Enlightenment Salon Culture: The Birth of Modern Public Life

The salon was the most characteristic cultural institution of the European Enlightenment, and the conversational culture that it nurtured was, the birthplace of the modern public sphere. While The Enlightenment Salons surveys the major French and German salons of the eighteenth century, this article focuses on the social and conversational dynamics that made the salon a unique institution: the role of the hostess, the rules of polite conversation, the relationship between salon conversation and the printed word, and the lasting influence of the salon on modern public life.

The Hostess and the Conversational Code

The central figure in the Enlightenment salon was the hostess. She set the tone of the gathering, chose the guests, and managed the conversation. The most successful hostesses — Madame Geoffrin, Madame du Deffand, Madame d’Épinay, and the later German hostesses Rahel Varnhagen and Henriette Herz — were women of great intellectual and social distinction, and they exercised a power that was otherwise denied to women in the eighteenth century.

The salon developed a distinctive conversational code that was different from the formal rhetoric of the academy and the disputation of the university. The ideal salon conversation was agréable — agreeable, lively, varied, and free from pedantry. The hostess was expected to draw out the shy, to moderate the disputatious, and to keep the conversation moving from topic to topic. The art of conversation, in the salon, was the art of bringing together people of different backgrounds and interests in a way that produced a conversation greater than the sum of its parts.

The success of the conversational code depended on a number of tacit rules. The conversation was to be conducted in a tone of urbanité — of refined urbanity, in which the participants treated each other as equals regardless of social rank. The topics of conversation were to be wide-ranging, including literature, philosophy, science, and the arts, and the participants were expected to be well-informed on all of them. Personal attacks and religious polemic were generally avoided. The ideal was a kind of rational sociability in which the participants were able to discuss the most controversial questions of the day without the conversation degenerating into quarrel.

The Salon and the Republic of Letters

The salon was closely connected to the wider republic of letters — the international community of scholars, writers, and intellectuals who corresponded with each other across national boundaries. The salon provided a local node in this wider network, and the conversations that took place in the salon were often carried outward through the letters of the participants, through the periodicals that they published, and through the books that they wrote.

The connection between the salon and the republic of letters was especially important for women. The republic of letters was, in principle, an egalitarian community of learning, but in practice it was dominated by men. The salon provided a space in which women could participate as equals in the intellectual life of the age, and the women who hosted the great salons were able to influence the direction of the republic of letters in ways that were not available to them in the more formal institutions of learning.

The salon also provided an important link between the conversation of the elite and the wider public. The works of Voltaire, Diderot, Rousseau, and the other major figures of the French Enlightenment were often first presented in the salons, and the reception of these works in the salons helped to shape their subsequent reception in the wider reading public. The salon was, in this sense, an important node in the network of communication that connected the new ideas of the Enlightenment to a wider audience.

The Rules of Polite Conversation

The Enlightenment theorists of conversation — including the abbé de Saint-Pierre, the comte de Bussy-Rabutin, and the various writers of the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries who tried to codify the rules of polite conversation — developed a sophisticated account of the proper form of social discourse. The rules of polite conversation were, in this sense, a kind of social technology that was designed to allow people of different backgrounds and interests to discuss the most controversial questions of the day in a way that was both productive and agreeable.

The rules of polite conversation had a number of important features. They were egalitarian, in that the participants were expected to treat each other as equals regardless of social rank. They were rational, in that the conversation was expected to proceed by argument and counter-argument rather than by appeal to authority. They were open, in that the conversation was expected to be open to all comers who could contribute to the discussion. And they were tolerant, in that the participants were expected to disagree without becoming disagreeable.

The Enlightenment commitment to the rules of polite conversation had important consequences for the development of modern democratic culture. The democratic commitment to the free exchange of ideas, to the protection of minority views, and to the resolution of political questions by argument rather than by force, can be traced to the salon culture of the eighteenth century. The contemporary commitment to the principles of free speech, of open public discussion, and of the peaceful resolution of political conflict is the political descendant of the conversational culture of the Enlightenment salon.

The Lasting Influence

The conversational culture of the Enlightenment salon has had a lasting influence on modern public life. The contemporary institutions of public discussion — the lecture hall, the conference, the panel discussion, the public forum, the online discussion group — draw on the central arguments of the salon. The principles of free discussion, of rational argument, of mutual respect among the participants, and of the formation of public opinion through open debate were all developed in the salons of the eighteenth century.

The salon was also an important model for the recognition of the cultural and intellectual contributions of women. The women who hosted the great salons were among the most influential cultural figures of their age, and their example has been an important source of inspiration for the modern recognition of women’s cultural and intellectual contributions. The contemporary commitment to the equal participation of women in public life is, a continuation of the commitment that the salon culture made to the recognition of women’s intellectual and cultural agency.

Further Reading

• Robert Darnton, The Literary Underground of the Old Regime (1982)
• Darrin McMahon, Enlightenment Contested (2006)
• Daniel Roche, The Enlightenment in the West (2010)