Hypatia Pétriz Haddad (Predoctoral researcher at CSIC and University of Barcelona) & Guillem Sales Vilalta (Postdoctoral Juan de la Cierva fellow at CSIC)1
Les Élusions Ridicules. Reconsidering Salonnières and their Agency
The salons were crucial cultural and social spaces that flourished in seventeenth-century Paris and were most often run by women. Emerging within the francophone context as designated reception rooms in aristocratic palaces and hôtels, and partly inspired by North Italian models, they gradually extended to more modest private homes over the course of the eighteenth century, while retaining their function as spaces of sociable gathering. As such, the salon appeared as a structured environment whose design, layout, and atmosphere actively shaped the character of these encounters2.
While many influential works of early modern thought emerged in close interplay with these settings, their historiographical treatment has oftentimes been rather reductive. This distortion can be traced back to the dismissive portrayals that accompanied the very emergence of salon culture like Molière’s Les Précieuses ridicules (1659) and Les Femmes savantes (1672), where Molière sharply reduces salon sociability to superficial exchanges of literary gossip and reputation essentially moved by improper aspirations3.
Although modern scholarship has sought to move beyond misogynistic perspectives like that of Molière, subtler versions of his reductive framing persisted well into the twentieth century. A gendered opposition usually emerged between the (male) philosopher and the salon, which appears as an exoteric and ancillary sphere reduced, at best, to a rather simplified discussion of ideas elaborated by philosophers4, thus displacing salonnières from the position of strictly philosophical agents.
This displacement is further attested by the fragmentary transmission of their intellectual legacy, which has rarely been integrated into canonical narratives of early modern philosophy. The challenge posed by this difficulty lies not only in reconstructing women’s contributions but in transmitting them as philosophers in the first place (Birulés 2014, 95). A significant effort in this direction can be found in Carla Lonzi’s Armande sono io! (1992), which seeks to recover the intellectual practices of the précieuses beyond Molière’s caricature through a feminist, situated perspective.
Following Fina Birulés and Carla Lonzi’s methodological points, some intellectual practices fundamental to salon culture (such as the orchestrating of debates and the writing and circulating of texts among participants) should arguably be regarded as genuine forms of philosophical agency, including both: (i) interventions that helped shape canonical works (typically by prompting controversies and debates); and (ii) contributions that went unrecognised because they did not conform to established conventions of philosophical writing.
A Methodological Proposal for the Study of Salons Beyond Classical Tropes
Understood as structured spaces of sociability, salons have frequently been interpreted through Jürgen Habermas’s notion of the public sphere, understood as a space of relatively equal communicative exchange (Habermas 1998, 33–34). While influential, this model requires qualification. Dena Goodman (1989; 1996) has shown that Parisian salons were structured by a gendered division of roles. In her account, women organised and regulated the meeting space while male intellectuals used it to advance their work, thus depicting an asymmetry that complicates the idea of the salon as a fully egalitarian sphere of discourse. Rather than adopting a Habermasian framework, it is important to remain attentive to the persistence of differences and power relations within these spaces.
A related issue arises in Goodman’s distinction between pre- and post-Revolutionary salons, in virtue of which pre-revolutionary salonnières like the précieuses are characterised as engaging in merely “playful” writing. Goodman presupposes a problematic distinction between playfulness and serious intellectual work5: in salon contexts, aesthetic play and reflection are often intertwined, and seemingly “literary” forms may actually entail substantive philosophical positions.
Seen from this perspective, salons cannot be easily dismissed as merely sites of sociability; rather, this point also challenges the common view that salons were confined to the realm of worldliness, in contrast to the more theoretically-serious domains of theology and philosophy (Craveri 2005, 9). Such a division proves difficult to sustain, given both the presence of religious actors in salons and cases like the gatherings of Madame de Sablé within a convent (Craveri 2005, 97–136).
With these qualifications in place, Salonnières appear to have exercised multiple forms of agency in organising their gatherings. They controlled admission, thereby structuring networks of inclusion and exclusion, and influenced the content of conversation, whether directly or indirectly, for instance, by preparing the topics that would later be addressed in discussion (Goodman 1989, 335). Their agency further extended to the configuration of space and atmosphere, through which they established norms of sociability and defined the boundaries of acceptable discourse6. Salon dynamics also involved the strategic distribution of attention with some specific figures occupying central roles.
Importantly, salonnières were also writers of their own. The salon functioned as a site for the production and circulation of texts in diverse forms: readings of works in progress, collaborative compositions, portraits, novels, and extensive correspondence networks. These textual practices often emerged at the intersection of orality and writing, frequently involving collective authorship or circulation within specific networks, which reflects a heightened awareness of the audience and context at stake.
Conclusions: The Importance of Shifting Perspective Beyond “Ridicule”
For all these reasons, the study of salons and the assessment of their significance call for two complementary shifts. First, (I) it requires an expansion of the philosophical corpus beyond canonical genres to include letters, dialogues, novels, poetry, and portraits. Second, (II) it calls for analysing texts in relation to their interlocutory contexts, that is, as part of dynamic exchanges between authors and audiences. Such an approach benefits from sustained engagement with cultural history and literary studies, thereby enabling a more comprehensive understanding of intellectual agency, the circulation of ideas, and the social conditions in which salons take shape
References
Birulés, F. (2014). Entreactes: En torn de la política, el feminisme i el pensament. Trabucaire.
Collins, N. W. (2006). The problem of the Enlightenment salon: European history or post-Revolutionary politics 1755-1850. [University College London]. https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/1348921/
Craveri, B. (2005). The age of conversation (T. Waugh, Trans.). The New York Review of Books.
Goodman, D. (1989). Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions. Eighteenth-Century Studies, 22(3), 329. https://doi.org/10.2307/2738891
Goodman, D. (1996). The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1. printing, Cornell paperbacks). Cornell Univ. Press.
Habermas, J. (1998). The structural transformation of the public sphere: An inquiry into a category of bourgeois society (T. Burger, Trans.). MIT Press.
Hazard, P. (1946). La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle: De Montesquieu à Lessing. Boivin.
Lonzi, C. (1992). Armande sono io! (M. Lonzi, A. De Carlo, & M. Delfino, Eds.). Scritti di Rivolta Femminile.
Pekacz, J. T. (1999). Conservative Tradition in pre-revolutionary France: Parisian salon women. Lang. https://www.collectionscanada.ca/obj/s4/f2/dsk2/tape17/PQDD_0005/NQ29092.pdf
- This article presents a condensed and synthetic account of the main arguments developed in “Pétriz, H. & Sales Vilalta, G. 2026 (submitted for revision), Les Élusions Ridicules. Salons, Conversation, and Agency in Early Modern Women’s Thought, in: Women Philosophers in the Renaissance and Early Modern Period: A Hidden Dialogue within the Canon. Aguilar, M. (ed). Springer.”, In this article, the reader will find a fuller and more nuanced version of the issues discussed here. ↩︎
- Though anachronistic and partly retrospective (Collins 2006), we propose to retain the term ‘salon’ as a heuristic device that, rather than erasing historical discontinuities, highlights continuities among practices understood, in their most basic sense, as structured gatherings of individuals within a shared space. ↩︎
- This logic of discrediting women’s intellectual activity can also be traced to other well-known works by early modern authors, such as Rousseau’s Lettre à d’Alembert sur les spectacles (1758), where he criticises both the “feminine” vices of salon society and the feminisation of men of letters. As Goodman observes, Rousseau’s concern was less with women’s lack of recognition than with men debasing themselves to please salon women, thereby becoming “effeminate” (Goodman 1994, 54). ↩︎
- In this regard, see for instance Paul Hazard’s influential La pensée européenne au XVIIIe siècle (Hazard 1946: 187). ↩︎
- Interestingly, Pekacz strongly criticises Goodman’s position for not being grounded on evidences: “Dena Goodman apparently believes that the salons of Mme Geoffrin, Mlle de Lespinasse and Mme Necker simply “emerged” as serious bureaux where the project of Enlightenment was carried on, thus breaking with the tradition of salons as “aristocratic leisure institutions” […]. No support is offered, however, to prove that such salons as those of Mlle de Scudéry or the Marquise de Lambert or even Mme du Deffand were merely aristocratic leisure institutions” (Pekacz, 1999, 8). ↩︎
- It is interesting to note that, in this capacity, they wielded a considerable authority, mediating the reception of literary and philosophical works and even influencing linguistic choices, such as the use of the vernacular: “No one at that time in the world of letters, however, could allow himself the luxury of ignoring the fact that feminine taste now determined the success of a literary work, confirmed the reputation of a writer, and steered the course of literature. And it was not only unscrupulous hacks who cultivated the new reading public. Descartes himself chose to write his Discours de la methode (1637) in French rather than Latin […] He, too, wanted to be read by women” (Craveri, 2005, 21). ↩︎