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A salon is a gathering of people held by a host. These gatherings often consciously followed Horace's definition of the aims of poetry, "either to please or to educate" (Latin: aut delectare aut prodesse). Salons in the tradition of the France literary and philosophical movements of the 17th and 18th centuries are still being conducted.
Salons were an important place for the exchange of . The word salon first appeared in France in 1664 (from the Italian language salone, the large reception hall of Italian mansions; salone is actually the augmentative form of sala, room). Literary gatherings before this were often referred to by using the name of the room in which they occurred, like cabinet, réduit, ruelle, and alcôve. Dictionnaire des lettres françaises: le XVIIe siècle, revised edition by Patrick Dandrey, ed. Fayard, Paris, 1996, p. 1149. Before the end of the 17th century, these gatherings were frequently held in the bedroom (treated as a more private form of drawing room):Aronson, Nicole, Madame de Rambouillet ou la magicienne de la Chambre bleue, Fayard, Paris, 1988. a lady, reclining on her bed, would receive close friends who would sit on chairs or stools drawn around.
This practice may be contrasted with the greater formalities of Louis XIV's petit lever, where all stood. Ruelle, literally meaning "narrow street" or "lane", designates the space between a bed and the wall in a bedroom; it was used commonly to designate the gatherings of the "précieuses", the intellectual and literary circles that formed around women in the first half of the 17th century. The first renowned salon in France was the Hôtel de Rambouillet not far from the Palais du Louvre in Paris, which its hostess, Rome-born Catherine de Vivonne, marquise de Rambouillet (1588–1665), ran from 1607 until her death.Kale, Steven. French Salons : High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the revolution of 1848. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. p.2Lenotre, G. Le Château de Rambouillet, six siècles d'Histoire, Calmann-Lévy, Paris, 1930. New publication, Denoël, Paris, 1984, chapter: Les précieuses, pp. 20-21 She established the rules of etiquette of the salon which resembled the earlier codes of Italian chivalry.
In Britain, mathematician and inventor Charles Babbage is credited with introducing the Science soirée, a form of salon, from France. Babbage began hosting Saturday evening soirées in 1828.
Major historiographical debates focus on the relationship between the salons and the public sphere, as well as the role played by women within the salons.
Breaking down the salons into historical periods is complicated due to the various historiographical debates that surround them. Most studies stretch from the early 16th century up until around the end of the 18th century. Goodman is typical in ending her study at the French Revolution where, she writes: 'the literary public sphere was transformed into the Politics public'.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 280. Steven Kale is relatively alone in his recent attempts to extend the period of the salon up until Revolution of 1848:Steven Kale, French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2006) p. 9
A whole world of social arrangements and attitude supported the existence of French salons: an idle aristocracy, an ambitious middle class, an active intellectual life, the social density of a major urban center, sociable , and a certain aristocratic feminism. This world did not disappear in 1789. Ibid., p. 9In the 1920s, Gertrude Stein's Saturday evening salons (described in Ernest Hemingway's A Moveable Feast and depicted fictionally in Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris) gained notoriety for including Pablo Picasso and other twentieth-century luminaries like Alice B. Toklas.
Her contemporary Natalie Clifford Barney's handmade dinner place setting is on display at The Brooklyn Museum. Like Stein, she was also an author and Americans Expatriate living in Paris at the time, hosting literary salons that were attended by Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald as well. She bought a home with an old Masonic Temple in the backyard which she dubbed Temple d’Amitié, the Temple of Friendship, for private meetings with attendees of her salons.
In 2018, Barnard College professor Caroline Weber's book “Proust's Duchess: How Three Celebrated Women Captured the Imagination of Fin-de-Siècle Paris” was shortlisted for the Pulitzer Prize and was the first in-depth study of the three Parisian salon hostesses Proust used to create his supreme fictional character, the Duchesse de Guermantes.
The period in which salons were dominant has been labeled the "age of conversation".Benedetta Craveri, The Age of Conversation (New York: New York Review Books, 2005) The topics of conversation within the salonsthat is, what was and was not "polite" to talk aboutare thus vital when trying to determine the form of the salons. The salonnières were expected, ideally, to run and moderate the conversation (See Women in the salon). There is, however, no universal agreement among historians as to what was and was not appropriate conversation. Marcel Proust "insisted that politics was scrupulously avoided".Kale, French Salons, p. 5. Others suggested that little other than government was ever discussed. Ibid., p. 5. The disagreements that surround the content of discussion partly explain why the salon's relationship with the public sphere is so heavily contested. Individuals and collections of individuals that have been of cultural significance overwhelmingly cite some form of engaged, explorative conversation regularly held with an esteemed group of acquaintances as the source of inspiration for their contributions to culture, art, literature and politics, leading some scholars to posit the salon's influence on the public sphere as being more widespread than previously appreciated.Dena Goodman, The Republic of Letters: a Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994), p. 14.Jürgen Habermas (trans. Thomas Burger), The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society (Camb., Mass.: MIT Press, 1989).
The most prominent defense of salons as part of the public sphere comes from Dena Goodman's The Republic of Letters, which claims that the "public sphere was structured by the salon, the press and other institutions of sociability". Goodman's work is also credited with further emphasizing the importance of the salon in terms of French history, the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment as a whole, and has dominated the historiography of the salons since its publication in 1994.Kale, French Salons, p. 238 n. 5.
Habermas' dominance in salon historiography has come under criticism from some quarters, with Pekacz singling out Goodman's Republic of Letters for particular criticism because it was written with "the explicit intention of supporting Habermas' thesis", rather than verifying it.Jolanta T. Pekacz, Conservative Tradition In Pre-Revolutionary France: Parisian Salon Women (New York: Peter Lang, 1999) p. 3. The theory itself, meanwhile, has been criticized for a fatal misunderstanding of the nature of salons.Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, pp. 23-4. The main criticism of Habermas' interpretation of the salons, however, is that the salons of most influence were not part of an oppositional public sphere, and were instead an extension of court society.
This criticism stems largely from Norbert Elias' The History of Manners, in which Elias contends that the dominant concepts of the salons politesse, Civility and honnêtetéwere "used almost as synonyms, by which the courtly people wished to designate, in a broad or narrow sense, the quality of their own behavior'.Norbert Elias (Trans. Edmund Jephcott), The Civilizing Process: The History of Manners, Vol. 1 (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), pp. 39-40. Joan Landes agrees, stating that, "to some extent, the salon was merely an extension of the institutionalized court" and that rather than being part of the public sphere, salons were in fact in conflict with it.Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, pp. 23-5. Erica Harth concurs, pointing to the fact that the state "appropriated the informal academy and not the salon" due to the academies' "tradition of dissent"something that lacked in the salon.Harth, Cartesian Women, pp. 61-63. But Landes' view of the salons as a whole is independent of both Elias' and Habermas' school of thought, insofar that she views the salons as a "unique institution" that cannot be adequately described as part of the public sphere or court society.Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution, p. 23 Others, such as Steven Kale, compromise by declaring that the public and private spheres overlapped in the salons.Kale, French Salons, p. 12. Antoine Lilti ascribes to a similar viewpoint, describing the salons as simply "institutions within Parisian high society".Antoine Lilti, 'Sociabilité et mondanité: Les hommes de lettres dans les salons parisiens au XVIIIe siècle' French Historical Studies, Vol. 28, No. 3 (Summer 2005), p. 417.
Historians tended to focus on individual salonnières, creating almost a "great woman" version of history that ran parallel to the Whiggish, male-dominated history identified by Herbert Butterfield. Even in 1970, works were still being produced that concentrated only on individual stories without analysing the effects of the salonnières' unique position.Anny Latour (Trans. A. A. Dent), Uncrowned Queens: Reines Sans Couronne (London: J. M. Dent, 1970) The integral role that women played within salons as salonnières began to receive greaterand more seriousstudy in latter parts of the 20th century, with the emergence of a distinctly feminist historiography.Carolyn C. Lougee, Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth Century France, pp. 3-7. The salons, according to Carolyn Lougee, were distinguished by "the very visible identification of women with salons" and the fact that they played a positive public role in French society. Ibid., pp. 3, 7. General texts on the Enlightenment, such as Daniel Roche's France in the Enlightenment, tend to agree that women were dominant within the salons, but that their influence did not extend far outside of such venues.Daniel Roche (Trans Arthur Goldhammr), France in the Enlightenment, (Cambridge, Massachusetts: HUP, 1998), pp. 443-8.
It was, however, Goodman's The Republic of Letters that ignited a real debate surrounding the role of women within the salons and the Enlightenment as a whole.Goodman, The Republic of Letters, pp. 1-11. According to Goodman: "The salonnières were not social climbers but intelligent, self-educated, and educating women who adopted and implemented the values of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and used them to reshape the salon to their own social intellectual, and educational needs". Ibid., p. 76. 1832, salonnière in Paris where political and other émigré Italians, including composer Vincenzo Bellini, gathered in the 1830s. Portrait by Francesco Hayez|alt=|left]]Wealthy members of the aristocracy have always drawn to their court poets, writers and artists, usually with the lure of patronage, an aspect that sets the court apart from the salon. Another feature that distinguished the salon from the court was its absence of social hierarchy and its mixing of different social ranks and orders.Goodman, Dena. Enlightenment salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 22. 3, Special issue : The French Revolution in Culture. (Spring, 1989), p 338 In the 17th and 18th centuries, "salons encouraged socializing between the sexes and brought nobles and bourgeois together".Kale, Steven. French Salons : High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the revolution of 1848. Baltimore : The Johns Hopkins University Press,2004. p.2 Salons helped facilitate the breaking down of social barriers which made the development of the enlightenment salon possible. In the 18th century, under the guidance of Madame Geoffrin, Mlle de Lespinasse, and Madame Necker, the salon was transformed into an institution of Enlightenment.Goodman, Dena. Enlightenment salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions. Eighteenth-Century Studies, Vol. 22. 3, Special issue : The French Revolution in Culture. (Spring, 1989), p.331 The enlightenment salon brought together Parisian society, the progressive philosophes who were producing the Encyclopédie, the Bluestockings and other intellectuals to discuss a variety of topics.
At that time, women had powerful influence over salons, where they carried very important roles as regulators who could select their guests and decide the subjects of their meetings, which could be social, literary, or political topics of the time. They also served as mediators by directing discussions. Salons were an informal form of education where women were able to exchange ideas, receive and give criticism, read their own works, and hear about the works and ideas of other intellectuals. Many ambitious women used salons to pursue a form of higher education.Bodek, Evelyn Gordon. Salonnières and the Bluestockings: Educated Obsolescence and Germinating feminism, Feminist Studies, Vol. 3 No. 3/4 (spring-summer, 1976), p. 186
Two of the most famous 17th-century literary salons in Paris were the Hôtel de Rambouillet, established in 1607 near the Palais du Louvre by the marquise de Rambouillet, where gathered the original précieuses, and, in 1652 in Le Marais, the rival salon of Madeleine de Scudéry, a long time habituée of the Hôtel de Rambouillet. , borrowed from England's "," soon found itself in use upon the attending ladies, a nickname continuing to mean "intellectual woman" for the next three hundred years.
Paris salons of the 18th century hosted by women include the following:
19th-century salons were more inclusive, verging on the raffish, and centered around painters and "literary lions" such as Madame Récamier. After the shock of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War, French aristocrats withdrew from the public eye. However, Princess Mathilde still held a salon in her mansion, rue de Courcelles, later rue de Berri. From the middle of the 19th century until the 1930s, a lady of society had to hold her "day", which meant that her salon was opened for visitors in the afternoon once a week, or twice a month. Days were announced in Le Bottin Mondain. The visitor gave his visit cards to the lackey or the maître d'hôtel, and he was accepted or not. Only people who had been introduced previously could enter the salon.
Marcel Proust called up his own turn-of-the-century experience to recreate the rival salons of the fictional duchesse de Guermantes and Madame Verdurin. He experienced himself his first social life in salons such as Mme Arman de Caillavet's one, which mixed artists and political men around Anatole France or Paul Bourget; Mme Straus' one, where the cream of the aristocracy mingled with artists and writers; or more aristocratic salons like Comtesse de Chevigné's, Comtesse Greffulhe's, Comtesse Jean de Castellane's, Comtesse Aimery de La Rochefoucauld's, etc. Some late 19th- and early 20th-century Paris salons were major centres for contemporary music, including those of Winnaretta Singer (the princesse de Polignac), and Élisabeth, comtesse Greffulhe. They were responsible for commissioning some of the greatest songs and chamber music works of Fauré, Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel and Francis Poulenc.
Until the 1950s, some salons were held by ladies mixing political men and intellectuals during the IVth Republic, like Mme Abrami, or Mme Dujarric de La Rivière. The last salons in Paris were those of Marie-Laure de Noailles, with Jean Cocteau, Igor Markevitch, Salvador Dalí, etc., Marie-Blanche de Polignac (Jeanne Lanvin's daughter) and Madeleine and Robert Perrier, with Josephine Baker, Le Corbusier, Django Reinhardt, etc.Django Reinhardt - Swing De Paris. 6 Oct. 2012. Exhibit. La Cité de la musique, Paris.
In Belgium, the 19th-century salon hosted by Constance Trotti attracted cultural figures, the Belgian aristocracy and members of the French exiled colony.Éliane Gubin (2006) (French). Dictionnaire des femmes belges: XIXe et XXe siècles. Lannoo Uitgeveri. '' by Anicet Charles Gabriel Lemonnier.]]
In Spain, by María del Pilar Teresa Cayetana de Silva y Álvarez de Toledo, 13th Duchess of Alba at the end of the 18th century; and in Greece by Alexandra Mavrokordatou in the 17th century.
The tradition of the literary salon continued to flourish in Italy throughout the 19th century. Naturally there were many salons with some of the most prominent being hosted by Clara Maffei in Milan, Emilia Peruzzi in Florence and Olimpia Savio in Turin. The salons attracted countless outstanding 19th-century figures including the romantic painter Francesco Hayez, composer Giuseppe Verdi and naturalist writers Giovanni Verga, Bruno Sperani and Matilde Serao. The salons served a very important function in 19th-century Italy, as they allowed young attendees to come into contact with more established figures. They also served as a method of avoiding government censorship, as a public discussion could be held in private. The golden age of the salon in Italy could be said to coincide with the pre-unification period, after which the rise of the newspaper replaced the salon as the main place for the Italian public to engage in intellectual discourse.
During the Swedish Age of Liberty (1718–1772), women participated in political debate and promoted their favorites in the struggle between the Caps (party) and the Hats (party) through political salons. These forums were regarded influential enough for foreign powers to engage some of these women as agents to benefit their interests in Swedish politics. The arguably most noted political salonnière of the Swedish age of liberty was countess Hedvig Catharina De la Gardie (1695–1745), whose salon has some time been referred to as the first in Sweden, and whose influence on state affairs exposed her to libelous pamphlets and made her a target of Olof von Dahlin's libelous caricature of the political salon hostess in 1733. Magdalena Elisabeth Rahm was attributed to have contributed to the realization of the Russo-Swedish War (1741–1743) through the campaign for the war she launched in her salon. Outside of politics, Hedvig Charlotta Nordenflycht acted as the hostess of the literary academy Tankebyggarorden and Anna Maria Lenngren did the same for the Royal Swedish Academy.
During the reign of Gustavian age, the home of Anna Charlotta Schröderheim came to be known as a center of opposition. Salon hostesses were still attributed influence in politic affairs in the first half of the 19th century, which was said of both Aurora Wilhelmina Koskull in the 1820s as well as Ulla De Geer in the 1840s. Carl De Geer, urn:sbl:17344, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (article by B. Boethius. Herbert Lundh), retrieved 2013-10-28
In the 19th century, however, the leading salon hostesses in Sweden became more noted as the benefactors of the arts and charity than with politics. From 1820 and two decades onward, Malla Silfverstolpe became famous for her Friday nights salon in Uppsala, which became a center of the Romantic era in Sweden and, arguably the most famed literary salon in Sweden. (1990). 9789187896033, Signum. ISBN 9789187896033 During the 1860s and 1870s, the Limnell Salon of the rich benefactor Fredrika Limnell in Stockholm came to be a famous center of the Swedish cultural elite, were especially writers gathered to make contact with wealthy benefactors, C Fredrika Limnell, urn:sbl:10390, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (article by Sven Erik Täckmark), retrieved 2015-03-15. a role which was eventually taken over by the Curman Receptions of Calla Curman in the 1880s and 1890s. Calla Curman (f. Lundström), urn:sbl:15740, Svenskt biografiskt lexikon (article by Gurli Linder), retrieved 2015-09-05.
In Coppet Castle close to Lake Geneva, the exiled salonnière and author, Madame de Staël, hosted a salon which played a key role in the aftermath of the French Revolution and especially under Napoleon Bonaparte's Regime. It has become known as the Coppet group. De Staël is author of around thirty publications, from which On Germany (1813) was the most well known in its time. She has been painted by such famous painters as François Gérard and Elisabeth Vigée-Lebrun.
Sally Quinn and her husband Ben Bradlee hosted influential salons in Washington DC from the 1970s until the 2000s. "An invitation to the couple’s historic Georgetown home was one of the most coveted status symbols in the nation’s capital, an entry to an elite salon of the powerful, talented and witty." In the 1980s, former nun and musician Theodora di Marco and her sister Norma hosted musical and debating soirées in their home in Notting Hill, London.
In 2014, in response to the isolation of the digital life, in-person events and salons grew in popularity. In 2021 response to the isolation of the pandemic, Susan MacTavish Best, who was part of the movement, launched an educational resource for those who wish to host salons in their community called The Salon Host. In late 2024 Peyton Kullander/Ophelie started a movement to bring salons back into the public consciousness, called The Temptations Artist Salon and Zine, aiming to encourage the discussion and banter of the past.
The name salon remained, even when other quarters were found and the exhibits' irregular intervals became biennial. A jury system of selection was introduced in 1748, and the salon remained a major annual event even after the government withdrew official sponsorship in 1881.
The related terms salon-style exhibition or salon-style hang describe the practice of displaying large numbers of paintings, thus requiring placing them close together at multiple heights, often on a high wall.
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