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. By Steven Kale. Baltimore, Md.: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2004. 230 pp. $48.00. ISBN 0-8018-7729-6.

French Salons: High Society and Political Sociability from the Old Regime to the Revolution of 1848 challenges the historiography of salon culture in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century France. Steven Kale frames his expose against the backdrop of the Republic of Letters and the grande monde and culminates with the decline of French salons in the nineteenth century. From a methodological perspective Kale incorporates the testimony of salon habitues through his prodigious use of memoirs and journals. The value of such fecund material will be familiar to readers of Libraries & Culture. The disparate voices of French salons, including Mme du Deffand and Mme de Stael in the eighteenth century to the duchesse de Dino and the princesse de Lieven in the nineteenth century, offer competing views on the influence of…