Goodman, Republic of Letters

Dena Goodman. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1994.

 In The Republic of Letters, Dena Goodman reconstructs the cultural dimensions of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century French Enlightenment project, which developed concurrently with, and in opposition to, the absolutist state. Of particular interest to Goodman, are the relative roles of men and women in the Republic of Letters, particularly as ideas about enlightenment practice shifted away from notions of sociability, necessarily mediated by women, toward Rousseauian views of male self-governance, a cultural swing mirrored in the shift from salons to fraternal musées. She writes that “the Republic of Letters was composed of French men and women, philosophes and salonnières, who worked together to attain the ends of philosophy, broadly conceived as the project of Enlightenment (9).”  The “interiority” of the salon allowed women, it was believed, to effectively police masculine discourse, wrangling male egos and maintaining the polite rules of engagement necessitated by the collaborative construction of the Enlightenment project. Nevertheless, the gens de lettres were never fully comfortable with feminine authority and ultimately resolved their discomfort by creating new institutions that decentered and displaced women (9). The displacement of women in the 1780s from Enlightenment cultural practice, however, should not diminish their contributions to the Republic of Letters nor undermine the significance of the salon in the French Enlightenment.

 Goodman begins the monograph with a narrative of the rise of the Republic of Letters followed, in chapter two, with a historiographical discussion of the salon and its role in the development of the Republic. She surveys the history of the Republic “from its founding in the seventeenth century as an apolitical community of discourse through its transformation in the eighteenth century into a very political community whose project of Enlightenment challenged the monarchy from a new public space (12).”  French Enlightenment can be viewed as an extension of Diderot’s Encyclopédie and Baconian concepts of sociability and collaboration, which found expression in the Parisian salons and radiated outward through epistolary and subscription networks. Rousseau stood in opposition to this epistemological construction, believing that philosophical understanding could only be derived when man was alone with his thoughts; conviviality was antithetical to the process. In Goodman’s view, it is this censure of the collectivization of Enlightenment work that has caused many historians—both then and now—to trivialize the role of the salon and the salonnière in the Enlightenment project.

 Chapters three and four deal in the rules and the form of Enlightenment discourse as it was practiced under the governance of the salonnières. From the early years of the French Enlightenment through the 1770s, the salonnières were seen to provide a basis of order for the Republic of Letters that was vital in the maintenance of the collaborative method by which truth was ascertained and transmitted. Goodman writes that, “the rules, and thus the governors, were necessary because eighteenth-century French intellectual practice was both militant and personal (91).”  By enforcing polite conversation, the women of the Republic kept open the channels of communication that fed the Enlightenment. If the discursive method was civility, the mode was the letter. The post connected a vast intellectual, interactive network of men and women whose missives became the raw material for salon discussions and a host of edited epistolary volumes, which transmitted ideas among and beyond the sophisticated network of Enlightenment correspondents. Yet the accord among the gens de lettres which had proven so effective in the Enlightenment project was not to last.  The final two chapters of Goodman’s study chart the deterioration of discursive affability and a concomitant shift from feminine to masculine governance in the Republic of Letters. When discourse left the salons and expanded into an unregulated field of print, the brutish, combative nature of the masculine ego was unfettered. Seeming to allow for a “freer” exchange of ideas, the newly-emancipated discourse too often devolved into name-calling and petty retribution in the name of “honor,” undermining the collaborative nature of philosophical production that had previously defined the Enlightenment project. The salon gave way to the boys’ clubs of the 1780s—which presaged the political clubs of the Revolution and heralded the de-feminizing of the public sphere—and women were reduced to so much window-dressing in the French age of Enlightenment. In an about-face that had its center in Rousseauian notions of gender, men became the judges of women and feminine governance, particularly in regard to the feminized monarch, was excised from both the territorial and discursive republics that the French gens de lettres called home.