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Michel Foucault, Lust, Women, and Sin in Louis XIV's Paris

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 July 2009

Philip F. Riley
Philip F. Riley
Affiliation:
Professor of history in James Madison University, Harrison burg, Virginia.
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Extract

Since 1984, the year of his death, a veritable cottage industry of criticism has appeared to decipher, decode, and demolish Michel Foucault. Despite the polemics, ambiguities, and, at times, the impenetrability of his prose, Foucault and his critics do agree that one of the central concerns of his work, particularly his early work, was an analysis of power and how such institutions as police, prisons, and churches reflect the power structures of society.

Type
Research Article
Information
Church History , Volume 59 , Issue 1 , March 1990 , pp. 35 - 50
Copyright
Copyright © American Society of Church History 1990

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References

1. Foucault's views are summarized in Foucault, Michel, “Governmentality,” Ideology and Consciousness 6 (1979): 5–21,Google Scholar and in Perrot, Michelle, ed., L'Impossible Prison… débal avec Michel Foucault (Paris, 1980), pp. 9–56.Google Scholar The full range of Foucault's scholarship is listed in Clark, Michael, Michel Foucault: An Annotated Bibliography: Tool Kit for a New Age (New York, 1983).Google Scholar

2. Foucault, Michel, Folie et déraison; histoire de la folie á 1âge classique (Paris, 1961), p. 88.Google Scholar Foucault's unfinished three-volume Histoire de la sexualité (Paris, 1978–1984)Google Scholar examines sexuality in the classical era but does not address the implications of the sin of lust in early modern France.

3. Foucault's failure to understand she role of religion in confinement is examined by Midelfort, H. C., “Madness and Civilization in Early Modern Europe,” in After the Reformation: Essays in Honor of J. H. Hexter, ed. Malament, Barbara (Philadelphia, 1980), pp. 247–265.Google Scholar

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35. Ibid.

36. BN MS Clair, 984, fols. 237, 238, 253.

37. In addition to the police reports, particularly in the BN MS Clair, 984, 985 series, women's corruptive powers as identified by Moliere, Racine, Bossuet, and Fénelon are analyzed in Bénichou, Paul, Morales du Grand Siècle (Paris, 1948), pp. 183–203,Google Scholar and Lougee, Carolyn, Le Paradis des Femmes: Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976), pp. 173–195.Google Scholar

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43. BN MS Clair, 984, fol. 54.

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45. BN MS Clair, 984, fol. 169.

46. Y 14506, July 1701, Archives Nationales, Paris (hereafter cited as AN). Further examples may be found in Williams, Alan, The Police of Paris: 1718–1789 (Baton Rouge, La., 1979), pp. 226–228.Google Scholar

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