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. Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: le XVIIe siècle, revised edition by Patrick Dandrey, ed. Fayard, Paris, 1996, p. 1149. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room):Aronson, Nicole, Madame de Rambouillet ou la magicienne de la Chambre bleue, Fayard, Paris, 1988. 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.Kale, Steven. French Salons : High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the revolution of 1848. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. p.2Lenotre, G. Le Château de Rambouillet, six siècles d'Histoire, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1930. New publication, Denoël, Paris, 1984, chapter: Les précieuses, pp. 20-21 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.
Historiography
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'.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 280. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) p. 9A 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.Ibid., p. 9In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's 1964 novel A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's 2011 film 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 form
Contemporary literature about the salons is dominated by idealistic notions of politeness, civility, and honesty, though it is debated whether they lived up to these standards. These older texts tend to portray reasoned debates and egalitarian polite conversation.Sisley Huddleston, Bohemian, Literary and Social Life in Paris: Salons, Cafes, Studios (London: George G. Harrap, 1928) 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.Dena Goodman, 'Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions' Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 22, No. 3, Special Issue: The French Revolution in Culture (Spring, 1989), pp. 330 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.Ibid., pp. 329-331
The period in which salons were dominant has been labeled the "age of conversation".Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation (New York: New York Review Books, 2005) 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".Kale, French Salons, p. 5. Others suggested that little other than government was ever discussed.Ibid., p. 5. 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).
Relationship with the public sphere Recent historiography 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.Ibid., p. 30. 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.Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988); Goodman, The Republic of Letters; Erica Harth, Cartesian Women: Versions and Subversions of Rational Discourse in the Old Regime (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1992).
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.Kale, French Salons, p. 238 n. 5.
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 [Habermas'] thesis", rather than verifying it.Jolanta T. Pekacz, Conservative Tradition In Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) p. 3. The theory itself, meanwhile, has been criticized for a fatal misunderstanding of the nature of salons.Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, pp. 23-4. 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.