French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (review)

Abstract

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 challenges the historiography of salon culture in eighteenthand nineteenth-century France. Steven Kale frames his exposé against the backdrop of the Republic of Letters and the grande monde and culminates with the decline of French salons in the nineteenth century. From a methodological perspective Kale incorporates the testimony of salon habitués through his prodigious use of memoirs and journals. The value of such fecund material will be familiar to readers of Libraries & Culture. The disparate voices of French salons, including Mme du Deffand and Mme de Staël in the eighteenth century to the duchesse de Dino and the princesse de Lieven in the nineteenth century, offer competing views on the influence of salonnières. Kale reconstructs salon history through an institutional approach, considering its evolution, function, and persistence, rather than a conventional examination of “women in salons per se” (16). He dismisses “literary studies and historical scholarship” that claim a salonoriented matriarchy politically reigning over le monde as inflated and fantastical discourse (39). He concurs with Adeline Daumard’s repudiation of salonnières as political. Daumard states that “women of the highest society and the best circles at court did not have . . . the power either to make the careers of a man they honored or to determine public affairs by friends interposed” (8). Kale skeptically questions the validity of French salons as idealized spheres of feminine power, seeking instead an accurate representation of salonnières. He departs from Joan Landes in Women in the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Cornell University Press, 1988) and Dena Goodman in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Cornell University Press, 1994). Landes focuses her argument on aristocratic “women [who] functioned as adjuncts, then, of a system of advancement for merit. Circles at court and salons in the city became centers of female power brokers” (24). Goodman proposes that the goal of Enlightenment salons “was to satisfy the self-determined educational needs of women who started them” (76). Kale is unconvinced by Goodman’s premise that salonnières helped to engineer autonomy for the Republic of Letters from le monde (242). Jolanta Pekacz supports this objection, holding that salonnières would not violate their sex through “illegitimate claims” promulgated by social and intellectual desires (Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women [Peter Land, 1999], 12). Kale debunks women’s power as “an optical illusion” (40). By the nineteenth century, he argues, “the power of women to harmonize the world was largely a fiction, [and] so was their ability to influence policy and events from behind the scenes” (146). These were women consumed