The World of the Salons: Sociability and Worldliness in Eighteenth-Century Paris by Antoine Lilti (review)

Published under the prestigious imprint of Fayard in 2005, only two years after its soutenance as a thesis, Antoine Lilti’s analysis of the salons has taken the world of Enlightenment studies by storm. This translation, though an abridgement of the original 568-page text, is evidence of the scholarly esteem in which it is held. It has completely renewed our understanding of one of the most distinctive institutions of pre-Revolutionary cultural life in Paris. Even the name, it seems, is inappropriate: ‘salon’ was a term only coined in the nineteenth-century. Most contemporaries called these gatherings ‘sociétés’. Nor was their contemporary importance mainly literary, as has so often been assumed. Their hosts (for not all of them were women — another surprise) certainly collected writers willing to boost their own fame by conforming to a complex code of social behaviour, but they were recruited more for their talent to amuse rather than instruct, much less for any tendency to voice criticism. For the mainstays of the salons were aristocratic courtiers, and behind a veneer of polite equality, social hierarchy was rigidly if tacitly respected. Salons, in fact, far from being incubators of subversion, were pillars of the established order, smart sets dedicated to gossip, light conversation, and witty repartee, eating, drinking, and (although these aspects are omitted from the abridgement) gambling and even sex. They gave the tone to polite society in the capital, reinforcing rather than subverting aristocratic culture by adding leadership of fashion to more traditional credentials of ancestry and alliances. The salons were hardly the midwives of the burgeoning public opinion so vaunted by the disciples of Jürgen Habermas: they were only interested in their own opinions, and those of others like them — for their membership overlapped widely. The opinion of a wider public they despised and positively mistrusted, since it was beyond their own control. The salons, therefore, played no part in fomenting revolution — unless their exclusivism helped to provoke it. The Revolution cheerfully swept them away along with the rest of the Ancien Régime of which they were so integrally a part. Lilti’s conclusions are based upon a deep rereading of all the well-known printed sources for the history of the Parisian Enlightenment, as well as a range of manuscripts in several countries. He has also made extensive and fruitful use of the French foreign office’s contrôle des étrangers archives, from which the central part played by diplomats in salon life fully emerges. Lilti writes clearly and without jargon, and Lydia Cochrane’s translation retains these qualities in English. Whether ‘worldliness’ quite conveys the full meaning of ‘mondanité’ is open to doubt, but it is hard to think of a more precise English equivalent of this concept, so central to the book’s argument.