Literary Salons Across Britain and Ireland in the Long Eighteenth Century

Amy Prendergast

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781137512710
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire moderne

The eighteenth-century salon played an important role in shaping literary culture, while both creating and sustaining transnational intellectual networks. Focusing on archival materials, this book is the first detailed examination of the literary salon in Ireland, considered in the wider contexts of contemporary salon culture in Britain and France.

1

The French Salon: Its Foreign Participants and Hosts

These receptions are attended by all the best people and by all the distinguished foreigners and travellers.¹

Reflecting in a letter to his father on his experiences of salon culture during his 1763 visit to France, the historian Edward Gibbon stressed the salons’ heterogeneity as well as their shared spirit. Emphasising their common values, he noted that the salons were not identical: “all these people have their different merit; in some I meet with good dinners; in others, societies for the evening. …”² Precisely as Gibbon recognised, it is essential to respect and indeed highlight the differences and multiplicity of purposes inherent in the French salons rather than forcing the salon to adapt to a strict, inflexible definition. The salon as an institution changed and evolved over the centuries, retaining the same overall form, but fulfilling different functions and needs as contexts and circumstances varied. The French Revolution, for example, changed the salon’s conversation by politicising it and making public affairs a top priority, but its form and ethos of sociability remained virtually unaltered until 1848, when liberals began to view salons and mondanité as a “frivolous distraction.”³

In all its manifestations, the French salon was a staged event, involving distinctive forms of material culture. These forms, no less than the discussions taking place, define the salon at any one moment. To consider a sketch or outline of an evening at a salon, with its food, decoration, and guests, offers us a fuller, more appropriately complex sense of an individual gathering. What the salon hostesses wore and how they choose to set the scene for their salons reveal much regarding taste, fashion, and creativity, while enabling us to further visualise the event. These gatherings often involved large numbers of guests. Who these people were, what backgrounds they came from, and how they behaved amongst each other lead to questions of meritocracy and complementarity, politesse and gallantry. These salons offered an important forum for discussion and they had an extensive sphere of influence, encompassing the French Academy, publishing, and the world of literature in general.

One important, often overlooked, feature of the French salons was the considerable participation of foreign visitors. The Englishman Edward Gibbon was just one of many foreign participants in the French salons. The abbé André Morellet, for example, recorded a list of participants at Mme Geoffrin’s Paris salon, which included Jean-François Marmontel, Baron d’Holbach, and Abbé Raynal as well as “beaucoup d’étrangers de tous les pays qui n’eussent pas cru avoir vu Paris, s’ils n’avaient pas été admis chez Madame Geoffrin.”⁴ The diaries, journals, and correspondence of British men and women of letters such as William Cole, David Garrick, David Hume, Horace Walpole, Laurence Sterne, Edward Gibbon, and Elizabeth Montagu all provide accounts of their visits to French salons, particularly during the 1760s and 1770s – after, or even during, the period of the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763) – and offer interesting accounts of the salons from a British perspective. This flood of tourists visiting France continued until the outbreak of the French Revolutionary Wars when the British began to rediscover their own country, travelling to places such as the Lake District, the Wye Valley, and Edinburgh.⁵

Visitors were also attracted to the salons from elsewhere in Europe and the world at large; the Italian economist Abbé Galiani and the American philosopher Benjamin Franklin, for example, both frequented the Parisian salons, as did the Russian Enlightenment figure, Princess Ekaterina Romanovna Dashkova. This practice of receiving foreign visitors to the French salons did not begin in earnest until the eighteenth century.⁶ The presence of foreign visitors in these eighteenth-century salons allowed both Enlightenment thought and descriptions of salon culture to spread throughout the Western world, “permitting mutual appreciation and a mutual exchange of ideas.”⁷ Amongst the most neglected of these foreign visitors are the French salons’ Irish contributors. In addition to the priests, merchants, and soldiers who made up the three dominant Irish groups in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, there were also many literary figures, members of the aristocracy, and travellers on the Grand Tour, who chose to visit or reside in France.⁸ Thomas O’Connor notes: “This exchange of people, ideas and resources marked Ireland’s historical experience and had an important impact on Europe in the early-modern period.”⁹ Our understanding of the French salon is incomplete without investigating the nature of this impact. The personal papers of such figures as James Caulfield, first Earl of Charlemont, and Emily Fitzgerald, Duchess of Leinster, for instance, offer a fresh insight into the French Enlightenment and its salons. The Irish involvement in the eighteenth-century French salon was extensive. In addition to their presence in various French salons as participants, several Irish men and women also played a significant role in hosting salons. Important salons in France were held by James Butler, the 2nd Duke of Ormonde; Anastacia Fitzmaurice, the Countess of Kerry; and Bridget Plunket, Madame de Chastellux. Correspondence and personal papers held in the National Library of Ireland, in addition to published correspondence, memoirs, and travel journals belonging to such Irish men and women, provide much information about these gatherings. These Irish salons in France add further to our perception of the salons, not only demonstrating their diverse nature, but also revealing points of similarity throughout. In addition, these sources allow new, often overlooked, perspectives on an institution which has received much study, but where the same evidence is frequently circulated by authors on the subject.

The eighteenth-century salon in Paris

Writing at the beginning of the eighteenth century, the Marquise de Lambert (1647–1733) reflects on the salons of the early-seventeenth century in the following manner: “Il y avait autrefois des maisons où il était permis de parler et de penser; où les muses étaient en société avec les grâces.”¹⁰ With this revealing statement, de Lambert highlights the importance of intellectual freedom, the ability to “both speak and think,” in seventeenth-century salons, implying her belief that free enquiry and individual reasoning were considered fundamental. Nicole Pohl has identified philosophical symposia, Medieval norms of courtly love, and Italian Renaissance court culture as having provided the “blueprint for seventeenth- and eighteenth-century salon culture,” in particular the latter through its emphasis on humanism, Platonism, and gallantry.¹¹ Men of letters played an important role within the seventeenth-century salons, but remained on an equal level with the female members and the female literati’s own literary endeavours and interests. A sample list of participants at Mme de la Sablière’s salon, for example, includes both successful men and women: Mme de Sévigné, the Comtesse de Lafayette, Mme de Coulanges, Mme Scarron, Mme de La Suze, Ninon de Lenclos, Madeleine de Scudéry, Paul Pelisson, Valentin Conrart, Isaac de Benserade, Jean de la Chapelle, Charles Perrault, and Fontenelle, as well as various diplomats and scientists.¹² In the seventeenth-century salon, the salonnière was both hostess and avid participant, contributing to the debate with her own interjections as well as offering her own written material for conversation and formal improvement. In the eighteenth century, the composition of the gatherings altered significantly with mixed-gender sociability generally confined to a female hostess and male-only participants.

Women in the eighteenth-century salon were thus present primarily as facilitators and hosts rather than as participants, but they still served an essential function. The salonnière’s most important task was now to guide conversation and to maintain absolute harmony amongst her guests. These salonnières became vital to the harmonious working of the eighteenth-century salon, invisibly determining the mood of the gathering itself. Those hostesses most associated with the salon’s “golden age,” and indeed with the term “salon” in general, are Suzanne Curchod Necker (1739–1794), Marie Thérèse Rodet Geoffrin (1699–1777), Julie de Lespinasse (1732–1777), and Marie de Vichy-Champrond du Deffand (1696–1780).¹³ The participants in these Parisian salons were primarily, if not exclusively, male. Julie de Lespinasse is often referred to as the only woman present at the salon of Madame Geoffrin: “[Lespinasse] était la seule femme que Mme Geoffrin eut admise à son dîner des gens de lettres,” while descriptions of Madame Necker’s salon usually only record the presence of one other female – the Neckers’ young daughter Germaine, better known today as the famous author Madame de Staël.¹⁴

The primary role of these salon hostesses was unmistakably to govern and uphold the rules of polite conversation by facilitating the intellectual exchanges of their guests. It is attention rather than interpolation that is now essential. Madame Necker declares in one of her diaries, which were published by her husband after her death, that “the great secret of conversation is continual attention.”¹⁵ The hostess had to ensure the smooth flow of dialogue. In Marmontel’s Portrait de Madame Geoffrin (1777), the author declares: “Lorsqu’il [l’abbé de Saint-Pierre] s’en allait, Mme Geoffrin lui dit: Monsieur l’abbé, vous avez été d’une excellente conversation. Madame, lui-dit-il, je ne suis qu’un instrument dont vous avez bien joué.”¹⁶ Faith Beasley, in her work on the seventeenth-century salon, frequently belittles those of the eighteenth century while Dena Goodman claims that “it was the seriousness and regularity of these [eighteenth-century] salons that distinguished them from seventeenth-century salons.”¹⁷ Rather than denigrating salons from different periods, it is better to see the salons as evolving to fulfil different functions. As an institutional base for the Enlightenment, the salon is no more or less serious than it would be as a centre for Fronde opinion or literary production, and one can observe that the salon’s position as a location for debate on literary and philosophical issues remained constant.¹⁸

The eighteenth-century French salons were re-established as a serious focus of study in the wake of Goodman’s critically acclaimed work, The Republic of Letters (1994), but they have been the centre of popular study for more than two centuries. The salons have been subject to idolisation at the hands of nineteenth-century amateur historians; feminist re-appropriation in the latter half of the twentieth century; abstract reasoning regarding sociability, conversation, and debates on the bourgeois public sphere during the 1980s; and more recently the denial of their very significance, with the entire history of the salon thus far denounced by Antoine Lilti as a mere product of the historical imagination.¹⁹ While it could be argued that Goodman occasionally overplays the importance of the salons, Lilti’s dismissal of their worth is untenable. Within his work, Lilti disparages many memoirs by contemporary salon members, such as Marmontel and Morellet, as mere nostalgic accounts. Correspondence and memoirs allow salon participants to disseminate a particular image of their gatherings and shape how others will perceive them. Such works, particularly these memoirs, should indeed be approached with caution, but to dismiss them entirely is a mistake. These personal writings contain much invaluable information and allow us to determine how the participants themselves interpreted the salons. The room in which the salon took place was carefully decorated with specific objects and commissioned artworks, including portraits of the salon hostesses, represented in such a way as to communicate a specific message. It is not surprising that such preparation for staging the salon also extended to consideration of how the gatherings would be perceived by others through written and visual descriptions. Within this material, there are certainly varying levels of authenticity and attempts at realistic representations. One can, for instance, easily identify such manifest fallacies as the 1812 oil painting by Lemonnier of Madame Geoffrin’s salon, which includes figures who could not have attended the salons together. Such idealisations, whether overt or ambiguous, can still help us to understand how impressions of the salons were commissioned, constructed, and circulated by both participants and hostesses.

That these salons were carefully orchestrated events is readily observable in the preparations undertaken by the hostesses prior to the actual gatherings. The salonnière often prepared meticulously in advance of the salon, setting the stage and anticipating the dialogue. Lespinasse’s guest, the chevalier de Chastellux, discovered one of Madame Necker’s diaries, or “little book,” for example, in the Neckers’ drawing room, which reveals the extent to which her salon was a planned event:

It was the preparation for the very dinner to which he was invited: Madame Necker had written it the evening before, and it contained all she was to say to the most remarkable persons at table; his name was there, and after it these words, “I must talk to the Chevalier de Chastellux about Public Happiness and Agathe.”

In addition to those notes regarding de Chastellux, a man of letters who had contributed to the Encyclopédie, there were also notes for Marmontel and Guibert, and indeed Mme Necker is recorded as subsequently having said, “word for word what she had written in her pocket-book.”²⁰ Geoffrin, meanwhile, is reported to have kept a catalogue of her guests according to nationality, including some essential information adja...