Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women.

Lynn, Michael R.

Conservative Tradition in Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women, by Jolanta T. Pekacz. (Series: The Age of Revolution and Romanticism, volume 25). New York, Peter Lang, 1999. 256 pp. $51.95 U.S. (cloth).

The role of women in the intellectual and cultural life of old regime France has provided a strong research focus over the last decades. Scholars have placed women's participation in associations such as Masonic lodges and salons under an ever-increasing scrutiny. At the same time, much of this recent scholarship has operated within the theoretical framework of Jurgen Habermas's notion of the public sphere. Jolanta Pekacz, rejecting the idea of the public sphere because of its inherent political outlook, analyzes one such institution, the salon, in an attempt to bring to light what she deems to be the conservative side of salonnieres. Pekacz explores the formation of salons and seeks to show the continuity of practices from the age of Louis XIV up to the French Revolution. In doing so, Pekacz tries to illustrate the connections between the absolute monarchy, the traditional values of the nobility, especially honnetete, and the place of women in spreading such values. At the same time, Pekacz wants to reconceptualize the relationship between sociability, politeness, and public opinion through an in-depth analysis of one specific example of the conservative behavior of salonnieres; in particular, she focuses on the eighteenth-century debate between the supporters of French and Italian opera.

The first two-thirds of Pekacz's book concentrates on the idea of honnetete, defined by Pekacz as a sense of honor that, ideally, governed the social behavior of people. This concept arose from both humanist and religious writings and became an important aristocratic virtue. Salonnieres, in order to legitimize the creation of salons, appropriated this virtue for themselves. Pekacz claims that the direct result of this infusion of honnetete into the personas of the salonnieres led them to become social, moral, and aesthetic conservatives who allowed their roles to be determined by men. Had the salonnieres behaved in any other manner they would have transcended traditional gender boundaries and been prohibited from running their salons. In essence, Pekacz argues for the centrality of honnetete in salon life and tries to demonstrate that salons and salonnieres remained constant in their conservatism throughout the old regime. Such a formulation runs counter to the work of other scholars, especially Dena Goodman in The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 1994). Goodman characterizes salons as distinct public sphere arenas noted for their emphasis on the criticism of the state and traditional institutions. In addition, Goodman suggests that salons had a substantially different clientele during the age of Enlightenment than in the seventeenth century and that the salonnieres took an active role in the discussions and debates. Goodman also argues that salons and salonnieres played a key role in the creation of Enlightenment ideas and for the spread of these ideas, something that Pekacz would like to refute.

Pekacz does this in the final section where she analyzes the Querelle des Bouffons in particular and the debate over French versus Italian opera in general. Almost all salonnieres, it turns out, came down on the French side in this debate, a position that Pekacz identifies as conservative since it meant allying with the state. The philosophes, on the other hand, frequently supported the Italian side during the Querelle, although by the 1770s they too had split on this issue. Their initial unity arose because the main part of the Querelle took place in the 1750s just after the publication of the Encyclopedie had been suspended. Thephilosophes thus utilized this debate as a forum through which they could argue in favor of freedom of expression. Even so, the salonnieres, argues Pekacz, showed their true colors and sided with the conservative state against the liberal philosophes.

Pekacz bases much of her discussion of salons on an extensive reading of printed works discussing honnetete. Many of these works were written and published in the seventeenth century, although they were often reprinted in the eighteenth century. This use of sources written earlier, however, makes Pekacz's argument less convincing for the later period. Pekacz also treats early modern France as somewhat static: both the salon itself and the importance of the idea of honnetete appear constant and unchanging over this time period until just before the Revolution. In addition, Pekacz discusses neither the changing social and intellectual backgrounds of the salonnieres nor the evolving nature of their clientele. She never explains, for example, why the philosophes would even want to attend salon meetings if the salonnieres were so conservative. Equally important, Pekacz fails to define what it is to be conservative or to illustrate that the conservative tradition of the salonnieres extended beyond the one example of the Querelle des Bouffons. Nonetheless, Pekacz's introduction of the example of opera into the debate over the role of the salonniere's position will help scholars in their understanding of the Enlightenment.

Michael R. Lynn
Agnes Scott College