Salon society let ambitious eighteenth-century women shape French political and intellectual life.

Evidence

Salon life once again blossoms: The roles played by Mme Geoffrin, Mme du Deffand, Mlle de Lespinasse, Mme d’Epinay, and Mme de Tencin are well-known; protectors and inspiration, women make up the writer’s favorite audience; they are personally interested in literature, philosophy, and sciences: like Mme Du Châtelet, for example, they have their own physics workshops or chemistry laboratory; they experiment; they dissect; they intervene more actively than ever before in political life: one after the other, Mme de Prie, Mme de Mailly, Mme de Châteauneuf, Mme de Pompadour, and Mme du Barry govern Louis XV; there is barely a minister without his Egeria, to such a point that Montesquieu thinks that in France everything is done by women; they constitute, he says, “a new state within the state”; and Collé writes on the eve of 1789: “They have so taken over Frenchmen, they have subjugated them so greatly that they think about and feel only for themselves.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 230

Categorization

• SEED: Angle: the salonnières as a pre-public-sphere institutional route for women’s influence — a historical case study in how excluded groups build parallel power structures.
• ADDENDUM: Echoes the ‘Complaints About Immodesty’ piece’s insight that behind moral panics hide real shifts in who controls social space.
• XREF: connects to: Eighteenth-century popular culture was enmeshed with polite society despite appearances — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 995

Broader Connections

• Eighteenth-century popular culture was enmeshed with polite society despite appearances #complicates (0.72) — Hall, Stuart, Essential Essays, Volume 1, 995