Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions

Abstract

A republic of letters in any age is a community of discourse and in discourse. The Republic of Letters of the French Enlightenment was a highly developed community of discourse based on a network of intellectual exchanges centered in the salons of Paris. In the 1760s, the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters that went back as far as the Respublica Litterarum of Erasmus and his contemporaries was taking shape in Paris as a community of discourse that took itself seriously in new ways. For the philosophes of the French Enlightenment, both the political and the literary dimensions of their citizenship in this republic were crucial their self-conception. This new sense of community and of collective purpose was shaped by the collective experience of making an Encyclopedia whose purpose, according its editor, was to change the common way of thinking.' The success of the Enlightenment as a project change the common way of thinking depended upon the expansion of the Republic of Letters beyond a small elite. It required a more permanent institutional base than the Encyclopedia, as a single project, could afford, one that would continue promote and sup-