Salonnière

A salon is a gathering of people held by a host. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate" (Latin: ''aut delectare aut prodesse''). Salons in the tradition of the French literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries are still being conducted.

Historical background

The salon first appeared in Italy in the 16th century, then flourished in France throughout the 17th and 18th centuries. It continued to flourish in Italy throughout the 19th century. In 16th-century Italy, some brilliant circles formed in the smaller courts which resembled salons, often galvanized by the presence of a beautiful and educated patroness such as Isabella d'Este or Elisabetta Gonzaga.

Salons were an important place for the exchange of ideas. The word ''salon'' first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian ''salone'', the large reception hall of Italian mansions; ''salone'' is actually the augmentative form of ''sala'', room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like '' cabinet'', ''réduit'', ''ruelle'', and ''alcôve''. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room): a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around.

This practice may be contrasted with the greater formalities of Louis XIV's '' petit lever'', where all stood. ''Ruelle'', literally meaning "narrow street" or "lane", designates the space between a bed and the wall in a bedroom; it was used commonly to designate the gatherings of the "précieuses", the intellectual and literary circles that formed around women in the first half of the 17th century. The first renowned salon in France was the Hôtel de Rambouillet not far from the Palais du Louvre in Paris, which its hostess, Roman-born Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), ran from 1607 until her death. She established the rules of etiquette of the salon which resembled the earlier codes of Italian chivalry.

In Britain, mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage is credited with introducing the scientific soirée, a form of salon, from France. Babbage began hosting Saturday evening soirées in 1828.

Studying the salon

The history of the salon is far from straightforward. The salon has been studied in depth by a mixture of feminist, Marxist, cultural, social, and intellectual historians. Each of these methodologies focuses on different aspects of the salon, and thus have varying analyses of its importance in terms of French history and the Enlightenment as a whole.

Major historiographical debates focus on the relationship between the salons and the public sphere, as well as the role played by women within the salons.

Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the political public'. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:

A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable traditions, and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789.

In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's ''A Moveable Feast'' and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's ''Midnight in Paris'') gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.

Her contemporary Natalie Clifford Barney's handmade dinner place setting is on display at The Brooklyn Museum. Like Stein, she was also an author and American ex-pat living in Paris at the time, hosting literary salons that were attended by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well. She bought a home with an old Masonic temple in the backyard which she dubbed Temple d’Amitié, the Temple of Friendship, for private meetings with attendees of her salons.

In 2018, Barnard College professor Caroline Weber's book “Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris” was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and was the first in-depth study of the three Parisian salon hostesses Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes.

Conversation, content and the form of the salon

Contemporary literature about the salons is dominated by idealistic notions of politeness, civility and honesty, though whether they lived up to these standards is a matter of debate. These older texts tend to portray reasoned debates and egalitarian polite conversation. Dena Goodman contends that, rather than being leisure-based or "schools of civilité", salons were at "the very heart of the philosophic community" and thus integral to the process of Enlightenment. In short, Goodman argues, the 17th and 18th century saw the emergence of the academic, Enlightenment salons, which came out of the aristocratic "schools of civilité". Politeness, argues Goodman, took second place to academic discussion.

The period in which salons were dominant has been labeled the "age of conversation". The topics of conversation within the salonsthat is, what was and was not "polite" to talk aboutare thus vital when trying to determine the form of the salons. The salonnières were expected, ideally, to run and moderate the conversation (See Women in the salon). There is, however, no universal agreement among historians as to what was and was not appropriate conversation. Marcel Proust "insisted that politics was scrupulously avoided". Others suggested that little other than government was ever discussed. The disagreements that surround the content of discussion partly explain why the salon's relationship with the public sphere is so heavily contested. Individuals and collections of individuals that have been of cultural significance overwhelmingly cite some form of engaged, explorative conversation regularly held with an esteemed group of acquaintances as the source of inspiration for their contributions to culture, art, literature and politics, leading some scholars to posit the salon's influence on the public sphere as being more widespread than previously appreciated.Dena Goodman, ''The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment'' (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 14.Jürgen Habermas (trans. Thomas Burger), ''The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society'' (Camb., Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).

The salon and the "public sphere"

Recent historiography of the salons has been dominated by Jürgen Habermas' work, ''The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere'' (triggered largely by its translation into French in 1978, and then English in 1989), which argued that the salons were of great historical importance. Theaters of conversation and exchangesuch as the salons and the coffeehouses in Englandplayed a critical role in the emergence of what Habermas termed the ''public sphere'', which emerged in cultural-political contrast to court society. Thus, while women retained a dominant role in the historiography of the salons, the salons received increasing amounts of study, much of it in direct response to or heavily influenced by Habermas' theory.

The most prominent defense of salons as part of the public sphere comes from Dena Goodman's ''The Republic of Letters'', which claims that the "public sphere was structured by the salon, the press and other institutions of sociability". Goodman's work is also credited with further emphasizing the importance of the salon in terms of French history, the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment as a whole, and has dominated the historiography of the salons since its publication in 1994.

Habermas' dominance in salon historiography has come under criticism from some quarters, with Pekacz singling out Goodman's ''Republic of Letters'' for particular criticism because it was written with "the explicit intention of supporting abermas'thesis", rather than verifying it. The theory itself, meanwhile, has been criticized for a fatal misunderstanding of the nature of salons. The main criticism of Habermas' interpretation of the salons, however, is that the salons of most influence were not part of an oppositional public sphere, and were instead an extension of court society.

This criticism stems largely from Norbert Elias' ''The History of Manners'', in which Elias contends that the dominant concepts of the salons''politesse'', ''civilité'' and '' honnêteté''were "used almost as synonyms, by which the courtly people wished to designate, in a broad or narrow sense, the quality of their own behavior'. Joan Landes agrees, stating that, "to some extent, the salon was merely an extension of the institutionalized court" and that rather than being part of the public sphere, salons were in fact in conflict with it. Erica Harth concurs, pointing to the fact that the state "appropriated the informal academy and not the salon" due to the academies' "tradition of dissent"something that lacked in the salon. But Landes' view of the salons as a whole is independent of both Elias' and Habermas' school of thought, insofar that she views the salons as a "unique institution" that cannot be adequately described as part of the public sphere or court society. Others, such as Steven Kale, compromise by declaring that the public and private spheres overlapped in the salons. Antoine Lilti ascribes to a similar viewpoint, describing the salons as simply "institutions within Parisian high society".

Debates surrounding women and the salon

When dealing with the salons, historians have traditionally focused upon the role of women within them. Works in the 19th and much of the 20th centuries often focused on the scandals and "petty intrigues" of the salons. Other works from this period focused on the more positive aspects of women in the salon. Indeed, according to Jolanta T. Pekacz, the fact women dominated history of the salons meant that study of the salons was often left to amateurs, while men concentrated on "more important" (and masculine) areas of the Enlightenment.

Historians tended to focus on individual salonnières, creating almost a "great woman" version of history that ran parallel to the Whiggish, male-dominated history identified by Herbert Butterfield. Even in 1970, works were still being produced that concentrated only on individual stories without analysing the effects of the salonnières' unique position. The integral role that women played within salons as salonnières began to receive greaterand more seriousstudy in latter parts of the 20th century, with the emergence of a distinctly feminist historiography. The salons, according to Carolyn Lougee, were distinguished by "the very visible identification of women with salons" and the fact that they played a positive public role in French society. General texts on the Enlightenment, such as Daniel Roche's ''France in the Enlightenment'', tend to agree that women were dominant within the salons, but that their influence did not extend far outside of such venues.

It was, however, Goodman's ''The Republic of Letters'' that ignited a real debate surrounding the role of women within the salons and the Enlightenment as a whole. According to Goodman: "The salonnières were not social climbers but intelligent, self-educated, and educating women who adopted and implemented the values of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and used them to reshape the salon to their own social intellectual, and educational needs".Wealthy members of the aristocracy have always drawn to their court poets, writers and artists, usually with the lure of patronage, an aspect that sets the court apart from the salon. Another feature that distinguished the salon from the court was its absence of social hierarchy and its mixing of different social ranks and orders. In the 17th and 18th centuries, "salon encouraged socializing between the sexes ndbrought nobles and bourgeois together". Salons helped facilitate the breaking down of social barriers which made the development of the enlightenment salon possible. In the 18th century, under the guidance of Madame Geoffrin, Mlle de Lespinasse, and Madame Necker, the salon was transformed into an institution of Enlightenment. The enlightenment salon brought together Parisian society, the progressive philosophes who were producing the ''Encyclopédie'', the Bluestockings and other intellectuals to discuss a variety of topics.

Salonnières and their salons: the role of women

At that time women had powerful influence over the salon. Women were the center of life in the salon and carried very important roles as regulators. They could select their guests and decide the subjects of their meetings. These subjects could be social, literary, or political topics of the time. They also served as mediators by directing the discussion.

The salon was an informal education for women, where they were able to exchange ideas, receive and give criticism, read their own works and hear the works and ideas of other intellectuals. Many ambitious women used the salon to pursue a form of higher education.

Two of the most famous 17th-century literary salons in Paris were the Hôtel de Rambouillet, established in 1607 near the Palais du Louvre by the marquise de Rambouillet, where gathered the original précieuses, and, in 1652 in Le Marais, the rival salon of Madeleine de Scudéry, a long time ''habituée'' of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. ', borrowed from England's " blue-stockings," soon found itself in use upon the attending ladies, a nickname continuing to mean "intellectual woman" for the next three hundred years.

Paris salons of the 18th century hosted by women include the following:

* Adèle and Aurore de Bellegarde
* Madame Geoffrin
* Madame de Tencin
* Jeanne Quinault, hostess of the Bout-du-Banc
* Madame Dupin
* Constance Pipelet, later Constance de Salm following her divorce
* Françoise de Graffigny, author of '' Lettres d'une Péruvienne''
* Julie de Lespinasse: her chief draw was d'Alembert, but "though the name of M. d'Alembert may have drawn them thither, it was she alone who kept them there."
* the marquise du Deffand, the friend of Horace Walpole
* the marquise de Lambert
* the duchesse du Maine
* Madame d'Épinay
* Madame Necker, the wife of the financier Jacques Necker
* Madame de Staël, daughter of the Neckers, took over from her mother and in exile hosted the international Coppet group
* Madame Helvétius, the wife of Helvétius
* Sophie de Condorcet, wife of the mathematician and philosopher Condorcet, visited by foreign notables and French thinkers alike
* Juliette Récamier, socialite and friend of Germaine de Staël
* Madame Roland, the political salon that was the resort of the Girondists at the first stages of the Revolution
* Madame Swetchine, wife of General Swetchine
* Julie Talma, a friend of Benjamin Constant

Some 19th-century salons were more inclusive, verging on the raffish, and centered around painters and "literary lions" such as Madame Récamier. After the shock of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, French aristocrats withdrew from the public eye. However, Princess Mathilde still held a salon in her mansion, rue de Courcelles, later rue de Berri. From the middle of the 19th century until the 1930s, a lady of society had to hold her "day", which meant that her ''salon'' was opened for visitors in the afternoon once a week, or twice a month. Days were announced in ''Le Bottin Mondain''. The visitor gave his visit cards to the lackey or the ''maître d'hôtel'', and he was accepted or not. Only people who had been introduced previously could enter the ''salon''.

Marcel Proust called up his own turn-of-the-century experience to recreate the rival salons of the fictional duchesse de Guermantes and Madame Verdurin. He experienced himself his first social life in ''salons'' such as Mme Arman de Caillavet's one, which mixed artists and political men around Anatole France

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