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At the end of Surveiller et Punir, Foucault indicated that it would be important to study the revolutionary debates on the right of parents to have their children locked up, in order to build on his analysis of discipline as a “form of society.” This article proposes to study these debates, by retracing the way in which family authority was constituted as a form of power and an object of knowledge, between the end of the 18th century and the beginning of the 19th century in France. The analysis of legal, pedagogical, and political discourses on family authority allows us to retrace the emergence of a new form of governmentality, whose specificity can only be apprehended if one moves from a genealogical approach to a socio-historical perspective on the relations between the groups in conflict within society. Considering this assessment, the problem of the relationship between the method of “historical-philosophical practice” and the method of socio-historical inquiry can be reexamined.