Lettres de cachet were letters signed by the king of France, countersigned by one of his ministers, and closed with the royal seal. They contained orders directly from the king, often to enforce arbitrary actions and judgments that could not be appealed.
A lettre de cachet of 1703 (reign of Louis XIV), opening De par le roy ("In the name of the King...")
Lettre de cachet ordering Jean-François Marmontel's detention at the Bastille, signed by Louis XV and minister Louis Phélypeaux in 1759
The ancien régime, now a common metaphor for "a system or mode no longer prevailing", was the political and social system of the Kingdom of France that the French Revolution overturned through its abolition in 1790 of the feudal system of the French nobility and in 1792 through its execution of the king and declaration of a republic.
Louis XIV of France (the Sun King), under whose reign the ancien régime reached an absolutist form of government; portrait by Hyacinthe Rigaud, 1701
The Storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, later taken to mark the end of the ancien régime; watercolour by Jean-Pierre Houël
Dioceses of France in 1789.
A prerevolutionary cartoon showing the Third Estate carrying on his back the Second Estate (the nobility) and the First Estate (the clergy)
