ABSTRACT
Many of the principal salonnières of the Bourbon Restoration had strong political opinions, which they expressed clearly in their memoirs and correspondence. By political opinions, I mean simply that they critically judged public affairs and took partisan positions on the political issues of the day. This fact has been exceedingly hard to notice because nearly all traditional and contemporary representations of the role of salonnières ignore the fact that they had ideas of their own. The political ideas expressed by Restoration salonnières were consistent with conventions of polite society that emphasized harmonious relations between members of an intimate circle. They also reflected long-standing assumptions about the role of women in aristocratic society and idealized notions propagated by both men and women regarding feminine intervention in the intellectual life of the eighteenth century. My larger purpose in focusing on the Restoration is simply to rectify a gap in the now voluminous literature on salon practices in which the specificity of women’s ideas has been neglected, and to answer this question: What did salonnières themselves think about the significance of the intellectual agency of women in salons?
