ELITE CULTURE IN EARLY NINETEENTH-CENTURY FRANCE: SALONS, SOCIABILITY, AND THE SELF

Extract

The cultural world of French elites was profoundly shaken by the long sequence of events we now refer to as the French Revolution. The legal, political, and social world in which elites moved was transformed by successive revolutionary regimes and, more generally, by what Benjamin Constant called “the torrent” of change that began with the Revolution in 1789. Individuals experienced excitement, hope, and enthusiasm, but also suffered trauma, insecurity, and loss. The effects of these experiences on elite sociability and culture are difficult to characterize precisely. Michelle Perrot and Anne Martin-Fugier have written that there was a tendency on the part of French elites during the nineteenth century to retreat increasingly into the sanctuary of their homes, where they practiced more exclusionary forms of sociability, and simultaneously adopted more defensive forms of politics. Alain Corbin reminds us that the vulnerability that accompanied the progress of individuation in nineteenth-century France frequently manifested itself as an obsession with self-scrutiny, as represented by the enriched forms of interior monologue found in diaries and in Romantic poetry and literature. This retreat and concomitant self-scrutiny can be seen as a further refinement of the delicacy and sense of shame—of what we call modesty—that Norbert Elias suggested over sixty years ago was a central characteristic of the advance of European manners.