French Salons Research Articles

Musical Sociability, Atlantic Slavery, and the Portraiture of Carmontelle

This article addresses the transatlantic financing of pre-revolutionary French salons and the amateur music-making that featured within them. It does so by reconstructing the context of a paradigmatic image of enlightened leisure: a portrait by Louis Carrogis (known as Carmontelle) inscribed “Mlle Desgots, from Saint-Domingue, with her Black servant Laurent, 1766.” The likeness is representative of Carmontelle’s style in subject and setting. It features a fashionable noblewoman—the French-Caribbean heiress Charlotte Louise-Desgots—who plays a gilded harpsichord. What is unusual about the scene is the identity of Desgots’s interlocutor; the aristocrat poses with a teenaged valet de chambre, Laurent, whom her family had enslaved. The soundscape evoked in the drawing—the domestic repertoire of the midcentury galant—is often described as a sonorous analogue to conventions of salon politesse. And yet, Laurent’s forcible participation in the artistic exchange destabilizes this “sociable” analytic framework. Tracing Laurent’s experiences in the decades before and after the portrait was made underscores how the dynamics of Caribbean slavery were inflected in the most prestigious of Parisian cultural spaces, and through the most anodyne and “convivial” of eighteenth-century sound worlds. Like Desgots, the musical engagement Laurent demonstrated was the result of an education attained in the metropole. Unlike Desgots, this training was not gifted for the pursuit of leisure but imposed in the formation of labor, as adornment to the artistic habits of his repatriated colonial enslavers.

Maria Weston Chapman, French Salons, and Transatlantic Abolitionism in the Mid-Nineteenth Century

AbstractThis article examines the idea of anti-slavery sociability as part of a wider analysis of the informal elements of the transatlantic anti-slavery movement. It considers how American abolitionist Maria Weston Chapman drew support for the American anti-slavery cause from French salons during her time spent living in Paris from 1848 to 1855. This case-study highlights how a focus on the informal dimensions of anti-slavery activism illuminates the often underappreciated work of female abolitionists in the transatlantic reform sphere. Through the connections she established with the likes of French writer Victor Hugo and Russian exile Nicholas Tourgueneff at salons in Paris, most notably that of Mary Clarke Mohl on the Rue de Bac, Chapman was able to cultivate European support for abolitionism in myriad ways. This included financial donations, goods to be sold at anti-slavery bazaars, and, perhaps most importantly, testimonies against American slavery from renowned Europeans like Hugo that could be republished in the United States.

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

Authorship and individualization in the digital public sphere

The Satire of the Salonnière: Women and Humour in Seventeenth-Century France

This article reassesses styles of humour in the literary output of seventeenth-century French salons by attending to women and satire. While scholarship has repeatedly dwelt on salons and salon hostesses as objects of satire, this study argues that salon hostesses were also writers of satire, and importantly writers of satire aimed at would-be hostesses, via an analysis of Madeleine de Scudéry’s Artamène; ou, Le Grand Cyrus (1649–1653). In the “Histoire de Sapho” (Book II, Tome X of Artamène), Scudéry presents a satirical portrait of an “anti-salonnière” named Damophile. This wannabe salon hostess strives to imitate the titular salonnière, Sapho, and become a well-respected savante, but instead appears excessive and pedantic in her efforts, attracting the ridicule of Sapho and her circle. Drawing together modesty, mockery and collective amusement, Scudéry uses satire to provide a model for other women writers that is firmly reconciled with the honnête values of salon culture.

Analytics of Organized Spontaneity: Rethinking Participant Selection, Interaction Format, and Milieu for Academic Forums

In an effort to enhance the odds of “organized spontaneity,” this article advances analytics for selection of participants, format of interaction, and milieu within which the interaction occurs. The analysis proceeds in a two-part process. First, three creative environments far removed from the present-day academic forums—18th-century French salons, the 18th-century London coffeehouses, and Mensa—are examined to generate analytical distance from our current practices. Second, with these three locales in the background, current practices are analyzed and the following thoughts are offered for deliberation: (1) Low threshold to entry is not necessarily a bad thing. (2) Creative environments require an artful mix of homogeneity and heterogeneity. (3) Sociality, which is essential for a creative environment, limits the extent to which a disagreement can be pushed. (4) The selection–format–milieu interaction greatly shapes the character of what gets produced in a creative environment.

“THE PARISIAN BEAU MONDE”: FRANCES TROLLOPE'S REPRESENTATIONS OF FRANCE

English representations of France in the first half of the nineteenth century are informed by two contradictory tendencies: cosmopolitanism and nationalism. While the tradition of the Grand Tour and cultural exchanges led to some sympathy among English and French upper classes and intellectuals, and consequently to attitudes which could be described as cosmopolitan, there was at the same time a clear sense of Englishness. This article explores representations of France using the example of Frances Trollope's works, arguing that while Victorian novels generally reflect English nationalism, her novels and travel book on France are marked by a distinct cosmopolitan tendency. Idealizing French salons and their cosmopolitan aristocratic or intellectual elite, Trollope constructs herself as part of this coterie. As a writer and narrator in her novels, she presents herself as a well-educated and sophisticated woman of the world. In her later novels, this cosmopolitan tendency disappears, leading to a more negative portrayal of France and its society. This shift towards viewing the French as “others” was prompted by political and sociocultural events: the Revolution of 1848 and developments in French salon culture.

María Luisa de la Riva: una artista española en los Salones Franceses. Documentos conservados en los Archives nationales de París

Maria Luisa de la Riva was an outstanding woman artist in the nineteenth century, well known in some of the most prestigious French salons. This paper presents unpublished data about her career, from records kept at the Archives Nationales, in Paris, just as it studies an unknown work by her: “Uvas y granadas”, a painting kept at the Prefecture de Cotes-du-Nord, in Saint-Brieuc.

Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism

Wilde’s Evenings: The Rewards of Citizen Journalism

Wilde’s Evenings

Wilde’s Evenings

Steven D. Kale, French Salons. High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004,308 p., $ 25.00

Steven D. Kale, French Salons. High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, Baltimore, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004,308 p., $ 25.00

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. By Steven Kale. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. x+308. $48.00.

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. By Steven Kale. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. Pp. x+308. $48.00.

Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales (review)

Reviewed by Jennifer Marchant Martin, Ann. Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2006. In Alice to the Lighthouse: Children's Books and Radical Experiments in Art, Juliet Dusinberre sets out to connect the child readers of Alice and other children's literature not only with the adults they later became, [End Page 289] "but to a generation of thought and writing" (1). How, she asks, did such modern writers as Virginia Woolf, reflect and transform their childhood reading in their own texts? Ann Martin explores a similar question in Red Riding Hood and the Wolf in Bed: Modernism's Fairy Tales. She examines how three modern writers' allusions to fairy tales reflect these writers' views of their cultures, including such anxiety-laden factors as sexuality and gender roles, class mobility, commodification, and the relationships between tradition and present. In the first chapter, "Turning Back the Covers: Fairy Tales in the Modern Age," Martin briefly summarizes the history of the literary fairy tale in Western culture, from Apuleius's "Cupid and Psyche" in the second century AD, to the French salons of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries and British chapbooks through the eighteenth century, to the pantomimes and Christmas books of the Victorians. She emphasizes the nineteenth-century's ambivalence about fairy tales: on the one hand, they evoked the "innocence" and "primitive nature" of the child and the peasant, whereas, on the other, their adaptation into modern culture in such forms as pantomimes, advertisements, and expensive picture books, suggested corruption and commodification. Martin suggests that this conflicted feeling, as well as the large number of variants, helped make the fairy tale a rich source of allusions for modern writers. In this chapter, Martin also explains her decision to focus specifically upon James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and Djuna Barnes. Although other twentieth-century writers reference fairy tales in their work, these three are among those who "use the stories to involve not just the past but the present" (40). Thus, Joyce, Woolf, and Barnes not only use the stories to suggest nostalgia and innocence, but to explore contemporary conflicts. Their fairy tale allusions also suggest the characters' and readers' power to make meaning. The characters actively adapt fairy tales to make sense of their lives, and readers must examine multiple, sometimes contradictory, fairy tale references to arrive at their own conclusions. Martin then proceeds to in-depth explorations of these writers' fairy tale allusions in some of their texts, drawing upon cultural, psychological, and gender theory to do so. In "James Joyce: The Fashionable Fairy Tale," Martin suggests that Joyce uses "Cinderella" to investigate both the possibility of class mobility in modern times and the loss of self this may involve. For example, in Joyce's Ulysses, Stephen Daedalus is offered employment by several fairy godmother figures, but fears they would make him "a commodity in a capitalist system toward which he feels most ambivalent" (64). However, characters can also use fairy tales for their own ends, as is shown by the characters of Bloom and Gerty Macdowell, [End Page 290] who use "Beauty and the Beast" as a pattern for their sexual fantasies, but also tailor the story to meet their individual needs. In "Virginia Woolf: A Slipper of One's Own," Martin notes that fairy tales were very much a part of Woolf's literary upbringing. She made frequent reference to them in her journals and essays, as well as in her fiction. In particular, Martin describes the influence of Woolf's aunt, Anne Thackery Ritchie, who wrote adaptations of older fairy tales, such as Perrault's "Cinderella." Martin suggests that, in citing and transforming these stories, Woolf both acknowledges Ritchie as a female literary ancestress, and sabotages the Victorian values reflected in Ritchie's adaptations. In Woolf's Orlando, for example, the protagonist undergoes Cinderella-like transformations, but subverts traditional views of social...

STEVEN KALE. French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback edition. 2006. Pp. x, 308. $25.00

STEVEN KALE. French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press. Paperback edition. 2006. Pp. x, 308. $25.00

Book Review: French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848

Book Review: French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848

Steven Kale. French salons. High society and political sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. Baltimore-Londres, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 308 p.

Steven Kale. French salons. High society and political sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. Baltimore-Londres, The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004, 308 p. - Volume 61 Issue 4

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability From the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. By Steven Kale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. x plus 308 pp.)

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability From the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848. By Steven Kale (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. x plus 308 pp.)

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, by Steven Kale

"French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848, by Steven Kale." Canadian Journal of History, 40(1), pp. 113–114

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (review)

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 (review)

French salons: high society and political sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848

Among the most enduring of French cultural institutions, the salon, is among the most misunderstood. Seen primarily as a venue for apolitical social gatherings, the salon's influence is generally believed to have ended during the French Revolution. In French Salons, Steven Kale challenges conventional thinking about the salon. Drawing on an impressive range of primary sources, he offers a nuanced history of this institution from the eighteenth century through the Revolution of 1848 which emphasizes continuity and evolution over disjuncture and highlights its shifting political character and relevance. Salons, Kale shows, originally provided opportunities for the exchange of literary and philosophical ideas among the French aristocracy. Central to the maintenance of salon culture were salonnieres, aristocratic women such as Madame de Stael who opened their homes to fellow elites and nurtured a sociability that united the members of high society. Salons provided ready-made venues for aristocratic politics during the early years of the French Revolution, when salons were transformed into places where the upper classes could express their political opinions and concerns. Even at the height of the Terror, salons did not dissolve but, rather, were displaced as aristocrats moved their social networks of influence to such cities as Coblenz, Brussels, and London. Napoleon sought to manipulate salon culture for his own ends, but with his fall from power, salons reemerged and proliferated. Although never intended to serve as political clubs, salons became informal sites for the cultivation of political capital and the exchange of political ideas during the Bourbon Restoration and the July Monarchy. By 1848, the conditions that sustained aristocratic sociability declined, and salons became increasingly marginal to French public life. At the same time, new political institutions-parties, the press, legislative bodies-emerged that more effectively disseminated and shaped political opinion and led to real political change. Challenging many of the conclusions of recent historiography, including the depiction of salonnieres as influential power brokers, French Salons offers an original, penetrating, and engaging analysis of elite culture and society in France before, during, and after the Revolution.

Women in chemistry: their changing roles from alchemical times to the mid-twentieth century

Though rarely noted, women have been active participants in the chemical sciences since the beginning of recorded history. This thought-provoking book brings to life the many talented women who - besides the universally respected Marie Curie - made significant contributions to chemistry. The Rayner-Canhams examine the forces that have defined women's roles in the progress of chemistry, observing that many were thwarted from capitalising on their achievements by the prejudices of their time. Their book discusses women chemists from as far past as the Babylonian civilisation and focuses on professional women chemists from the mid-19th century, when women gained access to higher education. Read this book and learn about the chemist-assistants of the French salons, about independent researchers in the 19th century, about the three disciplinary havens for women in the 20th century, about how war helped bring women into the chemical industry - and much more!