In the wake of the 11 July dismissal of Jacques Necker, the people of Paris, fearful that they and their representatives would be attacked by the royal military, and seeking to gain ammunition and gunpowder for the general populace, stormed the Bastille, a fortress-prison in Paris which had often held people jailed on the basis of lettres de cachet, arbitrary royal indictments that could not be appealed.

In the case of organized bodies lettres de cachet were issued for the purpose of preventing assembly or to accomplish some other definite act.

The best-known lettres de cachet, however, were penal, by which a subject was sentenced without trial and without an opportunity of defense to imprisonment in a state prison or an ordinary jail, confinement in a convent or a hospital, transportation to the colonies, or expulsion to another part of the realm.

In this respect, the lettres de cachet were a prominent symbol of the abuses of the ancien régime monarchy, and as such were suppressed during the French Revolution.

The power to issue lettres de cachet was a royal privilege recognized by the French monarchic civil law that developed during the 13th century, as the Capetian monarchy overcame its initial distrust of Roman law.

The lettre de cachet belonged to the class of lettres closes, as opposed to lettres patentes, which contained the expression of the legal and permanent will of the king, and had to be furnished with the seal of state affixed by the chancellor.

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 lawsuit, 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 Estates-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 most serious abuses connected with the issue of lettres de cachet.

The Comte de Mirabeau wrote a scathing indictment of lettres de cachet while imprisoned in the dungeon of Vincennes ( by lettre de cachet obtained by his father ).

( 1992 ) de Sade's mother-in-law, Madame de Montreuil obtained multiple lettres de cachet to ensure de Sade's continuous imprisonment in the Bastille and Charenton.

He held office only nine months, during which, however, he directed his attention to the police of the kingdom, which came under his department, and did much to check the odious practice of issuing lettres de cachet.

In early June, when the Parlementaires were required to leave by lettres de cachet, it was the intendant, not the magistrates, who beat a hasty retreat.

* November 20: The vocal opposition of the duc d ' Orléans leads to his temporary exile by lettres de cachet, and the arrest and imprisonment of two magistrates

It began to acquire a poor reputation when it became the main prison for those taken under lettres de cachet issued by the King of France

Thirty-eight magistrates gave an affirmative answer, but on the exile of their former colleagues by lettres de cachet they retracted, and were also exiled.

In 1508 he went to Paris on the invitation of Louis XII as professor of belles lettres, and held for a time the position of Rector of the University of Paris.

Literary critic known for his newsletter " Nouvelles de la république des lettres " and his powerful Dictionnaire historique et critique, and one of the earliest influences on the Enlightenment thinkers to advocate tolerance between the different religious beliefs.

* January 4 – Des chiffres et des lettres premieres on ORTF 2ème Chaîne in France ( 1972 – present ).

This book is based on extensive interviews with David Neel's secretary at Digne and reading her letters to her husband, now published as " Journal de voyage: lettres a son mari.

Sent abroad on business, he remained in Vienna from 1819 to 1824, and there drew up the first volumes of his great work, La France littéraire, ou Dictionnaire bibliographique des savants, historiens, et gens de lettres de la France, & c. ( 14 vols., 1826-1842 ), dealing especially with the 18th and early 19th centuries, which he was enabled to complete by a government subsidy granted by Guizot in 1830, and by the help of the Russian bibliophile Serge Poltoratzky.

In 1833 he worked on the foundation of the Societé de arts et des lettres du Hainaut, where he was vice-president and from 1865 president.

The intention of Lectures is to provide youth with a simple, organized guide on the value of rhetoric and belles lettres in the quest for upward mobility and social success.

Cornet receive gold medal of Société des sciences, arts, et lettres du Hainaut for a paper on the Cretaceous terrain of Hainaut.

There, on the recommendation of Calvin, he was appointed professor of belles lettres and history.

Occasionally the Parlement ( Parlement de Paris ) refused to register the lettres of patent conferring peerage on them.

He developed these ideas further in Quatre lettres sur le Mexique ( 1868 ), which presents a history of Atlantis based on his interpretation of Maya myths.

To these works should be added his monuments to Cardinal Lavigerie and to General de La Fayette ( in Washington, DC ), and his statues of Alphonse de Lamartine ( 1876 ) and St Vincent de Paul ( 1879 ), as well as the Honoré de Balzac, which he executed for the Société des gens de lettres on their rejection of that by Auguste Rodin ; and the busts of Carolus-Duran and Ernest Alexandre Honoré Coquelin ( 1896 ).

The Spanish TV show Cifras y letras ( Numbers and Letters ) is another adaptation of Des chiffres et des lettres on Canal Sur 2.

" For example, Les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux billard / The white letters on the cushions of the old billiard table … must somehow reach the phrase, … les lettres du blanc sur les bandes du vieux pillard / letters by a white man about the hordes of the old plunderer.

Mémoires sur les doctrines religieuses ; de Confucius et de l ' école des lettres ( Dissertations on religious doctrines ; from Confucius to the school of letters ) ( 1887 )

Daniel also wrote a reply to Pascal's Provincial Letters, entitled Entretiens de Cleanthe et d ' Eudoxe sur les lettres provinciales ( 1694 ); two treatises on Descartes ' theory as to the intelligence of the lower animals, and other works.

Entre flous ( 1867 ) was built on a similar plan, and was followed by some psychological novels: Le Cahier bieu de Mile Cibot ( 1868 ); Autour dune source ( 1869 ); Un Paquet de lettres ( 1870 ); Babolein ( 1872 ); Les Etangs ( 1875 ); and L ' Enfant ( 1885 ).

Dukes without a peerage fell into one of two groups: those without peerage fiefs, or those for whom the Parlement refused to register the lettres patentes conferring a peerage on them.

Although they often insisted on their own sensibility and lack of critical capacities, the salon women Susan Dalton studied also defined themselves as belonging to the Republic of Letters not only with reference to the very different conception of gender offered by the gens de lettres but also with reference to a wider, gender-neutral vocabulary of personal qualities revered by them even when it contradicted their discourse on gender.

De Beaumont's Mandements, lettres et instructions pastorales were published in two volumes in 1780, the year before his death.

In the year 1767, his writings in belles lettres were issued in six volumes, edited by his half brother, J. C. Bökman.

They received grants from Bravo! FACT, the Canada Council for the Arts and the Conseil des arts et des lettres du Québec and SODEC but were still short of financing.

Pius II was greatly admired as a poet by his contemporaries, but his reputation in belles lettres rests principally upon his The Tale of the Two Lovers, which continues to be read to this day, partly from its truth to nature, and partly from the singularity of an erotic novel being written by a Pope.

In 1996, Findley was honoured by the French government, who declared him a Chevalier de l ' Ordre des arts et des lettres.

In 1784 Pierre Samuel du Pont de Nemours was made noble by " lettres patentes " ( letters patent ) from the king Louis XVI ( a process known as noblesse de lettres ).

The lives by Charles Nisard — that of Julius et Les Gladiateurs de la république des lettres, and that of Joseph Le Triumvirat littéraire au seizième siècle — are equally unworthy of their author and their subjects.

The " ministres d ' État ", appointed by lettres patentes, attended meetings of the Conseil du Roi ( which would later become the Conseil d ' État ).