14 Dec Sundays with Stendhal 8: Social Etiquette in the Salons of Paris, 1830
14.12.08
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2 Comments
So long as you did not speak lightly of God, or of the clergy, or of the King, or of the men in power, or of the artists patronised by the court, or of anything established; so long as you did not say anything good of Berenger, or of the opposition press, or of Voltaire, or of Rousseau, or of anything that allowed itself the liberty of a little freedom of speech; so long, above all, as you did not talk politics, you could freely discuss anything you pleased.
(The Red and the Black, Part II, Chapter 34, “The Hotel de La Mole.”)
For a bit more on the salons, I would recommend the following:
Craveri, Benedetta. The Age of Conversation. New York: New York Review of Books, 2005.
Goodman, Dena. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1994.
Gordon, Daniel. Citizens Without Sovereignty: Equality and Sociability in French Thought, 1670-1789. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994.
Kale, Steven. French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004.
Miller, Stephen. Conversation: A History of a Declining Art. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2006.
Of course a famous argument tying salons, coffee houses and reading societies to the emergence of the bourgeois public sphere is Jurgen Habermas’s The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1989. See too, Craig Calhoun, ed., Habermas and the Public Sphere. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992. Habermas’s book is one of the more recent inspirations for the body of work that falls under the heading of “deliberative democracy.”
re: Patrick’s comment…
I like to think of Opinio Juris (and various blogs I like to frequent) as a coffee house without the coffee. And without the house.