This sort of protection is a part of the function of every government; but on the Continent, in old times, and still in some countries, long and painful imprisonment of men who had never been convicted of any crime was considered one of the proper methods of police. It was justified in some measure in French eyes by the fact that secrecy saved the feelings of innocent families, which thus did not suffer in the public estimation for the misdeeds of one unruly member. In France, where the family is much more of a unit than in English-speaking countries, the disgrace of one person belonging to it affects the others far more seriously. The _lettre de cachet_ of old France, confining its victim in a state prison, was too elaborate a method to be used with the turbulent lower classes--for them there were less dignified forms of proceeding; but it was freely employed against persons of any consequence. Spendthrifts and licentious youths were shut up at the request of their relations. Authors of dangerous books were readily clapped into the Bastille, Vincennes or Fors l'Evêque. Voltaire, Diderot, Mirabeau, and many others underwent that sort of confinement; and the first of them is said to have procured by his influence the incarceration of one of his own literary enemies. Fallen statesmen were fortunate when they did not pass from the cabinet to the prison, but were allowed the alternative of exile, or of seclusion in their own country houses. But this was not the worst. The _lettre de cachet_ was too often the instrument of private hate. Signed carelessly, or even in blank, by the king, it could be procured by the favorite or the favorite's favorite, for his own purposes. And if the victim had no protector to plead his cause, he might be forgotten in captivity and waste a lifetime.
For such abuses as this, there is no remedy but publicity. If, on the one hand, too much has been made of the romantic story of the Bastille, which was certainly not a standing menace to most peaceable Frenchmen, too great stress, on the other hand, may be laid on the undoubted fact that under Louis XVI. the grim old fortress contained but few prisoners, and that some of them were persons who might have been cast into prison under any system of government. In the reign of that king's immediate predecessor great injustice had been committed. Nor had arbitrary proceedings been entirely renounced by the government of Louis XVI. itself. In the very last year before that in which the Estates General met at Versailles, the royal ministers imprisoned in the Bastille twelve Breton gentlemen, whose crime was that they importunately presented a petition from the nobles of their province. The apartments which they were to occupy were filled with other prisoners, so room was made by removing these unhappy occupants to the madhouse at Charenton, whence they were released only in the following year by order of a committee of the National Assembly.[Footnote: Barère, i. 281. Perhaps the most terrifying thing about the Bastille was that no one really knew what went on inside. Mercier thinks that the common people were not afraid of it, iii. 287, 289.]