Salon

This page requires fuller treatment: currently sourced from John C Turpin's "Domestic Doyennes" (Intimus, 2006) with a Viennese counterpart in Houze. The salon's Habermasian public-sphere role and the individual salonnières await fuller sources (see log).

Definition

The salon is the seventeenth-century French institution and room-type in which conversation became the organizing practice of elite society — and the historical site where women converted controlled talk into social authority. Turpin's account: "In the first half of the seventeenth century, a new exclusive space developed for the nurturing of the elite culture. Originally referred to as an alcove or ruelle, today it is known as a salon. Here, conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries as French women began redefining the criteria for inclusion and exclusion into the strata of the social elite. The vehicle for change would be the restructuring of etiquette." The salon is thus three things at once: a room (the suite-end space whose archetype is Madame de Rambouillet's Chambre Bleu), an institution (the inclusion/exclusion system whose gatekeepers were the salonnières), and an atmosphere-machine ("the women created atmospheres both spoken and visual to ensure a successful event").

The salon's architectural and conversational forms are one design: Madame de Rambouillet "gave architectural proportions to this new concept of exclusivity" — the Hôtel de Rambouillet's "numerous relatively small, well-proportioned rooms, instead of the great hall and central staircase," the sequence of "ornately finished rooms" ending in the Chambre Bleu with its "intimate proportions and daring use of color," the blue damask-hung bed in the second alcove as the room's focus. The analogy is explicit: "The physical design of the Hotel de Rambouillet with its architectural features facilitated movement between the rooms, creating a more unified interior space, with tall windows and doors offering the occupants enlarged exterior perspectives. Similarly, ideal conversation had to permit both a smooth pattern of movement between the participants and a broad view of the world outside." The plan is the conversation's diagram. Its social rule was equality — "nobles and scholars engaged on equal ground"; "Domination, dispute, interruptions and inattentiveness were not permitted" — and its stakes were total for its hostess: "The salon would be considered a failure and that particular salonnière would lose her most valued position if the environment was not perfect." The institution's English afterlife is a fusion without the enlightenment: "The salon continued to slowly fuse itself with the culture of the English upper class, but without the emphasis on enlightened discussions occurring in France… The salon itself was not as popular as a room type. The drawing room was a more affordable choice" — with de Wolfe later keeping the word's prestige alive: Americans use "drawing room" and "salon" interchangeably, "there is an appreciation for the term salon for its implication of brilliant conversation."

Key Thinkers

John C Turpin — the institution's historian in this wiki: the salon's seventeenth-century birth (alcove/ruelle → salon), the Chambre Bleu's architectural proportions, the salonnières' manufactured atmospheres, the salonnière's precarity, and the English fusion (2003/2006).
Madame de Rambouillet, Madame Geoffrin, Madame Lespinasse (cited figures — PAGE NEEDED as the salonnières, see log) — the institution's agents: Rambouillet "gave architectural proportions to this new concept of exclusivity" (her Chambre Bleu the first known salon); Geoffrin and Lespinasse "maintained high levels of control over carefully selected participants."
Elsie de Wolfe — the salon's American memory: the Hôtel Rambouillet "devised for and consecrated to conversation, a new form of privilege"; the salon as the decorator's aspirational term (1913; via Turpin).
Rebecca Houze — the salon's Viennese definition: "The salon functioned as a space in which women would socialize while dressed in more relaxed and intimate garments, hovering on the boundary between public and private" (2002/2006) — the salon as the separate spheres' airlock.
Elizabeth Goldsmith (cited figure — see log) — Exclusive Conversations: The Art of Interaction in Seventeenth-Century France (1988), the source of the design/conversation analogy and the equality-precondition.
Mark Taylor & Julieanna Preston — the editors framing the selection as the study of "late nineteenth-century French salons and English drawing rooms" (headnote, p. 368).

Conversation — the salon's founding practice: "conversation created its own social space"; the salon is that social space given a room, a hostess, and rules.
Etiquette — the salon's engine: "The vehicle for change would be the restructuring of etiquette"; the salonnières as etiquette's new proprietors.
The Drawing Room — the salon's English successor: "a more affordable choice," the institution fused into upper-class culture "without the emphasis on enlightened discussions."
Gender and the Interior — the salon's gender mechanism: women as "the gatekeepers of elite society," a "new position in society… based on the ability to enhance human relations through controlled conversations."
Separate Spheres — the salon's boundary-work: Houze's salon "hovering on the boundary between public and private" — the institution that stages the spheres' contact.
Atmosphere — the salon's product and test: atmospheres "both spoken and visual," with the salonnière's position staked on the environment's perfection.
Public Sphere — the salon as the public sphere's domestic-elite ancestor: exclusive conversation as a polity of talk before the bourgeois public (Habermas's salons unnamed in the wiki's sources — see Open Questions).
Domestic Interior — the salon as the domestic interior's public face: the private rooms' sequence opening onto society.
Practiced Place — "conversation created its own social space with carefully marked boundaries" — the salon as de Certeau's space-as-practiced-place in its aristocratic form.

Source Support

Sources in the wiki that discuss this concept:

Domestic Doyennes: Purveyors of Atmospheres Spoken and Visual (Turpin 2003/2006) — the concept's founding source: the alcove/ruelle genealogy and conversation's self-made social space (p. 369); etiquette's restructuring as the vehicle (p. 369); Faret's exclusion of the military and women's proprietorship of civility ("the best social education emanated from cultivated women, the gatekeepers of elite society," p. 369); Geoffrin and Lespinasse's control and the atmospheres "both spoken and visual" (p. 369); the Chambre Bleu's proportions ("intimate proportions and daring use of color"; waist-high gilded panels, blue tapestries, Venetian mirrors, the damask-hung bed in the second alcove — Anderson & Zinsser quoted, p. 370); the movement/windows analogy (Goldsmith; p. 370); ideal conversation's equality-precondition and the salonnière's precarity (p. 370); the retention thesis ("feminine qualities of tact, sympathy and mental alertness," p. 370); and the English fusion ("The salon continued to slowly fuse itself with the culture of the English upper class, but without the emphasis on enlightened discussions," p. 371).
Suitability, Simplicity and Proportion (de Wolfe 1913/2006) — the salon as the decorator's aspirational vocabulary: via Turpin, "devised for and consecrated to conversation, a new form of privilege" (House in Good Taste, p. 11); "Americans use the terms 'drawing room' and 'salon' interchangeably, there is an appreciation for the term salon for its implication of brilliant conversation" (pp. 135–6, via Turpin). The salon as the prestige-word the decorator's profession inherits.
From Wiener Kunst im Hause to the Wiener Werkstätte (Houze 2002/2006) — the salon's Viennese form and its boundary-function: "The salon functioned as a space in which women would socialize while dressed in more relaxed and intimate garments, hovering on the boundary between public and private" (p. 159) — the salon as the separate spheres' airlock, the feminine room that hosts the household's public life, its relaxation licensed by dress (see interior-as-garment).

Open Questions

The salon and the public sphere: Habermas's bourgeois public sphere genealogy treats the salon (with the café) as the public sphere's aristocratic-domestic precursor. The wiki's public-sphere page (Arendt/Habermas lineage) has not yet connected the salon — does the salonnière's curated exclusivity ("carefully selected participants") make the salon the public sphere's gate-kept ancestor, and does that gatekeeping distinguish it from the open bourgeois public?
Was the salon a room or a practice? Turpin's formula — "conversation created its own social space" — suggests the salon is a practice that occasionally annexes a room (the ruelle was the bed-alcove). The Chambre Bleu gave it "architectural proportions." Which is primary: the room type (the design-history reading) or the ritual (the social-history reading)? The wiki's room-type pages (drawing-room, dining-room) assume rooms; the salon may be the case that breaks the assumption.
The salonnière's precarity as atmospheric stakes: "The salon would be considered a failure and that particular salonnière would lose her most valued position if the environment was not perfect" — is the salonnière the historical type of the atmosphere-wielder (cf. atmosphere), and does her "most valued position" — held by staging, lost by failure — describe the modern designer's own condition?
The equality paradox: the salon's ideal conversation required "equal standing within the group" among "nobles and scholars" — an engineered equality inside a ranked society. Is the salon therefore a pocket equality (the interior as the space where the outside hierarchy is suspended), and does that make the salonnière's exclusivity (her "carefully selected participants") the price of the equality she hosts?
The English fusion: the salon fused into English upper-class culture "without the emphasis on enlightened discussions" — and shrank to the drawing room. Did the salon fail in England because its premise (women controlling inclusion) was incompatible with the patriarchal drawing-room system ("a wife was legally bound to uphold the husband's social status"), or because its room-form was unaffordable? And what survived the fusion — the word ("salon" as the term implying brilliant conversation) or the practice?

Notes

Created from Turpin's essay as the wiki's first sociability-institution page. Related future work: Habermas's salon-café genealogy in public-sphere; the salonnières as a group page (Rambouillet, Geoffrin, Lespinasse — PAGE NEEDED, see log); Houze's Viennese salon as the boundary-institution's second case.