The World of the Salons

Ten years after Antoine Lilti’s doctoral dissertation on elite sociability in eighteenth-century Paris was published by Fayard, an abridged version has appeared in an excellent English translation by Lydia Cochrane. As Lilti notes in a brief introduction to the English edition, he has cut the lengthy discussion of historiography and honed his argument. In the Age of Enlightenment, he asserts, the Paris salons remained what they had always been and would remain: aristocratic institutions whose politics were a continuation of the intrigues of the royal court. The three chapters that constitute Part 1 of the book examine the social structures and mechanisms of the eighteenth-century salon, its personnel, and the principles and values that guided it. Part 2 considers the salon as a political space with an emphasis on ‘what set the salons apart from the public sphere’ (p. 10). The book is unabashedly polemical. It opens with a discussion of the many ‘myths’ about the salon that have persisted since the nineteenth century: that they were regular gatherings of men in the home of an elite woman and under her guidance; that they were dedicated primarily to polite conversation and governed by its rules; and that they facilitated both social mobility and Enlightenment. Beneath this rhetoric of critique, however, one cannot help but recognise the overall outlines of the picture drawn by feminist scholars and historians of sociability that Lilti seeks to displace. ‘Worldly sociability sheds new light on the social history of Enlightenment writers’, he avers. ‘One of the most salient results is the participation of writers in the sociability networks of Parisian high society’ (p. 237). Declaring that the salons did not ‘efface social distinctions’, that they were not ‘egalitarian and peaceful places’, is to point out only what those scholars whose work he dismisses (myself among them) have explored in depth. To conclude, as Lilti does, that ‘the adherence of many men of letters to the practices and representations of high society does not imply any abdication of criticism’, or that ‘writers’ intellectual autonomy was not necessarily asserted by a formal break with the elites, but could also take place, within certain limits, through a commitment to some of their cultural values’ (p. 237), is to concede considerable ground indeed

Argument (complex analysis · Art · Art history · Conversation · Elite · Enlightenment · Historiography · Literature · Politeness · Political science · Politics · Public sphere · Rhetoric · Salon · Sociology · Theology · Classics · Historical Economic and Social Studies · History · Law · Medicine · Philosophy