Governing the republic of letters: The politics of culture in the French enlightenment

History of European Ideas, Vol. 13, No. 3, pp. 183-199, 1991 Printed in Great Britain

0191-6599/91 $3.00+0.00 © 1991 Pergamon Press plc

GOVERNING THE REPUBLIC OF LETTERS: THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN THE FRENCH ENLIGHTENMENT DENA GOODMAN*

Ce n'est qu'en se poli~ant que les hommes ont apris h concilier leur int6r6t particulier avec l'int6r& commun; qu'ils ont compris que, par cet accord, chacun tire plus de la soci6t6 qu'il n'y peut mettre. Charles Duclos Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters grew up alongside the monarchies of Europe. Like the monarchies, the Republic of Letters was a modern phenomenon with an ancient history. While references to the Respublica literaria have been found as early as 1417, ~ the concept of the Republic of Letters only emerged in the early seventeenth century and became widespread only at the end of that century. Paul Dibon has defined the Republic of Letters as it was conceived in the seventeenth century as 'an intellectual community transcending space and time, [but] recognizing as such differences in respect to the diversity of languages, sects, and countries . . . . This state, ideal as it may be, is in no way utopian, b u t . . , takes form in [good] old human flesh where good and evil mix. '2 According to Annie Barnes, the Republic of Letters was based on 'the conscious notion of international intellectual cooperation', translated not into 'the creation of a commission or an institute, but the founding of an ideal state, the Republic. of Letters') State building was the order of the day in the seventeenth century, and men of letters participated in it in their own fashion. By 1789, however, the Republic of Letters, like the French monarchy, was in a state of crisis, victim to the anarchy that recurrently plagued it and that always threatened to tear it apart. In 1747, for example, the same year in which Denis Diderot and Jean le Rond d'Alembert took advantage of the opportunity to edit an encyclopedia to create a 'society of men of letters and artisans', an anonymous author proposed a Bureau G~ndral for the Republic of Letters. The Republic of Letters, he declared, was 'in a sort of anarchy, having neither Archives, nor Chancellery, nor Center of Unity'. 4 Like the Encyclop~die, the proposed Bureau G~n~ral was intended to be this center of unity, but it would go even further by providing a centralised government for the Republic of Letters patterned on that of France. Government was needed because, while the Republic of Letters was structured in theory by egalitarian principles of reciprocity and exchange, the reality of intellectual practice fell far short of this ideal. French men of letters in particular found themselves increasingly engaged in divisive quarrels, such as that between *Department of History, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA 70803-3601, U.S.A.

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the Ancients and the Moderns, rather than in constructive debate. Traditionally, French intellectual practice was both militant and personal. Disputation resembled duelling more than anything else. These traditional values ran headon into the collective and critical ideals and practices of the cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. With the establishment of Paris as the capital of the Republic, French men of letters had enriched traditional epistolary relations with direct verbal ones. That is, finding themselves drawn together by the capital, they began to meet together and make their collaboration on the project of Enlightenment direct, and thus suffered the consequences of giving up the mediation that the written word provided. Without this traditional kind of formal mediation, the philosophes needed a new kind of governance. Neither the Encyclop~die nor the proposed Bureau GEn~ral--both of which were meant to take the place of royal academies--satisfied the need for governance in the French Republic of Letters. The philosophes sought a social base independent of the state, the Church, and corporative society in general; and they needed a form of government conducive to the functioning of a republic. These social and political needs were fulfilled by an institution that, like the Republic of Letters itself, had originated in the previous century: the Parisian salon. The Parisian salon gave the Republic of Letters a source of political order in the person of the salonni~re, for she gave order both to social relations among salon guests and to the discourse in which they engaged. When Marie-Thrr~se Geoffrin launched her weekly dinners in 1749, the Enlightenment Republic of Letters found its 'center of unity'. Discursive liberty rather than moral license made the salon of Mme Geoffrin and of those who took her as a model attractive to serious men of Letters. As a regular and regulated formal gathering hosted by a woman in her own home, the Parisian salon could serve as an independent forum and locus of intellectual activity for a well-governed Republic of Letters. From 1765 until 1776, men of letters and those who wanted to be counted among the citizens of their Republic could meet in Parisian salons any day of the week. Some, such as Jean-Francois Marmontel and the abb6 Andr6 Morellet, went every day. Not coincidentally, these years correspond to the height of the Enlightenment, when the philosophes were both highly productive and highly visible. It was also during this decade that the philosophes came closest to their goal of establishing themselves as the arbiters of public opinion and captured significant positions both in the royal administration and in the royal academies) In 1776, Friedrich Melchior Grimm described the sorry state of the Republic of Letters without two of its leading salonni~res to govern it: The disorder and anarchy into which the party of the philosophes was put after the death of Mile de Lespinasse and the paralysis of Mme Geoffrin proves how much the wisdom of their government had averted evils, how much it had dissipated storms, and above all how much it had rescued it from ridicule. 6 Grimm had a penchant for political language, but he was not alone in using it to describe the salon-based Republic of Letters. Suzanne Necker saw the parallel between her work as a salonnibre and that of her husband, Jacques Necker, the

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Swiss banker who rose to finance minister in the French government under Louis XVI: 'The government of a conversation very much resembles that of a State', she wrote; 'one can scarcely doubt its influence'. 7 The Republic of Letters, because it was a community in discourse and of discourse, was governed through the government of conversation, and the salonni~res were its governors. Eulogies of Mme Geoffrin and Julie de Lespinasse stressed their ability to govern conversation by harmonising not only discordant voices, but unruly egos. Of Mile de Lespinasse, Marmontel wrote: She found [her guests] here and there in the world, but [they] were so well matched that, when they were [with her], they found themselves in harmony like the strings of an instrument played by an able hand. Following this comparison, I could say that she played this instrument with an art that resembled genius;... I would say that she knew our minds and our characters so well that, to put them in play, she had only to say a word? Of salons in general and Mme Geoffrin in particular, Antoine-L6onard Thomas wrote: These sorts of societies that, in order to survive, cannot be too constrained, but that, with the liberty of democracies, are sometimes beset with agitations and movement, require a certain power to temper them. It seems that this power is no better held than in the hands of a woman. She has a natural right that no one disputes and that, in order to be felt, has only to be shown. Madame Geoffrin used this advantage. In her [salon], the reunion of all ranks, like that of all types of minds, prevented any one tone from dominating. 9 Finally, Mme Necker wrote about Mile de Lespinasse in a letter to Grimm in 1767: Mile de l'espinasse is no more; the movement that she gave to her society has slowed down greatly. M. d'Alembert, who was its soul, is having trouble becoming its motor [organe]: he brings his friends together three days a week; but everyone in these assemblies is [now] convinced that women fill the intervals of conversation and of life, like the padding that one inserts in cases of china; they are valued at nothing, and [yet] everything breaks without them. L° H a r m o n y through the balancing and blending of voices was thus the overriding theme stressed by philosophes and salonni~res alike in their understanding of how the salonni~re made her salon a success. Such harmonising was necessary not only because different views were expressed, but because strong egos were involved. It was because social and intellectual identities could not be easily separated when philosophes interacted directly that the salonni~re was needed to bring them into harmony. As the quotations from both Thomas and Mme Necker indicate, women were thought to be particularly suited to effecting this much-needed harmony in the eighteenth century. In that day, the ideal woman was characterised by a lack of ego which enabled her to direct her attention to coordinating the egos of the men around her. The qualities that defined the successful salonni~re and which

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enabled her to effect social and intellectual harmony were thought to be genderspecific. In the seventeenth century, Francois Poulaine de la Barre had inscribed this definition of the female in a history of human society. H Poulaine began his history with a pre-political state of nature. The peace and equality of this original state were broken, however, by an increasing division of labor between men and women, as the expansion of societies brought about the creation of hierarchy and authority. Since government at this stage simply meant military defense, men were entrusted with it on the basis of their physical strength. But order having been reestablished through the institution of this first form of government, military governors were no longer needed. Now, when this third stage had been reached, women should become preeminent, since government would no longer be a matter of force, but of the humanity and discernment that were women's natural strengths. Rather than to nature, the salonni~re's 'virtues' can perhaps better be ascribed to the fact that eighteenth-century girls were excluded from the educational system in which men, and particularly men of letters, were formed. They developed neither the combative, disputatious spirit that characterised the men around them, nor direct mastery of the word that came from a training in dialectic and rhetoric. The salonni~re was thus able to stand above the disputants and outside the dispute, controlling the collective discourse of those who were masters of the word but who, as citizens of a republic, did not want this mastery of the word to become the basis of mastery over persons. In his eulogy of Mile de Lespinasse, the comte de Guibert wrote: I have tried to understand the principle of that charm which no one possessed as she did, and here is what it seems to me to consist in: she was always devoid of ego [personnalite'], and always natural. Devoid of ego, never was anyone else so to such a degree .... She knew that the great secret of how to please lay in forgetting oneself in order to become occupied with others, and she thus forgot herself constantly. She was the soul of conversation, and she thus never made herself its object. Her great art was to show to advantage the minds of others, and she enjoyed doing that more than revealing her own. 1~ Morellet, in his eulogy of Mme Geoffrin, emphasised the way in which she allowed others to speak, without herself making substantive contributions to the conversation. 13 This did not mean, however, that women were passive; the salonni~re's attentiveness to others, her silence, even, was as much a conscious action as was the loquacity of her male guests. Indeed, according to Mme Necker the salonni~re's m6tier consisted in actively attending to others. 'As long as one is in society', she wrote, 'one must occupy oneself with others, never keeping silent out of laziness or from distraction, but only in order to listen or to let others speak'. 14 This attention to others implied a denial of the self, since, again according to Mme Necker, 'the greatest attack of distraction and inattention is an attack of ego, because one sees and focuses only on oneself') 5 The eulogies of the three great Enlightenment salonni~res, together with their own understanding of themselves and of each other, add up to the definition of a maftresse de maison in Mme de Genlis's Dictionnaire des ~tiquettes, which she

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wrote after the Revolution. 'In order to do well the honors of a home', she wrote, it is necessary to have in one's character tact, finesse, excellent breeding, great equanimity [dgalitd d'humeur], calmness, and the ability to be obliging. One must, when one receives people, forget oneself, feel absolutely no desire to shine, and put kindness in the place of the desire to please; one must occupy oneself with others, without agitation, without affection, and know how to set them off to advantage without appearing to protect them; one must, finally, encourage the timid, put them at their ease, maintaining the conversation by directing it with skill rather than keeping it up oneself, such that each person gets the reception that can and ought to satisfy him. 16 The ideal that Mme de Genlis could represent after the great salons had passed into memory was composed of the distinctive features of the women who had shaped that institution in the eighteenth century. Enlightenment salons were places where male egos were brought into h a r m o n y through the agency of female selflessness. Men such as Marmontel and Morellet (whom Diderot called 'the most egoistic [personnel] man I know '~7) could only meet together every day to collaborate on the project of Enlightenment if women kept them from dominating and insulting each other; if women kept them within the bounds of polite conversation and civil society. 'Politeness', wrote Mme Necker, has been regarded as a [kind of] servitude; while its origin, on the contrary, is found in the consideration that force has given to weakness, to age, to women, to children .... Politeness conforms to the principle of equality that is so often spoken of .... is Politeness was thus a female attribute, according to Mme Necker, because it derived from weakness rather than strength. But it was also a principle of equality, since it redressed the balance between strong and weak, male and female. The government of salonni~res was thus appropriate for a Republic of Letters whose relations were structured by reciprocity and the equality it implied. In this very crucial sense, the government of salonni~res was just the opposite of the government of kings, although both were the sources of order in their respective polities. According to contemporary theories of absolute monarchy, the king was the sole source of unity and order in particularistic society. His role was to impose order by reconciling the competing claims of the different groups authoritatively from a position above them all. ~9 While the salonni~re, too, created order in an otherwise disorderly society, she did so not with an authority imposed from above and sanctioned by G o d and history, but in republican fashion by consent of the governed--exactly as John Locke had defined legitimate political authority? ° She brought about order in society by embodying and enforcing the rule of law to which each member of the republic consented when he identified himself as a citizen of the Republic of Letters. This each individual did by affirming its values, sharing in its practices, and consenting to the rules of polite discourse by which those values and practices could be realised. 21 Government by salonni~res was government by consent.

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And yet, one should not assume that the citizens of the Republic of Letters submitted to the rule of law and the government of women without a struggle. While it made sense to submit to women because of their ability to suppress their egos and harmonise those of men, it also went completely against male notions of natural gender relations for men to place themselves under the control of women. This is because, Poulaine de la Barre notwithstanding, women were also viewed traditionally as the source of disorder in society. 22 As Rousseau wrote in his Lettre ?t d'Alembert: 'Never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women. '23 In the traditional view, it was not women who established order a m o n g men by enforcing the rule of law, but law that created order by subjecting wives to their husbands. 24 It is thus easy to understand why Rousseau feared above all government by women: ' D o you think, Sir', he asked d'Alembert, 'that this order is without its difficulties; and that, in taking so much effort to increase the ascendancy of women, men will be the better governed for it? '25 With the Lettre ?t d'Alembert, Rousseau broke with both the philosophes and the salonni~res, rejecting both the Enlightenment Republic of Letters and its form of government. While Rousseau was at least consistent in rejecting the salonni~re as a corrupter of men and advocating a domestication of women, the philosophes were not. 26 They were caught in the web of conflicting paradigms of the female, who was at once the source of both order and disorder. 27 Men had seen themselves as women's natural rulers for so long that it was difficult for them to feel comfortable with the situation reversed, even if that reversal had come about by their own will, and not through tyranny. The resistance to the rule of salonni~res was best expressed in the memoirs of Marmontel and Morellet, both of which were written long after the salon-centered Republic of Letters had passed into memory. In the masculine world of the French Revolution, these men who had submitted themselves to the rule of women in that earlier age were perhaps wondering if such submission had been necessary. Marmontel, who not only spent part of each day in one salon or another throughout the 1760s and '70s, but also lodged for a number of years in Mme Geoffrin's house, found himself 'forced' to admit in his memoirs that the society of Mme Geoffrin lacked one of the pleasures that I value most, freedom of thought. With her soft "voil~t, that's fine", she did not fail to keep our minds, as [it were] on a leash; and I had dinners elsewhere where one was more at ease.28 Morellet made a similar criticism of Mme Geoffrin. In his memoirs he complained that she was, in fact, a little meticulous and timid, obsequious towards the government, deferential to royal officials and court society; feelings excusable in an elderly woman, who, with reason, looked after her own life, and did not wish to compromise its ease and tranquility. 29 Morellet recalled that, after long dinners during which Mme Geoffrin controlled the conversation, the philosophes would walk over to the Tuilleries where they would meet friends and

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learn the news, subvert [fronder] the government, and philosophise at our ease. We would make a circle, seated at the foot of a tree in the main path, and abandon ourselves to conversation animated and free like the air that we breathed) ° Only Mme Necker, who was herself criticised in similar terms by some of her guests, saw no constraint in Mme Geoffrin's practice as a salonni~re. ' M m e Geoffrin permits herself to hear and to say everything', the younger woman wrote admiringly, 'and yet she is never indecent'. 3~ Of Mme Necker's salon, Morellet wrote: 'The conversation was good there, although a little constrained by the severity of Madame Necker, around whom m a n y subjects could not be touched, and who suffered above all from the liberty of religious opinions. '32 It is worth noting as well that Mme Necker's descriptions of Mme Geoffrin are free of the patronising tone that characterises Morellet's in particular, when he portrays her as a timid, elderly lady who is concerned for her own well-being. That image is undermined by Mme Geoffrin's actions in going out on a limb herself to help her philosophe friends, such as MoreUet and Marmontel. Was it a timid, elderly lady who wrote the following letter to one such friend? Voilh, the M~moirewritten in your hand. It has never left mine. I have had it copied in my bedroom by a man who does not know your handwriting at all, and who certainly does not know about whom you wish to speak. I have omitted from yours whatever I thought was not useful. I will say in my letter whatever is necessary. I am sending it to you for a reading. 33 Not surprisingly, historians have tended to validate the criticisms and to argue with Marmontel and Morellet that the salonni~res constrained the philosophes despotically out of their own self-interest and fear, rather than exercising legal and necessary restraint over them by their own consent and in their own interest. Historians as diverse as Daniel Mornet, Alan Kors, and Robert Darnton have suggested that the real work of the Enlightenment went on outside the female-controlled discursive space of the salons. 34 In doing so, they have responded sympathetically, even instinctively, to the feelings of constraint expressed by men such as Marmontel and Morellet, without asking why these men would continue to frequent the salons that were supposedly prisons to them. Let me now pose this question and answer it by taking a closer look at one philosophe in particular: the abb6 Morellet. Morellet, who could be found in the salons every day of the week, best embodied the conflict between the old ethos of scholastic duelling and the new ethos of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters. Educated by the Jesuits in Lyon and then at the Sorbonne in Paris, Morellet was universally regarded as the most disputatious of the philosophes. Voltaire took to referring to him in letters as 'Mord-les' or ' b i t e - ' e m ' ) 5 Morellet wrote of himself in his M~moires: 'I w a s . . , violent in dispute, but my antagonist could never reproach me for the least insult. My warmth was only for my opinion, and never against my adversary; and I sometimes spit blood after a dispute in which I had not let escape a single personal remark [personnaliteq.'36 And yet, while defending his disputatious spirit, Morellet also wrote that the most valuable part of his university education was his membership in a sort of residential student club called the 'Society of the Sorbonne'. There he not only

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made life-long friendships with progressive members of the elite such as Turgot and Lom6nie de Brienne, who helped advance him in his career, but also learned to value sociability and comradeship as fundamental to intellectual life. It was in the dining hall with his fellow students that Morellet argued theology and philosophy for five years and made lasting friendships. In 1805, still traumatised by the Revolution that had disrupted his life, Morellet looked back to the Society of the Sorbonne as the model of social and intellectual life in which disputation and friendship went hand in hand. And yet, the form of sociability that shaped intellectual life in the Enlightenment of eighteenth-century Paris in which Morellet went on to live and work did not correspond to the ideal of the all-male student club. The social and intellectual world that was destroyed by the upheavals of the French Revolution was not the hazily remembered corps of Morellet's student days, but the salon world in which the philosophes ate, drank, and argued under the guidance of salonni~res every afternoon and evening for more than ten years. In Morellet's M~moires, the constraint of the salons was contrasted with freedom and natural harmony in three different all-male social and discursive settings: first, the Society of the Sorbonne; then, the meetings under the tree in the Tuilleries, which recall those of the mythical Germanic barons of France idealised as the founders of the state by aristocratic historians in the eighteenth century; and, finally, the weekly dinners at the home of the Baron d'Holbach. 'It was there', wrote Morellet, 'that one was subjected to the freest, the most animated, and the most instructive conversation that e v e r w a s ' . 37 Like JeanJacques Rousseau, like the men who founded political clubs during the French Revolution and exalted fraternity as a fundamental political value, Morellet dreamed of an idyllic world of male companionship in which discordant voices were naturally harmonised. 3s In the real world of eighteenth-century France, however, this natural harmony had never existed. Government was necessary precisely because such harmony did not exist naturally in civil society. It did not exist in the Republic of Letters, either, and thus government had been found necessary there just as much as in any other polity. A 1774 letter from Morellet to Lord Shelburne reveals the abb6's ability to believe men to be self-governing, even in the face of an admission to the contrary. In response to a letter of Shelburne's he wrote: Mme Geoffrin believes.., that there is a bit of flattery in what you say about her being the only person "whom you like to be governed by", and when I had explained this English [phrase] to her, we agreed that for you there is no such thing as "governed by", that you would always govern yourself, and that you would never let yourself be governed by anyone.39 Perhaps Mme Geoffrin decided to agree with Morellet's argument, but Shelburne's testimony and recognition remain. Another glance at Morellet's memoirs and Mme Necker's notebooks suggests the way in which the underlying tensions in the salons were the product of the combative spirit among men of letters and their resistance to putting into practice their own republican values: values which they counted on the salonni~res to support and uphold by enforcing the rules of polite discourse. In describing the freedom of conversation at d'Holbach's, Morellet wrote:

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Often a single person took the floor and proposed his theory peacefully and without interruption. Other times, it took the form of hand-to-hand combat, of which the rest of the group was silent spectators: a manner of listening that I found only rarely elsewhere. 4° Here Morellet claimed to value a discursive setting in which the s p e a k e r - conceptualised either in individualistic or traditional t e r m s - - h a d the greatest freedom, but without regard for the group. Mme Necker, on the other hand, showed a different principle to be at work in the salon, where 'the great art of a [salonnibre] is to prevent anyone of her society from taking up too much r o o m at the expense of others'. 41 Indeed, she noted that the salonni~re, far from letting men drone on, must adroitly interrupt those people who get bogged down in private arrangements: it is wrong to say that it suffices for a salonni~re [just] to let things run along; her role is always to take up the shuttlecock when it falls from the racquet. 42 If the philosophes could discourse at length without interruption only at d'Holbach's, it was indeed because there was no salonni~re to control them. But we ought not to assume that such discursive license constituted liberty in the Republic of Letters. True liberty rested upon an acceptance of the equal right of each to speak, the mutual respect for the rules of discourse by which such rights were guaranteed, and the acceptance of the salonni~re's role in enforcing them. 'The freedom of men under government', Locke had written, 'is to have a standing rule to live by, common to every one of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it'. 43 'Where there is no law', he declared, 'there is no freedom'. 44 The restraining force of the salonni~res in the Republic of Letters, the control they tried to maintain over the citizens of the republic and their discourse, was resisted by the citizenry, but it was nonetheless legitimate and in no way arbitrary or despotic. Like all laws, the rules of Enlightenment discourse aimed, in Locke's words again, 'not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom'. 45 What were the rules of polite conversation? What were these laws that the salonnibres were empowered to enforce? More fundamentally, what was the political order instantiated in and articulated by the rules of polite conversation by which the salonnibres governed the Republic of Letters? When the abb6 Morellet sought to answer these questions, he took one of John Locke's compatriots for his model and guide. Morellet's 'De la Conversation', began as a translation for the Mercure de France of Jonathan Swift's 'Hints Toward an Essay on Conversation'. Two years later, Morellet used this translation as the basis of a much fuller treatment, explaining that his goal was to carry out the plan that Swift had merely sketched out. Morellet acknowledged Swift as a master of the subject by noting his association with the English Whigs who had made of conversation a civic discourse, and the fact that his own conversation was sought after by all. 46 The importance that Morellet gave to conversation, however, went beyond the English model. The ethical and public roles that English theorists of civic virtue had given conversation were extended to even greater intellectual and political goals as it became the discursive base of the French project of Enlightenment. 47

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Morellet' interest in the theory of conversation derived from the problems posed by disputation and criticism in a collaborative Republic of Letters. His translation of Swift, which appeared in the Mercure at the end of 1778, followed by only a few months an original essay of his, 'De l'esprit de contradiction', which had run in the same journal in the summer of that year. 4~ The expanded version o f ' D e la conversation' was accompanied by 'De l'esprit de contradiction' and a response to it by Lom6nie de Brienne in Morellet's Mdlanges and in the volume of ~loges of Mme Geoffrin, both published by the author after the Revolution. What Morellet called the spirit of contradiction was the critical spirit that was the basis of knowledge in the Enlightenment Republic of Letters: 'It is that which leads the human race unconsciously to enlightenment and to happiness by the successive destruction of all errors. In exciting minds to combat the false opinions that have been set forth on all sorts Of subjects, il gives birth to discussion and to the discovery of the truths that oppose them.' The spirit of contradiction, Morellet argued, was not simply a product of amour-propre or self-interest, but the manifestation of the love of liberty, which was its principle. 49 In his critique of Morellet's argument, Lom6nie de Brienne acknowledged that truth could indeed emerge only out of the 'choc des id6es'. The source of the critical spirit, however, lay not, according to Brienne, in a love of liberty, but in the relativity of judgments and the imperfection of men: it comes from objects that have many faces, and of which everyone sees the side that pleases him; it comes from people who do not have the same interests, the same eyes, the same principles, the same knowledge; it comes above all from expressions that are not widely enough shared, particular enough, to be accurate; such that almost everything that one says or writes being susceptible to contradiction, we need not be surprised to find this sort of opposition. 5° Morellet acknowledged that these were all good reasons upon which particular contradictions could be based. However, he still maintained the validity of his argument: that a pure critical spirit, the expression of liberty, existed and caused people to argue without reason and without self-interest. While there were certainly those, like Brienne, who argued in the interest of truth, there were others who argued simply in order to argue, and they were the p r o o f of a pure spirit of criticism. ~ Why was it so important to Morellet to establish this pure spirit of criticism, independent of any interest, even truth? For the same reason that modern thinkers argue in favor of basic research: that the activity itself must be promoted and defended regardless of the practical applications that may derive from it. For if one depends upon application to validate research, bad applications can equally well be used to invalidate it. As Morellet put it in his conclusion: Let us look at man as he is; let us not lend him perfections that he doesn't have any more than defects of which he is free. Let us recognise the real motives of his actions, which are neither good nor bad in themselves, but [are] only such by the direction that we give them: such are the spirit of contradiction and the love of liberty that is its principle. The first has advantages and disadvantages that balance each other; the second is the source of action, human activity itself, indifferent to good or evil,

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but without which nothing useful, good, or great would ever be accomplished, or rather, without which man would no longer be man. Let us enjoy them both, and take care to use them for our happiness and that of our fellow-men, in turning them away from the baneful uses which passions and ignorance too often make them serve. 52 For Morellet, the spirit of criticism had to be disassociated from its results not only to protect the right to criticise, regardless of the implications of particular criticisms; but also because only by recognising the neutrality of criticism could it be directed toward good and useful ends. As Rousseau had in his Discours sur l'in~galit~, Morellet defined man as naturally free and declared that freedom to be morally neutral: man was by nature neither good nor evil; he became so only by the way in which he used his nature. For Rousseau, the qualities that defined human nature were piti~ and amour-propre; for Morellet, the critical spirit constituted human nature. For b o t h Rousseau and Morellet, human freedom was manifested in humanity's ability to use its natural attributes toward either good or evil. For both thinkers, human history displayed overwhelmingly a poor use of that freedom, and Enlightenment showed how to redirect it toward good ends. 53 As Morellet made clear, however, in defining the criticial spirit as the expression of liberty he was rejecting both piti~ and amour-propre. If in 'De l'esprit de contradiction' he had made clear that the critical spirit was not a product of amour-propre, the 'Essai sur la conversation' implicitly posited conversation as an alternative to piti~ as the solution to the problems raised by the critical spirit in society. In his critique, Brienne had cautioned his friend that 'criticism must be gentle and without bile, falling on things, and not on persons'2 4 He realised that disengaging criticism from personnalit~ in theory was not enough. While Morellet realised that, too, his next step was not simply to ask people to be nice to one another. Rather, he sought to elaborate a theory of conversation that would articulate a structure of social and discursive relations within which the spirit of criticism--the human spirit, as he saw it--could truly and fully function. For Morellet, like Locke, the government of conversation was the proper means of both protecting and restraining individual freedom in society. 'Conversation', Morellet wrote, 'is the great school of the mind, not only in the sense that it enriches the knowledge gained with difficulty from other sources, but in making it more vigorous, more accurate, more penetrating, more profound'. In addition, conversation trained the intellectual faculties of mind, memory, and judgement, and strengthened the attention of both speakers and listeners. This last skill, which was to become central for Mme Necker, Morellet considered crucial for all the rest and the result of conversation rather than reading, as might otherwise be assumed. 'In the majority of men, reading is not accompanied by this strong attention that is precisely the instrument of all our knowledge', he argued. 'This attention becomes easy in conversation'. Finally, MoreUet wrote that 'a no less interesting effect of conversation is to improve man's morality and sociability'.55 Morality and sociability were functions of each other since les moeurs, according to Morellet, were fundamentally social. Because they conversed the most, the French were the nation with the highest degree of sociability and thus the greatest morality. This did not mean that their

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morals were the best, but simply that they were the most highly developed. 56 Already in 1750, Charles Duclos had observed that although the French were the most polite nation, they were not necessarily the most virtuous. Duclos went on to argue that a peuple polic~ was worth more than a peuple poli, and that les moeurs, enforced by public opinion, performed this policing function27 Duclos had taken the idea of reputation that was central to seventeenth-century French conceptions of nobility and conversation and made of it the principle behind society more broadly conceived. 'Men are destined to live in society', he wrote, moreover, they are obliged to by the need they have for each other: they are in this regard in a [state of] mutual dependence. But it is not only material needs that bind them; they also have a moral existence that depends upon the opinion they have of each other [leur opinion rrciproque]... The desire to occupy a place in the opinion of men gave birth to reputation, celebrity, and renown, powerful springs of society that derive from the same principle. 58 Duclos was applying the French tradition of conversation to the larger ends of enlightenment. For him, conversation was not simply the basis of politeness, although it was that. Polite conversation was also well-governed conversation, the basis of good thinking and good social order. It played a political role, and only as such could it generate les bonnes moeurs. By adapting the English conception of conversation as the mark and m o t o r of civic virtue to the French social context embodied in the salon, Morellet arrived at a similar position, for the salon differed from the coffeehouse in being governed rather than anarchic. And it was women who took on the policing function in this microcosm of French society. 'The free commerce of the two sexes [is] one of the most powerful principles of civilisation', wrote Morellet, 'and of the improvement of sociability. This effect occurs by means of conversation'. 59 What distinguished France from other nations was its extreme sociability; what distinguished French sociability from its English form in particular was the role women played in it. W o m e n were thus central to the definition of France's national character and its greatness. In his essay, Morellet spel!ed out the rules of polite conversation as he had learned them from Swift by spelling out the vices to be avoided: inattention; interrupting or speaking all at once; overeagerness; egoism; despotism or the spirit of domination; pedantry; illogic; the spirit of pleasantry; the spirit of contradiction; dispute; and personal conversation substituted for general conversation. 6° But the necessary harmony of conversation, against which all these vices operated, did not depend simply on their avoidance. The free atmosphere of the English coffeehouse, where men exercised the necessary restraint voluntarily, was not invoked. Rather, Morellet explained that in France the most effective conversation was held in small groups o f t e n to twelve people around a natural center. ' T o be frank', he wrote, 'I have never seen consistently good conversation except where a salonni~re [magtresse de maison] was, if not the only woman, at least a sort of center of the society'. His point was not that there ought to be only one woman in the group of men, but that the natural role of women was to be a center around whom men gathered, and if more than one woman played this role, the conversation would not function properly. Groups

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that included educated women or those who sought and loved instruction could generate excellent conversation just as well as those that were all male. Such women were, however, u n c o m m o n . 61 The issue of whether or not women contributed to good conversation was fundamentally a political issue. While granting that women could in theory contribute to good conversation in the same way as men, Morellet took this point as marginal because so few women were disposed to make this sort of contribution. He did not, of course, ask why they should be so little interested in learning, but that is not my point here. Rather, I would like to focus on the issue that was central for Morellet: the effect of women on conversation when they acted according to their nature. Because Morellet saw women as naturally attracting men to themselves and thereby uniting them, he held that one woman exerted a positive force in conversation, while additional women exerted a negative one. Because woman's natural role was to create a circle around herself as center, she became a natural governor of men. More women would mean more circles, more societies, and an inevitable conflict, since there was no higher authority to ajudicate among them. No women, however, would surely mean anarchy. The restraining force of the salonni~res in the Republic of Letters, the control they tried to maintain over the citizens of the republic and their discourse, was sometimes resisted, sometimes denied by the citizenry--not least by MoreUet h i m s e l f u b u t it was nonetheless legitimate and in no way arbitrary or despotic. Like all laws, the rules of Enlightenment discourse aimed, in Locke's words, 'not to abolish or restrain but to preserve and enlarge freedom'. 62 Ifphilosophes such as Morellet sometimes suggested otherwise, their complaints are undermined not only by the conversational theory they admired and elaborated, but by the regularity of their attendance at salons in the 1760s and '70s, the praise they lavished on the salonni~res whose services they valued, and the anarchy that beset the Republic of Letters in the 1780s when the departure of the three great Enlightenment salonni~res meant that there was no one left to enforce the rules of polite discourse and to govern an unruly republic that was breaking down as surely as was the French monarchy. In a highly suggestive reinterpretation of the French Enlightenment, Robert Darnton has pointed to the advancing age and subsequent deaths of Voltaire and others between 1778 and 1785 as marking a turning point: 'As age overcame them, the great philosophes made the rounds of the salons, searching for successors', Darnton writes. But 'with the death of the old Bolsheviks, the Enlightenment passed into the hands of nonentities'. 63 From the perspective of Grub Street, Darnton sees the heritage of the Enlightenment as a comfortable, privileged niche in the order of the Old Regime that had been carved out and bolstered through decades of ingratiation and exclusion. The resentment of those who were excluded only grew in the 1780s, when the chosen heirs of the philosophes simply lived off the income of their inheritance, without even the merit of having earned the comfortable situation they enjoyed. 'The works of men like Marat, Brissot, and C a r r a . . . ' , writes Darnton, 'seethe with hatred of the literary 'aristocrats' who had taken over the egalitarian 'republic of letters' and made it into a 'despotism'. It was in the depths of the intellectual underworld

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that these men became revolutionaries and that the jacobinical determination to wipe out the aristocracy of the mind was b o r n ' J 4 But was the problem that the Republic of Letters had become a despotism? Was the anger that Darnton identifies the result of a resentment against despotism, or was it a revolt against the legitimate but uncomfortable republican rule of salonni~res? Could we not see those last years before the Revolution not as the hardening of an entrenched elite, but as a fall into the anarchy that always threatened the Republic of Letters: an anarchy which overwhelmed the fragile bonds of a government whose force was limited to the direct verbal relations of salon conversation, and whose legitimacy was only half-way acknowledged? Was the turning point the deaths of great men, or was it perhaps the deaths of Mme Geoffrin and Mile de Lespinasse that marked the end of the well-governed Republic of Letters and the beginning of the pre-Revolution? Dena G o o d m a n

Louisiana State University

NOTES This article has its origins in papers that I was asked to give in the spring of 1989 when I was a Mellon Faculty Fellow at Harvard University. I am thus indebted to Peta Howard of Tunxis Community College, who first asked me to speak in a lecture series on 'Women in their Times'; to Pleun Bouricius and the committee of graduate student women who asked me to contribute to that year's celebration of Women's History Week at Harvard; and to Linda Colley, who invited me to speak at Yale University's Center for British Art in a symposium on 'The French Revolution in Culture'. Useful comments and encouragement came out of all three engagements, but I would especially like to acknowledge those of Caroline Ford, Heather Hathaway, and Olwen Hufton. I should also acknowledge the Institute for Research in the Humanities at the University of Wisconsin, under whose auspices much of the research for this article was conducted during an earlier fellowship year. 1. Elizabeth L. Eisenstein, The Printing Press as an Agent of Change: Communications and Cultural Transformations in Early-Modern Europe, 2 vols (Cambridge, 1979), 1: 137, n. 287. 2. Paul Dibon, 'L'Universit6 de Leyde et la R6publique des Lettres au 17e si~cle', Quaerendo 5 (1975): 26. 3. Annie Barnes, Jean Le Clerc (1657-1736) et la R~publique des Lettres (Paris, 1938), p. 13, cited in Paul Dibon, 'Communication in the Respublica literaria of the 17th Century', Res Publica Litterarum 1 (1978): 44. 4. 'Projet pour l'6tablissement d'un bureau g6n6ral de la R6publique des Lettres', in Bibliothbque Raisonn$ des Ouvrages (Amsterdam, 1747), p. 205. 5. Louis XV died in 1774, and one of the first appointments made by his successor was of Turgot as controller-general. The two years of Turgot's tenure thus coincide with the last years of the salons of Mme Geoffrin and Mile de Lespinasse. In the Acad6mie Fran~aise, philosophes began to win seats regularly with the election of Antoine-L6onard Thomas in 1767. He was followed by the abb6 Etienne Bonnot de Condillac in 1768, and the marquis Jean-Francois de Saint-Lambert and

Governing the Republic o f L e t t e r s

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11.

12.

13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

25. 26.

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Etienne-Charles de Lom6nie de Brienne in 1770. In 1772, the election of abb6 Jacques DeliUe and Jean-Baptiste-Antoine Suard brought about a confrontation with the combined forces of court and clerical groups within the Acad6mie. The opposition won in the short term when the king refused to confirm the appointments, but d'Alembert's subsequent election as perpetual secretary strengthetled the philosophes' hand, and in 1774, Suard and Delille were re-elected and confirmed. The elections of Chr6tien-Guillaume de Lamoignon de Malesherbes, Jean-de-Dieu-Raymond de Cuc6 de Boisgelin, and Jean-Francois de La Harpe followed in 1775 and 1776. See Keith Michael Baker, Condorcet: From Natural Philosophy to Social Mathematics (Chicago, 1975), p. 23. Quoted in Marguerite Glotz and Madeleine Maire, Salons du xviiibme sibcle (Paris, 1949), p. 17. Suzanne Curchod Necker, M~langes extraits des manuscrits de Mine Necker, ed. Jacques Necker, 3 vols (Paris, 1798), 2: 1. Jean-Francois Marmontel, Mkmoires, ed. John Renwick, 2 vols. (Clermont-Ferrand, 1972), 1: 220, Antoine-L6onard Thomas, 'A la m6moire de Madame Geoffrin', in Andr6 Morellet, ed. Eloges de Madame Geoffrin (Paris, 1812), p. 89. Mme Necker to Grimm, 16 January 1777, in Necker, M~langes, 1: 344-45. The following reading of Poulaine de la Barre, Egalit~ des deux sexes, is based on Carolyn Lougee, 'Le Paradis des Femmes" : Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976), p. 20. [Jacques-Antoine-Hippolyte, comte de] Guibert, 'Eloge d'Eliza', in Lettres de Mlle de Lespinasse, ed. Eugene Asse (Paris, n.d.), 360~ F o r an analysis of the implications of this suppression of the ego in the case of Mile de Lespinasse see Dena Goodman, 'Julie de Lespinasse: A Mirror for the Enlightenment', in Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch, Eighteenth-Century Women and theArts (New York, 1988), pp. 3-10. Morellet, 'Portrait de Madame Geoffrin', in Eloges de Madame Geoffrin, p. 11. Suzanne Curchod Necker, Nouveaux m~langes, 3 vols. (Paris, 1801), 1: 188-89. Necker, Nouveaux m~langes, 1: 302. Mine [St6phanie-Felicit6 Du Crest, Comtesse] de Genlis, Dictionnaire des ~tiquettes de la cour (Paris, 1818), s.v., 'Maitresses de Maison'. Diderot, Notessurlar~futation .... quoted in Jean-Pierre Guicciardi, Introduction to Andr6 Morellet,M~moires sur le dix-huitibme sibcle et sur la r~volution (Paris, 1988), p. 34. Necker, Nouveaux m~langes, 2: 291. Keith Michael Baker, 'Politics and Public Opinion under the Old Regime: Some Reflections', in Jack R. Censer and Jeremy D. Popkin, eds, Press and Politics in Pre-Revolutionary France (Berkeley, 1987), p. 209. John Locke, The Second Treatise o f Government (Indianapolis, 1952), pp. 48-49. See Dena Goodman, 'Pigalle's Voltaire nu: The Republic of Letters Represents Itself to the World', Representations 16 (Fall 1986): 86-109. On the seventeenth-century debate about the nature and function of women in society in which these two positions are articulated, see Lougee, "Le Paradis des Femmes'. Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Politics and the Arts: Letter to M. D'Alembert on the Theatre, trans. Allan Bloom (Ithaca, NY, 1960), p. 109. Natalie Zemon Dayis, 'Women on Top', in Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford, 1965), pp. 124-26. See also Lougee, 'Le Paradis des Femmes', pp. 11-14. Rousseau, Letter to cgAlembert, p. 47. There are no good [moeurs] for women outside of a withdrawn and domestic life:'

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Letter to aVAlembert, p. 82. Rousseau's attitude toward women has been widely studied. Recent work includes: Gita May, 'Rousseau's "Antifeminism" Reconsidered', in Samia I. Spencer, ed., French Women and the Age of Enlightenment (Indianapolis, 1984), pp. 309-17; Carol Blum, Rousseau and the Republic of Virtue: The Language of Politics in the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1986); Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, 1988), pp. 66-89. 27. See Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, trans. H.M. Parshley (New York, 1974), p. 162. 28. Marmontel, M~moires, 1: 170. 29. Morellet, M~moires, p. 98. 30. Morellet, M~moires, p. 97. 31. Necker, 'Sur Mine Geoffrin', in M~langes, 3: 245. 32. Morellet, Mkmoires, p. 144. 33. Autograph in Mme. Geoffrin's hand to [.7], no date. Archives de la famille D'Estampes. 34. Daniel Mornet, 'La Vie mondaine, les salons', in La Vie Parisienne au XVIIIe sibcle (Paris, 1914), pp. 133-43; Alan Kors, D'Holbach's Coterie: An Enlightenment in Paris (Princeton, 1976), pp. 92-94. On Darnton, see below. 35. Arthur M. Wilson, Diderot (New York, 1972), p. 495. See also Abb6 Galiani to Mme d'Epinay, 27 [January] 1770, in Galiani, Correspondance, ed. Lucien Perey and Gaston Maugras, 2 vols. (Paris, 1990); and Dominique Joseph Garat, M~moires historiques sur la vie de M. Suard, 2 vols (Paris, 1820), 2: 203. 36. Morellet, M~moires, p. 51. 37. Morellet, M~moires, p. 130. 38. Rousseau, Letter to d'Alembert, pp. 98-99; Blum, Rousseau and theRepublic of Virtue: p. 210. 39. Morellet to Shelburne, 13 December 1774, in Lettres de l'Abb~ Morellet ~ Lord Shelburne, ed. Edmond Fitzmaurice (Paris, 1898). 40. Morellet, M~moires, p. 129. 41. Necker, Nouveaux m~langes, 1: 100-1. 42. Necker, M~langes, 2: 85. 43. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 15. 44. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 32. 45. Locke, Second Treatise, p. 32. 46. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', in M~langes de litt~rature et de philosophie du 18e sibcle, 4 vols. (Paris, 1836), 4: 71. 47. On the civic connotations of conversation among the English Whigs see Lawrence E. Klein, 'The Third Earl of Shaftesbury and the Progress of Politeness', EighteenthCentury Studies 18 (1984): 186-214 and 'Berkeley, Shaftesbury, and the Meaning of Politeness', Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture 16 (1986): 57-68. Daniel Gordon draws upon another of Morellet's essays, 'R6flexions sur les avantages de la libert6 d'6crire et d'imprimer sur les mati~res de l'administration' (1764), for further evidence of the centrality of conversation in Morellet's political thought: ' "Public Opinion" and the Civilizing Process in France: The Example of Morellet', Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (Spring, 1989), pp. 313-16. 48. Morellet, 'De l'esprit de contradiction', Mercure de France, 15 August 1778, pp. 138-52 and 25 August 1778, pp. 258-78; 'De la conversation',Mercure deFrance, 5 November 1778, pp. 5-22. 49. Morellet, M~langes, 4: 161-62, 153, and 147. 50. [Etienne de] Lom6nie de Brienne, 'Critique des r6flexions pr6c6dentes', in Morellet, M~langes, 4: 171-72.

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51. Morellet, 'R6ponse aux R6flexions pr6cedentes', in M~langes, 4: 173-74. 52. MoreUet, 'De resprit de contradiction', in M~langes, 4: 164. 53. Rousseau, 'Discours sur rorigine et les fondements de l'in6galit6 parmi les hommes', in Oeuvres completes, 3: 125-26; 131-33. See also Dena Goodman, Criticism inaction." Enlightenment Experiments in Political Writing (Ithaca, 1989), pp." 164-66. 54. Lom6nie de Brienne, 'Critique', p. 172. 55. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', 4: 73-76. 56. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', pp. 76-77. 57. Charles Duclos, Considerations sur les moeurs, ed. F.C. Green (Cambridge, 1946), pp. 12 and 44-45. 58. Duclos, Considerations sur les moeurs, p. 64. 59. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', p. 77. 60. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', pp. 82-83. 61. Morellet, 'De la Conversation', pp. 129-30. 62. Locke, SecondTreatise, p. 32. 63. Robert Darnton, 'The High Enlightenment and the Low-Life of Literature', in The Literary Underground of the OM Regime (Cambridge, Mass., 1982), p. 15. 64. Darnton, 'The High Enlightenment', pp. 20-21.