (Isambert, Anciens lois françaises, xiv. 278) state that François de Montmorency was «imprisoned in our Bastille castle in Paris by verbal order» of the late King Charles IX. But in the 14th century, the principle was introduced that the order had to be written, and this is how the lettre de cachet was born. The lettre de cachet belonged to the class of closed letters, as opposed to letters patent, which contained the expression of the king`s legal and permanent will and had to bear the state seal affixed by the chancellor.

Letters of seal, on the other hand, were simply signed by a secretary of state (formerly secretary of command) to the king; They bore only the imprint of the royal secret seal, which is why in the 4th and 5th centuries they were often called small bookmark letters or small stamp letters and completely escaped the Chancellor`s control. In this regard, lettres de cachet were an important symbol of the abuses of the monarchy of the Ancien Régime and, as such, were suppressed during the French Revolution. In 1789 and 1790, all cases were examined by a commission that upheld most of the judgments. The historian Claude Quétel interpreted these confirmations to mean that the Letters were not as arbitrary and unfair as they were portrayed after the Revolution,[1] and therefore speaks of a Black Legend. [a] LETTERS SEAL. Lettres de cachet, considered exclusively French documents, can be defined as letters signed by the King of France, countersigned by one of his ministers and bearing the royal seal (seal of approval). They contained an order – essentially any order – that emanated directly from the king and was carried out by himself. In the case of organized organizations, letters of stamp are issued to compel members to meet or perform a specified act; The provincial states were summoned in this way, and by a letter of stamp (called a letter of jussion), the king ordered a parliament to register a law in the teeth of his own remonstrances. However, the best-known letters of stamp were those that can be described as punishments by which the king sentenced a subject, without trial and without possibility of defense, to imprisonment in a state prison or ordinary prison, placement in a monastery or hospital, transport to the colonies or exile to a specific place of the empire. Over the years, letters of stamp have been used to imprison and send into exile indefinitely anyone the king perceived as a threat to his person.

Letters of seal, on the other hand, were simply signed by a secretary of state to the king; They only bore the imprint of the royal secret seal, which is why in the 14th and 15th centuries they were often called small bookmark letters or small stamp letters and were completely out of the Chancellor`s control. These drastic legal rights and the inevitable abuses to which they led contributed to the French Revolution and the dramatic end of the French monarchy. While letters of stamp served the government as a silent weapon against political opponents or dangerous writers, and as a means of punishing those guilty of high birth without the scandal of a trial, they had many other uses. They were hired by the police to deal with prostitutes, and on their authority, the lunatics were locked up in hospitals and sometimes prisons. They were also often used by heads of household as a means of correction, for example to protect the honour of the family against disorderly or criminal behaviour by sons; Women also used them to curb the profligacy of husbands and vice versa. They were issued by the mediator on the advice of the provincial directors and the police lieutenant in Paris. In reality, the Secretary of State issued them completely arbitrarily, and in most cases the King was unaware of their affair. In the 18th century, it is certain that letters were often issued in blank, that is, without containing the name of the person against whom they were addressed; The addressee or agent completed the name to make the letter effective. Many of the early settlers of present-day Louisiana came for their forced exile, as stated in a letter of seal. Protests against letters of stamp were constantly raised by the Parliament of Paris and the provincial parliaments, and often by the Estates General. In 1648, the sovereign courts of Paris obtained their temporary suppression in a kind of charter of freedoms, which they imposed on the crown, but which was transitory.

It was not until the reign of Louis XVI that a reaction against this abuse became clearly perceptible. Early in this reign Malesherbes, in his brief service, strove to inject a certain degree of justice into the system, and in March 1784 Baron de Breteuil, minister of the king`s household, sent a circular to the intendants and the lieutenant of police to prevent flagrant abuses connected with the question of letters of seal. In Paris, the Court of Aids demanded their abolition in 1779 and, in March 1788, the Parliament of Paris protested with excessive vigour, important for the light they shed on the old French public law. However, the Crown did not decide to set this weapon aside, and in a declaration to the Estates General at the royal session of 23 June 1789 (art. 15), it did not necessarily renounce it. The lettres de cachet were abolished by the Constituent Assembly, but Napoleon reinstated their equivalent by a political measure in the decree of 9 March 1801 on state prisons. This was one of the acts brought against him by the Senate consulate of April 3, 1814, which declared his overthrow, «considering that he violated the constitutional laws by the decrees on state prisons». See Honoré Mirabeau, Les Lettres de cachet et des prisons d`État (Hamburg, 1782), written in the dungeon of Vincennes, into which his father had thrown him through a lettre de cachet, one of the most capable and eloquent of his works, which had an immense print run and was translated into English in 1788 with a dedication to the Duke of Norfolk; Frantz Funck-Brentano, Les Lettres de cachet d Paris (Paris, 1904); and André Chassaigne, Les Lettres de cachet sous l`ancien régime (Paris, 1903).