Relationships between husband and wife were mostly non-fulfilling, leading women to seek "careers" and center their time and effort around roles of salonnieres, or ladies in waiting. Social Structure of the Salons Social hierarchy and behavioral social guidelines allowed common people to interact with the nobility at Parisian salons.
Political Influences. Because women did not particularly play a role when it came to politics, salons gave women an opportunity to indirectl. The French Revolution was a time of immense upheaval and change in France, so it must be noted in our reflection of political circumstances surrounding 18th century salons, although its effects on salons were inconsequential.
While one major aim of revolutionaries was to end the social inequality between different classes, especially the nobility, the rights of women and feminist claims were largely ignored. Religious Influences The rapidly changing beliefs in the Catholic Ch urch directly influenced much of the discussion that occurred in the salons and also led to the embrace of the intermingling between classe s that was also found in the salons. Previously, intellectual gatherings had been restricted to nobility, however the co mmon thread found in questioning religion led to the convergence of several classes in the salons.
The rise of the bourgeois class in the 1 8th century subsequently led to the erosion of the significance and importance of the Catholic Church in both the elite and middle class. The bourgeois n. Why it Matters The Parisian salons of the 18th century allowed women to play a positive role in the public sphere of French society.
Salons provided a unique outlet where women's ideas could be heard. Women, in addition to conversing with men at an academic level, had the power to influence the topics major philosophers studied. The cross-class communication that salons fostered also allowed social groups, which had never before interacted, to share ideas. Women's contributions to the development of intellectual and scientific ideas through their role as salonierres marked a cultural shift in how women should be accepted and involved in society.
Though still limiting, salons forged the way for women's rights and leadership in the arts and sciences. Outram, Dorinda. The Enlightenment. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, Klaits, Joeseph.
Landes, Joan B. Thames and Hudson. Behrens, Spencer, Samia. Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters , p. Goodman, The Republic of Letters, p. The Republic of Letters , Cornell Publishers, , p. Goodman, The Republic of Letters , p.
Sutton, Geoffrey. The bond of clientelism institutionalized a relationship of domestic service between a great noble and an author, based on a model of political fidelity and literary service. Patronage, on the other hand, made it possible to reward authors for their works. Under the patronage system, the prestige that writers confer on those who protect them is sanctioned by the dedicatory epistle, which displays not only the generosity of the patron, but also the huge gap between the respective positions of the patron and the writer.
The situation is different within the context of the salon because there gifts do not reward a specific work or literary favor, nor do they demand public praise. The gift presents itself as a form of friendly generosity inscribed within a relationship of sociability. These codes of polite society, and not those of the Republic of Letters, were the normative ideal that shaped the behavior of men of letters in the salons. The language of friendship, so present within the social relationships of polite society, does not constitute evidence of a truly egalitarian relationship, but neither should it be characterized as a fiction with which men of letters sought to mask the self-interested calculus that drew them into the salons.
In fact, the language of friendship is precisely what makes the relationship of protection possible by endowing it with new meaning, different from patronage, and all the more so from forms of literary domesticity: the man of letters is present within it not only as a writer, but also as un homme du monde.
One of the most influential promoters of this ideal of the writer was Voltaire. It was accompanied by an intense defense of politesse as a linguistic value a way of speaking which held up the court as its model and as a social value a habitus forged in the company of the monde.
It thus becomes clear that for writers the frequentation of the salons of polite society promoted not only material but also symbolic imperatives: to affirm that one had assimilated the dominant norms of the man of letters and of social success through writing.
Of course, in the seventeenth century, scholars were deeply concerned with the rules of interpersonal conduct; several recent insightful works in the social history of science have stressed the importance of civility in learned communities, and even in the very language of scholarship. As Anne Goldgar has convincingly argued, in the mid-eighteenth century, the classical ideal of the Republic of Letters was sharply attacked by the philosophes, the very same ones who attended the Parisian salons and had nothing but scorn for the tradition of scholarship and erudition which was the constitutional base of the Republic of Letters.
This was a real conflict of values about the regulation of literary life. In some areas of intellectual life, especially in antiquarianism, but also in natural history, the practices and ideals of the Republic of Letters remained vital and they organized networks of knowledge. All around Europe, academies were the underpinnings of the eighteenth-century Republic of Letters, and they encouraged the circulation of knowledge.
The case of Esprit Calvet, well studied by Laurence Brockliss, illustrates the persistence of such networks. If one wants to understand why so many writers in the eighteenth century, and especially many encyclopedists, sought eagerly to be received in the salons, the Republic of Letters is not a helpful notion.
Certainly, not every writer claimed to follow the ideal of the Voltairian homme de lettres , nor did every writer conform to the practices of high society. Finally, we have to examine one last argument in favor of equating the salons with the Republic of Letters. According to Dena Goodman, salons were the center of the Republic of Letters and the principal tool of its feminization. Salon women were never praised for their knowledge and their intellectual achievements but for their social skills, their ability to maintain politesse and harmony, and this was their traditional role in high society.
Mme Geoffrin, for instance, always insisted that she had no formal education, and no desire to read the books that people sent to her. In fact, salon sociability was at odds with republican principles and republican values as they were defined in the eighteenth century. Salons were mostly organized as little courts, revolving around the hostess, and ruled by the ideals of politesse , witty conversation, social distinction, and galanterie.
No wonder republicans like Rousseau were so eager to denounce the salons and the role women played there on behalf of republican virtues. I have tried to demonstrate that the Republic of Letters is not an appropriate notion with which to think about the salons. What about the Republic of Letters itself , then, in the context of the Enlightenment?
Certainly, as a network of learned communication and exchange, the Republic of Letters still existed even if it declined as a normative ideal of communication. And there is still a lot to learn by studying European networks of scholars and writers in the eighteenth century, with their institutions academies, universities, libraries, learned journals , their sense of forming a community or communities, and their practices of sociability.
But we have to acknowledge that the Republic of Letters faced two important challenges. It was no longer possible to avoid the question of the public utility of scholarship.
There were, therefore, critical tensions between the principle of peer communication that ruled the Republic of Letters, on the one hand, and the dynamics of publication that was consubstantial to the Enlightenment, on the other.
The second challenge was the dynamics of nationalization, by which I mean both the fact that intellectual innovations and their circulation were promoted and controlled more and more by national institutions, but also the temptation for political social elites to manipulate culture on behalf of national projects.
Their base was the Parisian salons, where networks of social and intellectual exchange were developed to connect Paris, the capital of the Enlightenment and the City of Light, with the rest of France. Here in the salons of the Enlightenment, compared to other 18th century social gatherings and salons of an earlier age, the tone was much more serious.
The de Goncourts' wrote:. Its walls, its architecture are saddened like the court and like society, by reform, seriousness, rigidity This is still society, but it is no longer pleasure " de Goncourt,
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