Salons
The salonnière played a prominent role in establishing order within the Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment period. Beginning in the 17th century, salons served to bring together nobles and intellectuals in an atmosphere of civility and fair play in order to educate one, refine the other, and create a common medium of cultural exchange based on the shared notion of honnêteté that combined learning, good manners, and conversational skill. But government was needed because, while the Republic of Letters was structured in theory by egalitarian principles of reciprocity and exchange, the reality of intellectual practice fell far short of this ideal. French men of letters in particular found themselves increasingly engaged in divisive quarrels rather than in constructive debate. With the establishment of Paris as the capital of the Republic, French men of letters had enriched traditional epistolary relations with direct verbal ones. That is, finding themselves drawn together by the capital, they began to meet together and make their collaboration on the project of Enlightenment direct, and thus suffered the consequences of giving up the mediation that the written word provided. Without this traditional kind of formal mediation, the philosophes needed a new kind of governance.
The Parisian salon gave the Republic of Letters source of political order in the person of the salonnière, for she gave order both to social relations among salon guests and to the discourse in which they engaged. When Marie-Thérèse Geoffrin launched her weekly dinners in 1749, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters found its ‘center of unity’. As a regular and regulated formal gathering hosted by a woman in her own home, the Parisian salon could serve as an independent forum and locus of intellectual activity for a well-governed Republic of Letters. From 1765 until 1776, men of letters and those who wanted to be counted among the citizens of their Republic could meet in Parisian salons any day of the week.
The salons were literary institutions that relied on a new ethic of polite sociability based on hospitality, distinction, and the entertainment of the elite. The salons were open to intellectuals, who used them to find protectors and sponsors and to fashion themselves as 'hommes du monde.' In the salons after 1770 there emerged a radical critique of worldliness, inspired by Rousseau. These radicals denounced the mechanisms of polite sociability and called for a new model of the independent writer, who would address the public and the nation.
Lilti (2005) argues that the salon never provided an egalitarian space. Rather, salons only provided a form of sociability where politeness and congeniality of aristocrats maintained a fiction of equality that never dissolved differences in status but nonetheless made them bearable. The "grands" (high-ranking nobles) only played the game of mutual esteem as long as they kept the upper hand. Men of letters were well aware of this rule, never confusing the politeness of the salons with equality in conversation.
As well, the advantages that writers gained from visiting salons extended to the protection by their hosts. The salons provided crucial support in the career of an author, not because they were literary institutions, but, on the contrary, because they allowed men of letters to emerge from the circles of the Republic of Letters and access the resources of aristocratic and royal patronage. As a result, instead of an opposition between the court and the Republic of Letters they are instead a collection of spaces and resources focused around the court as a center of power and distribution of favors.
Antoine Lilti paints a picture of a reciprocal relationship between men of letters and salonnières. Salonnières attracted the finest men of letters through gift-giving or regular allowance in order to boost the reputation of the salons. For salon hosts and hostesses, they were not merely sources of information, but also important points of relay in the circulation of praise. From one salon to the next, in conversation as in correspondence, men of letters gladly praised the social groups who welcomed them. In turn, the salon hostess had to be able to prove their capacity to mobilize as many high society contacts as possible in favor of their protégés. Consequently, correspondences openly display network of influence, and the woman of high society employed all their know-how to help benefit those men of letters whose elections to the academies they supported.
Read more about this topic: Republic Of Letters