lettre de cachet
Noun

lettre de cachet

  1. (historical) A warrant issued by the monarch in ancien régime France, especially one which imprisons someone without trial.
    • 1992, Hilary Mantel, A Place of Greater Safety, Harper Perennial 2007, p. 113:
      This year the King sent it to Troyes, each member ordered there by an individual lettre de cachet.
    • 2002, Colin Jones (historian), The Great Nation, Penguin 2003, p. 22:
      Louis stepped up persecution of prominent Jansenists, using lettres de cachet to imprison the most subversive [...].



This text is extracted from the Wiktionary and it is available under the CC BY-SA 3.0 license | Terms and conditions | Privacy policy 0.003
Offline English dictionary