Public Sphere and Private Life/Dena Goodman

Wiley and Wesleyan University are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to History and Theory.

http://www.jstor.org

Wesleyan University

Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches tothe Old Regime Author(s): Dena Goodman Source: History and Theory, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 1-20Published by: for Wiley Wesleyan UniversityStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605Accessed: 25-03-2015 11:23 UTC

REFERENCESLinked references are available on JSTOR for this article:

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

You may need to log in to JSTOR to access the linked references.

Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of contentin a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship.For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected].

This content downloaded from 95.183.210.78 on Wed, 25 Mar 2015 11:23:29 UTCAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions

http://www.jstor.org

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=black

http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=wesleyan

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605

http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605?seq=1&cid=pdf-reference#references_tab_contents

http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp


PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE: TOWARD A SYNTHESIS OF CURRENT HISTORIOGRAPHICAL

APPROACHES TO THE OLD REGIME

DENA GOODMAN

ABSTRACT

This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and Roger Chartier shows that the "authentic public sphere" articulated by Habermas was constructed in the private realm, and the "new culture" of private life identified by Aries was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenth- century France. Having superimposed the "maps" of public and private spheres drawn by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution.

Public sphere and private life - these domains are now the focus of considerable interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic. 1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen Habermas's The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, and volume three of A History of Private Life, edited by Roger Chartier.' Each domain, private and public, has its own historiographical tradition and, in a sense, its own partisans. This division of historical labor, however, has contributed to a misunderstanding of the relationship between these two spheres of activity in eighteenth-century France, a misunderstanding that has led to the creation of a false opposition between public and private spheres. My aim here is to show that the two visions of the Old Regime represented by these two historiographical schools are fundamentally complementary. By focusing on the simple real-

1. Jfrgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society, transl. Thomas Burger (Cambridge, Mass., 1989); and A History of Private Life: Passions of the Renaissance, ed. Roger Chartier, transl. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, Mass., 1989). Habermas's work was originally published in German in 1962, and then translated into French in 1978. Chartier's De la Renaissance aux Lumieres, volume 3 of Histoire de la vie privie, edited by Philippe Aries and Georges Duby, was published in France in 1986.



2 DENA GOODMAN

ization that the public sphere articulated by Habermas is a dimension of the private sphere delineated by Chartier and his collaborators, the false opposition between them can be collapsed. The next step in our understanding of the Old Regime, I am suggesting, requires a joint effort and mutual understanding of those working within these two theoretical and historical frameworks. The result will be an integration of the richest strains in current historical thinking and a vision of the Old Regime as the moment in which all attempts at oppositional definitions of public and private were contested and undermined. The very instability of conceptions of public and private spheres that characterized the years leading up to the French Revolution helped to create the volatile and shifting ground upon which both criticism and revolution were constructed.

In what follows, I will first present the maps of public and private spheres as they have been drawn by the theorists of the public sphere and the historians of private life. A discussion of the convergence of these two visions of the Old Regime and the historiographical traditions from which they derive will lead to the examination of two recent books: Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution (1991); and Joan D. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988). A better understanding of the relationship between public and private spheres can shed light on both the origins of the French Revolution in the Old Regime and the role and position of women in the political culture of the Old Regime.

I. THE PUBLIC SPHERE: HABERMAS AND KOSELLECK

In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, Jurgen Habermas pre- sents an interpretation of the creation of modern (bourgeois) society through the historical articulation of an authentic public sphere in the eighteenth century. His argument can be read as a critical elaboration of that advanced by Reinhart Koselleck in Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Mod- ern Society, first published in German in 1959, and translated into English in 1988.2 Since the focus of Koselleck's work is narrower than Habermas's it provides a good starting point for an understanding of public sphere theory.

Koselleck's argument takes the form of a dialectic in which absolutism and criticism confront each other; from their confrontation emerge bourgeois society and the French Revolution. "Absolutism necessitated the genesis of the Enlightenment, and the Enlightenment conditioned the genesis of the French

2. Reinhart Koselleck, Critique and Crisis: Enlightenment and the Pathogenesis of Modern Society (Cambridge, Mass., 1988). A French translation appeared in 1979, one year after The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere. Habermas acknowledges Koselleck in his notes for specific analyses and information, but he never suggests that his argument is either an elaboration or a critique of Koselleck's. Habermas did write a critical review of Koselleck's book in 1960, however, "Zur Kritik an der Geschichtsphilosophie (R. Koselleck, H. Kesting)," republished in his Kultur und Kritik, Verstreute Aufsdtze (Frankfurt, 1973). Thus, I do not mean to suggest that Habermas's intention was to elaborate on Koselleck's dialectic, but simply that a comparison of the two works argues for this relationship.



PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE 3

Revolution," he explains in his introduction. "It is around these two theses that the action of this book takes place."3 Criticism in intellectual activity and absolutism in politics, he argues, both emerged out of the Religious Wars. Absolutism found its theoretical basis in the doctrine of raison d'6tat, a doctrine that allowed it to establish politics outside the range of moral considerations. But if the system of absolutism sought carefully to exclude morality from politics, it did not, in theory at least, intrude upon the now private sphere of individual conscience. Peace was achieved through the separation of political (public) authority and obedience from personal (private) morality and religious conscience. Only external actions could be judged by the established powers; the internal movements of the heart were one's own business and so were removed from the public arena where conflict could arise.4

The Republic of Letters conceived by Pierre Bayle toward the end of the seventeenth century was established in the private sphere carved out by religious conscience over the course of the preceding century. There critical reason reigned, and it was to assure the autonomy of criticism that Bayle removed it from the political domain of the absolute monarchy to the very heart of its own Republic of Letters. It was the rigorous separation of criticism from politics, Koselleck argues, that made historically possible - if not inevitable - the seem- ingly contradictory politicization of criticism in the eighteenth century. Defining itself in opposition to the absolutist state, criticism eventually made of politics its foremost object. "Intellectual criticism," he writes, "based on the separation of the non-political Republic of Letters and the political State, now took refuge in this separation and at the same time broadened it so as to extend its intellectual judgement - ostensibly neutral and in the name of impartial truth - to the State as well."5

Criticism, intitially defined as the antithesis of absolutism, was transformed into its opponent in the hands of the philosopher. For Koselleck, this was not a happy turn of events. Criticism became hypocrisy, and the critic became the usurper of sovereign authority, employing the terms of neutrality and objec- tivity in order to seize power for himself. "Criticism," concludes Koselleck, "goes far beyond that which had occasioned it and is transformed into the motor of self-righteousness."6 It was the philosopher' assumption of power in the name of society that led inevitably to the Jacobin Revolution. Their hypocrisy would become the hypocrisy of the Terror.7

Koselleck's argument is elegant, as all good dialectics are. But the simplicity behind that elegance is also its weakness as historical explanation. Koselleck sets up a fundamental opposition between the public sphere of absolutism and the private sphere of religious conscience. This polarity, which he resolves

3. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 8. 4. Ibid., chap. 1. As should be clear, Koselleck depends heavily on a reading of Hobbes in

constructing this phase of his argument. 5. Ibid., 110-114. 6. Ibid., 119. 7. Ibid., 119-120.



4 DENA GOODMAN

according to a simple historical dialectic, becomes the framework upon which Habermas can weave a more complex and satisfying picture of the Old Regime.

Whereas Koselleck made a simple identification of the public with the state, and saw the private realm of conscience as the by-product of state policy, Habermas begins with an inquiry into the meaning of the term "public." In the Middle Ages, he argues, there was no public sphere "in the sense of a separate realm distinguished from the private sphere." Publicity became a kind of "status attribute" of those with power -it represented the power of the person, rather than articulating a sphere of social action.8

Since there was no public sphere, there was no private sphere either. Like Koselleck, Habermas identifies the emergence of the private sphere with the Reformation.9 Unlike Koselleck, he sees the public sphere not simply as that from which the private was delineated, but as itself in the process of definition at the same time. "The first visible mark of the analogous polarization of princely authority," he explains, "was the separation of the public budget from the territorial ruler's private holdings."'0 Out of an undifferentiated experience, simultaneous developments were occurring that articulated public and private spheres in different ways. The establishment of the private sphere of individual conscience was not, in Habermas's scheme, the result of state policy, but was a simultaneous and analogous development. The private sphere did not simply emerge from the rib of the absolutist Adam.

What the state did create, however, was its own object: the public. The public, according to Habermas, was initially the object of state power, the "addressees of public authority." In particular, he is thinking of mercantilist policy, which addressed economic individuals. "Civil society," he continues, "came into exis- tence as the corollary of a depersonalized state authority.""

Unlike Koselleck, whose dialectic is more Hegelian than Marxist, Habermas works within Marxist discourse, as his identification of the public and civil society with the bourgeoisie demonstrates. "This stratum of 'bourgeois' was the real carrier of the public, which from the outset was a reading public," he writes. "In this stratum . . ., the state authorities evoked a resonance leading the publicum, the abstract counterpart of public authority, into an awareness of itself as the latter's opponent, that is, as the public of the now emerging public sphere of civil society."'2 This is Habermas's version of class consciousness, although it is pretty far removed from any simple notions of economic status and interest.

And criticism, for Habermas, was neither the naive invention of Koselleck's Bayle nor the nefarious hypocrisy of his heirs in the Enlightenment. For Ha- bermas, criticism developed "in the zone of continuous administrative contact"

8. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 7. 9. Ibid., 11. 10. Ibid., 12. 11. Ibid., 18-19. 12. Ibid., 23.




Sphere of Public Private Realm Authority

Civil society (realm of Public sphere in the State (realm of the commodity exchange political realm "police") and social labor)

Public sphere in the world of letters (clubs, press)

Conjugal family's internal (market of culture products) Court (courtly-noble space (bourgeois "Town" society) intellectuals)

FIGURE 1

Diagram of the relationship between public and private spheres from Habermas, Struc- tural Transformation, 30.

between the state and its subjects. It developed in this "critical" zone because subjects were private persons who found certain of their activities the object of public policy, and thus were provoked into using their reason to make critical judgments.'3 A new public sphere, similar to Koselleck's Republic of Letters, formed in opposition to the state: "The publicum developed into the public, the subjectum into the [reasoning] subject, the receiver of regulations from above into the ruling authorities' adversary."'4

In Habermas's picture, criticism did not illegitimately and surreptitiously invade the public sphere of the state. By expanding the Republic of Letters into an authentic public sphere, Habermas legitimizes it. Criticism is now seen as the proper discourse of the "bourgeois public sphere," in which "private people come together as a public."'5 What for Koselleck was mere utopianism that masked real political and economic relations, is for Habermas the great historical development of the modern world: the sphere of public opinion. He finds in the bourgeois public sphere, its critical and open discourse, and the public opinion that represents it, the best hope for a modern democratic political structure.

In Habermas's positive view, then, what is the relationship between public and private spheres? [Figure 11 What he calls the "authentic" public sphere is part of the private realm. There are thus two public spheres: the inauthentic public sphere of state authority, and the authentic one of private people coming together as a public through the public use of their reason. The authentic public sphere divides further into three aspects, which develop in the following order: first, the market of culture products; second, the Republic of Letters, with its institutions of intellectual sociability; and, third, the public sphere in the political realm. The authentic public sphere, moreover, which is in the private realm, is distinguished from the intimate private sphere which itself has two aspects:

13. Ibid., 24. 14. Ibid., 26. 15. Ibid., 27.



6 DENA GOODMAN

Privatbereich Sphare d. offentl. Gewalt

Burgerliche Gesellschaft politische Staat (Bereich d. Warenverkehrs Offentlichkeit (Bereich d. "Polizei")

u. d. gesellsch. Arbeit) literary. Offentlichkeit

(Clubs, Presse)

Kleinfam. Binnenraum (Kulturgutermarkt) Hof (birgerl. Intelligenz) (adlig-hof. Gesellschaft)

"Stadt"

FIGuRE 2

Figure I as it appears in the German edition.

civil society, which is concerned with production and exchange of commodities; and the bourgeois family. The town, in which the authentic public sphere was manifested in the Old Regime, "was the life center of civil society": the public face of the private realm. In the town, institutions of sociability and publicity were developed to counter those of the court, and it was there that the public sphere in the political realm emerged to confront the state.'6

If criticism is the discourse of the critical zone where state and society meet, then the authentic public sphere is the ground that mediates between the private life of individuals as producers and reproducers, and their public roles as subjects and (later) citizens of the state: it is the public ground of "society." It is also the ground of the Enlightenment, and thus Habermas also sometimes refers to the "literate" public sphere, since the public was first a reading public, and the critical reasoning of private persons on political issues had a literary precursor. 17

Both Habermas and Koselleck are particularly interested in the institutions in which criticism and the public sphere took social shape. These institutions of sociability - clubs, cafes, salons, academies, and so on - provide the social base of the intellectual history Koselleck and Habermas write, a locus for the bourgeoisie excluded from state politics and the philosophes who construct their ideology.'8 Koselleck's main focus, however, is the Masonic lodges, for they best represent the hidden power of the new class. For Koselleck, the secret rites of the Illuminati represent the dark shadows of Enlightenment and become the figure of its bourgeois hypocrisy. "On the Continent," he asserts, "there were two social structures that left a decisive imprint on the Age of Enlightenment: the Republic of Letters and the Masonic lodges. From the outset, Enlightenment

16. Ibid., 29-30. The diagram given here is from the American edition of Habermas's work. The diagram in the German edition is slightly different. [Figure 2] It indicates less clearly that the authentic public sphere is in the private realm, since it lacks the vertical lines of demarcation between the various zones. On the other hand, it indicates more clearly that the authentic public sphere, and not simply the "market of culture products" is associated with the town. (Habermas, Strukturwandel der 6!fentlichkeit [Berlin, 1965], 41.)

17. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 29. 18. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 65-69; Habermas, Structural Transformation, 31-43.




and mystery appeared as historical twins."' Moreover, he continues, "the mystery, this element that seems so flatly to contradict the spirit of the Enlighten- ment, needs clearing up, for the Masonic mystery will lead us to the core of the morality-policy dialectic. What the mystery covers - ambivalently, as we shall see - is the political reverse of the Enlightenment."20

In Habermas's hands, the institutions of bourgeois and Enlightenment sociability become the social structures of the authentic public sphere. It was in these institutions of sociability that private individuals gathered to use their reason and form civil society; it was through the creation of these institutions that they created a new public sphere to challenge and eventually appropriate the old public sphere of the monarchy.

The process in which the state-governed public sphere was appropriated by the public of private people making use of their reason and was established as a sphere of criticism of public authority, was one of functionally converting the public sphere in the world of letters already equipped with institutions of the public and with forums for discussion.'

For Habermas, the great virtue of these new institutions of sociability was their publicity. By identifying the bourgeois public sphere as the authentic public sphere, he reverses Koselleck's picture. No longer are real politics going on in the state, and secret, pseudo-politics confined to the private world of lodges, clubs, and cafes. In Habermas's view, "the principle of publicity" which un- derlay these new institutions of sociability came to challenge "the practice of secrets of state."22 The bourgeois public sphere was authentic precisely because it was open; its true publicity revealed as illegitimate the monarchy's claims to represent the public opaquely, rather than with the new transparency. The veil lay not over the real, hidden, economic interest of the bourgeoisie, but over the political practices of the state. Yes, Habermas admits, there was a "fictitious identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human beings pure and simple,"23 but there was no hypocrisy involved. To the contrary, the identification was possible because the two self-definitions did converge as a single front that held its principle of publicity up against the real hypocrisy of a state that claimed to represent the public through secrecy.

Public and private, open and secret: the different ways in which Koselleck and Habermas manipulate and apply these terms constitute the significant diver- gence between their two understandings of the Old Regime. The shift achieved by Habermas is to theorize the development of a new and authentic public sphere out of the private sphere, whereas for Koselleck any reconciliation of the opposition between public and private spheres by the bourgeoisie and its ideological representatives remains a deception.

19. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 62. 20. Ibid., 70. 21. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 51. 22. Ibid., 52. 23. Ibid., 56.



8 DENA GOODMAN

It is thus clear, I think, why, although Habermas works from a Marxist tradition of historical interpretation, his vision has become part of a new post- Marxist historiography. His account of the creation of an authentic public sphere (in the hands of non-Marxists, it is no longer called "bourgeois"), with its institutions of intellectual sociability, provides a social and material base for the "political culture" on which the work of Franqois Furet, Keith Baker, Mona Ozouf, Lynn Hunt, and others has come to focus.24

Koselleck's bleak vision, on the other hand, reflects the darkness of postwar Europe, the anxiety of the Cold War. "From an historical point of view," Koselleck wrote in the introduction to Kritik und Krise in 1959, "the present tension between two superpowers, the USA and the USSR, is a result of Euro- pean history. Europe's history has broadened; it has become world history and will run its course as that, having allowed the whole world to drift into a state of permanent crisis." In a preface to the English edition, written almost thirty years later, he explained that

this study is a product of the early postwar period. It represented an attempt to examine the historical preconditions of German National Socialism, whose loss of reality and Utopian self-exaltation had resulted in hitherto unprecedented crimes. There was also the context of the cold war. Here, too, I was trying to enquire into its Utopian roots which, it seemed, prevented the two superpowers from simply recognising each other as opponents.... It was in the Enlightenment, to which both liberal-democratic America and socialist Russia rightly retraced themselves, that I began to look for the common roots of their claim to exclusiveness with its moral and philosophical legitimations.25

While Habermas sees the authentic public sphere and the Enlightenment that shaped it as something of a lost paradise that emerged in the eighteenth century and then collapsed in the nineteenth,26 Koselleck sees that same formation as the origin of the hypocritical deceptions of the twentieth. And while, in this post-Marxist and post-Cold War world, we can purge Habermas of his Marxism without too much trouble, it is more difficult, in the end, to cleanse Koselleck of the Cold War fears that color his analysis of the Old Regime.

II. PRIVATE LIFE: ARIES AND CHARTIER

"Is it possible to write a history of private life?" Philippe Aries asks in intro- ducing The Passions of the Renaissance, volume three of A History of Private Life. His answer to this question is yes: the history of private life is the history of the transformation of a medieval society in which public and private spheres

24. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, transl. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, Eng., 1981); Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1989); Ozouf, Festivals and the French Revolution, transl. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class in the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1984). See also The French Revolution and the Creation of Modern Political Culture: vol.1, The Political Culture of the Old Regime, ed. Keith M. Baker (Oxford, 1987); and vol. 2, The Political Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford, 1988).

25. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 5 and 1. 26. Habermas, Structural Transformation, chap. 5.




are confounded into a modern one in which they are fully distinguished.27 Not surprisingly, Aries argues that this transformation began at the end of the seventeenth century - at precisely the same time that Habermas's public sphere of the state emerged. Not surprisingly, since both Habermas and Aries assume an undifferentiated sphere of social and political activity, out of which, respec- tively, public and private spheres were articulated over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aries, however, is looking not at the larger world out of which state and society will slowly be articulated, but at the community out of which individuals will come to know themselves separately from their village and their family.

Like Habermas, Aries identifies three main "events" as responsible for the shift by which differentiation was accomplished: (1) the rise of the state; (2) increased literacy; (3) and new forms of religion.28 Aries points to various areas that were manifestations of this transformation, but he focuses on the development of individualism and the family as the structures of daily life constructed from these elements. "The 'social space' liberated by the rise of the state and the decline of communal forms of sociability was occupied by the individual, who established himself- in the state's shadow, as it were - in a variety of settings."29 Only after 1800, he argues, did the family take the place of the individual as the focus of private life.

In the history of private life, the eighteenth century was characterized by new forms of sociability that took place in the new social settings occupied by individuals. "Here," writes Aries,

a new culture developed, a social life that revolved around conversation, correspondence, and reading aloud. People met in intimate private rooms or around a lady's bed .... In the eighteenth century some of these groups adopted formal rules and organized as clubs, intellectual societies, or academies, losing some of their spontaneity in the process. They became public institutions. Other circles shed some of their gravity and turned into literary salons.30

Aries's "new culture" of private life is Habermas's bourgeois public sphere, located in those same new centers of sociability on which Habermas had focused. The "conviviality" that Aries thinks had "ceased to be a major factor in society by the end of the nineteenth century," was the defining feature of the public sphere whose rise and fall were traced by Habermas.

"As I see it," Aries reflects, "the entire history of private life comes down to a change in the forms of sociability."3' We could just as easily say that the entire history of the public sphere comes down to the same thing. This is because the structures and institutions of sociability give both the Annaliste interested in private life and the Marxist concerned with the public sphere the social base

27. Philippe Aries, "Introduction," to Passions of the Renaissance, 1-2. 28. Ibid., 3-4. 29. Ibid., 7. 30. Ibid., 8. 31. Ibid., 9.



10 DENA GOODMAN

upon which to erect notions of mentality, ideology, and discourse without, however, having to perpetuate mechanistic distinctions between "base" and "superstructure," "idea" and "reality," that both seek to transcend through integration."

At the end of Aries's Introduction to Passions of the Renaissance one finds that at the end of his own life, the master of private life history was beginning to see that his work and that of those interested in the public sphere were two sides of the same coin. He acknowledged further that he had formulated the problem of the development of the relationship between public and private spheres too simplistically because he had been "alienated from political history." Whereas he had always looked at the private sphere as that which retreated from the public spaces of street or village or castle court, his friends and colleagues gave different meaning to the terms and the distinction between them: they held the political view of the public as that which refers to the state, and of the private as that which was beyond the control of the state. "This approach, centered on the state," Aries concludes, "is not without parallels to the other, centered on sociability."33 In an epilogue to Passions of the Renaissance, Chartier concludes in his own voice that it was one of the intentions of that work "to use the history of private life as a means of understanding the different definitions of public space: village or neighborhood, jurisdiction of the sovereign, or realm subject to criticism by what is held to be public opinion."34

In his own introduction to part one of Passions of the Renaissance, Chartier affirms his commitment to Aries's project of defining the boundary between public and private spheres in early modern Europe in terms of the state, religion, and literacy. "It is generally agreed," he writes, "that the limits of the private sphere depend primarily on the way public authority is constituted both in doctrine and in fact."35 But Chartier complicates Aries's picture, just as Ha- bermas had complicated Koselleck's, by focusing on the privatization of the state and the publicization of the private sphere. Norbert Elias is Chartier's guide in explaining how, through the court, the state "instituted a new way of being in society, characterized by strict control of the instincts, firmer mastery of the emotions, and a heightened sense of modesty."36 The seventeenth-century

32. The interest in such structures of sociability and their usefulness for integrating social practices and beliefs is what brought the work of another German sociologist, Norbert Elias, into the developing framework of what Roger Chartier has dubbed "cultural history." See Chartier, "Introduction," Cultural History: Between Practices and Representations, transl. Lydia Cochrane (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988), 1-16.

33. Aries, "Introduction," 9-11. In a note, Chartier explains that this last section of the Introduc- tion is based on the recollections he and the other collaborators had of "the thoughts that [Aries's] seminar [on the History of Private Space] inspired in Philippe Aries," Passions of the Renaissance, 615, n. 2 to "Introduction."

34. Chartier, "Epilogue" to Passions of the Renaissance, 610. 35. Chartier, "Introduction" to Passions of the Renaissance, 15. 36. Ibid., 16. He refers specifically to Elias's The Civilizing Process, transl. Edmund Jephcott,

2 vols. (New York, 1978 and 1982). An English translation of Chartier's introduction to the French edition of Elias's other major work, The Court Society, transl. E. Jephcott (New York, 1983) is included in Cultural History under the title, "Social Figuration and Habitus: Reading Elias," 71-94.




state created privacy as secrecy, as that which could not be displayed in public, from parts of the body, to social behaviors, to the government itself defined as the secret du roi.37

To explain the publicity of the private sphere, Chartier turns to Habermas:

If the "private" is a product of the modern state, the "public" is by no means a state monopoly. In England by the end of the seventeenth century and in France during the eighteenth, a public space began to develop outside of government. It grew out of the private sphere, a consequence of what Jurgen Habermas has called the public use of reason by private individuals. The public social life of the Enlightenment took many forms, only some of which were institutionalized. Discussion and criticism gradually came to focus on the authority of the state itself. In literary societies, Masonic lodges, clubs, and cafes, people learned to associate as intellectuals, recognizing all participants regardless of status, as equals.38

Within the History of Private Life itself, then, Chartier has inscribed the public face of the private realm, identifying it with the institutions of sociability that Aries, a few pages earlier, had called "public institutions." And yet, as Daniel Gordon points out, the Passions of the Renaissance does not develop this line of thinking, focusing rather on Aries's central concern: the dissolution of community and the creation of isolation and intimacy.39 Like his mentor, Chartier was only beginning to be aware of the relationship between public sphere theory and the history of private life.

In his most recent work, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Chartier has made a real attempt to bring together the work of the historians of political culture with his own work on popular culture, reading practices, and the history of the book.40 A chapter entitled "The Public Sphere and Public Opinion" is based on Habermas's theory (primarily as it has been interpreted by Keith Baker), and establishes the framework within which, in the next chapter, Chartier can talk about book publication and diffusion.4'

What is interesting here is not simply that the histories of Aries and Habermas converge, but that they emerged as answers to very different questions and within independent intellectual traditions. While Habermas writes as a re- forming Marxist sociologist of the Frankfurt School, Aries was an Annaliste historian whose work on the history of childhood and attitudes toward death were tongue dure'e studies of mentality. 42 Aries explicitly criticized teleological

37. On the secret du roi see Baker, Inventing the French Revolution, 169-170. 38. Chartier, "Introduction" to Passions of the Renaissance, 17. 39. Daniel Gordon, "The Idea of Sociability in Pre-Revolutionary France," (Ph.D. Dissertation,

University of Chicago, 1990), 367-368. 40. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane

(Durham, N.C., 1991). 41. Unlike Habermas and Baker, Chartier frequently reminds the reader that "between the people

and the public there was a clear break. From Malesherbes to Kant, the line of demarcation ran between those who could read and produce written matter and those who could not." (Cultural Origins, 37).

42. On Habermas see Peter Hohendahl, "Jirgen Habermas: 'The Public Sphere' (1964)," transl. Patricia Russian, New German Critique 3 (1974), 45-48; and The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca, N.Y., 1982), 242-280. Aries's major work is the pathbreaking Centuries of Childhood: A Social History of Family Life, transl. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962).



12 DENA GOODMAN

history, of which Habermas's Marxist dialectic provided one version, in favor of an historical approach that treated the early modern period as "something autonomous and original.... Something unique, neither a continuation of the Middle Ages nor an adumbration of the future."43 But while Aries wanted to look at the period from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries covered by volume three of A History of Private Life as a moment that had value and meaning in itself, it is also clear that he saw this as a period when mentality changed with a Foucauldian epistemic shift. Like Foucault, Aries displaced the transformative moment from the e've'nement of 1789 to the century that preceded it, further distancing himself from the Marxist paradigm. In doing so, however, Aries located the center of interest in exactly the same place as Habermas had, for in his attempt to make the cultural sphere more than superstructure, Habermas gave it an importance that shifted the focus of the Marxist dialectic away from the Revolution and to the eighteenth century, when an authentic public sphere was articulated and established for the first and only time.4

III. CONVERGENCE AND IMPLICATIONS

The convergence of public sphere theory and the history of private life lies in two complementary strains in the historiography of the Old Regime and Revolution: one that talks primarily of political culture and public opinion, and a second that looks at sociability. Often, however, they are talking about the same thing: Aries's institutions of sociability and Habermas's institutions of the public sphere reveal sociability as a dimension of political culture: the social structures by which and within which prerevolutionary discourse was shaped and protopolitical experience was gained.45

Roger Chartier effects a more complex synthesis of public sphere and private life historiography and theory in order to provide a new solution to an old problem. In The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, Chartier concludes

43. Aries, "Introduction," 2. 44. In Aries and Duby's History of Private Life, the French Revolution is displaced to volume

four, which takes on the nineteenth century. Habermas's discussion of the Revolution is a couple of pages under the heading "The Continental Variants [of the Political Functions of the Public Sphere]," Structural Transformation, 69-71.

45. Recent work that focuses on political sociability includes Ran Halevi, LesLoges maconniques dans la France d'Ancien Rigime: aux origines de la sociability democratique (Paris, 1984); Gordon, "The Idea of Sociability in Pre-Revolutionary France"; and Margaret C. Jacob, Living the Enlight- enment: Freemasonry and Politics in 18th-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991). Chartier rightly distin- guishes between two opposing forms of political sociability in the Old Regime: the "democratic sociability" of masonic lodges and clubs that culminated in the Jacobinism of the Revolution; and the sociability of the literate public sphere found in salons, cafes, and academies. (See Cultural Origins, 16-17.) While Koselleck's work clearly informs the study of democratic sociability, the current interest in it is also indebted to Fransois Furet's essay on Augustin Cochin in Interpreting the French Revolution, 164-204. Cochin's major works are: Les Societts de pensie et la Dimocratie moderne (Paris, 1921); and Les Societts depensie et la Revolution en Bretagne (1787-1788) (Paris, 1925). Despite the growing body of work informed by Habermas, Gordon's is the only study that uses it to explore the political sociability of the literate public sphere.




with the paradox that "the long process of invention of the private sphere culminated with the institution of the full dominance of the public sphere."46 How can it be, he asks, that the culmination of the age characterized in The Passions of the Renaissance as that of the emergence of the private sphere, was a revolution that sought to dissolve the private under the gaze of the state? "The Revolution and its exclusive passion for publicness thus seems incongruous in an age that delighted in a new and more intimate organization of ordinary life."47 Chartier resolves this paradox precisely by recognizing the dependence of the revolutionary public sphere on the Old Regime private sphere. There is a continuity, he explains, between the new political culture of the Revolution and the sphere of the individual. "Indeed, it was the constitution of the private as a form of experience and a set of values that made possible the emergence of a space both autonomous of state authority and critical of it."48 Drawing primarily on the work of Sarah Maza, Chartier identifies judicial memoirs and libelles as two strategies by means of which the new public sphere of the 1780s was fed by conflicts that were produced by its private side: the politicizing of disputes within families, and the public revelation of moral corruption in the monarchy.

The omnipresence of politics imposed by the Revolution was thus not contradictory to the privatization of conduct and thoughts that preceded it. Quite the contrary: it was precisely the construction of a space for liberty of action, removed from state authority and reliant on the individual, that permitted the rise of the new public space that was at once inherited from and transformed by the creative energy of revolutionary politics.49

To push Chartier's conclusion one step further: Was it not, then, because the authentic public sphere was one face of the private realm that the men of the Terror, once they had eliminated the public sphere of the monarchy, were unable to fix limits between public and private, and argued for a transparent politics that became a new form of despotism? If the Terror was about the domination of the intimate by the public, of the individual and the family by the state, its discourse erupted as a contestation about the meaning of public and private in a new society in which what had been a private realm with two faces was now the whole of state and society.

Following Chartier's lead, I would suggest that historians of the Old Regime and the Revolution need to place at the center of historical attention the prob- lematic relationship between public and private spheres. If, as Habermas argues,

46. Chartier, Cultural Origins, 195. 47. Ibid., 196. 48. Ibid. 49. Ibid., 196-197. He builds this case earlier, in chapter 2 (especially 34-37). Maza's work on

the memoirs and libelles can be found in the following articles: "Le Tribunal de la nation: les memoires judiciaires et l'opinion publique a la fin de l'Ancien R6gime," Annales ESC (1987), 73- 90; "The Rose-Girl of Salency: Representations of Virtue in Prerevolutionary France," Eighteenth- Century Studies 22 (1989), 395-412; "Domestic Melodrama as Political Ideology: The Case of the Comte de Sanois,"American Historical Review 94 (1989); "The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited (1785-1786), The Case of the Missing Queen," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt (Baltimore, 1990), 63-89.



14 DENA GOODMAN

the authentic public sphere developed within the private sphere; if the public sphere of the state was private in the sense that it was secretive, while the private sphere had a public face; if the institutions of the public sphere and those of private sociability were the same; then we need to start using these terms in more sensitive ways if they are to help us to get at the experience of men and women in the Old Regime. We need to get away from rigidly oppositional thinking that assumes two spheres or two discourses, one public and the other private. If these are indeed mutually exclusive categories of experience in today's world, they were not in the eighteenth century, when the monarchy was predicated on secrecy and a new form of publicity developed within -and precisely because it was within - the private sphere.

The eighteenth century was the historical moment in which public and private spheres were in the process of articulation, such that no stable distinction can or could be made between them -a moment in which individuals needed to negotiate their actions, discursive and otherwise, across constantly shifting boundaries between ambiguously defined realms of experience. If, as Kant pointed out, the eighteenth century was not an enlightened age, but an age of enlightenment, it was in the same sense an age of definition in which nothing was firmly defined.50 Rather than reifying these fundamental categories of human experience so that they falsify a changing reality and the attempts made through discourse to comprehend it, we need to appreciate the conflicts and ambiguities that they illuminate." To illustrate what I mean, let me conclude with an example of the way in which a too-rigid understanding of the opposition between public and private spheres fails to account for the complexity of the Old Regime.

In recent years a feminist historiography has emerged to challenge the notion that the French Revolution was a liberating moment in the history of women just because it is seen as one in the history of man. The work that has broken this ground and focused the attention of historians on it is Joan Landes's Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (1988).52 As Joan Kelly asked the question: "Did Women Have a Renaissance?""3 Joan Landes has asked: "Did women have a French Revolution?" Her answer, like Kelly's before her, is a resounding "no!" In Women and the Public Sphere, Landes

50. Immanuel Kant, "What is Enlightenment?" in Perpetual Peace and OtherEssays, transl. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis, 1983), 44.

51. Perhaps it is the notion of spheres, which invokes the invisible but inviolable orbits of the planets, the very image of the laws of nature, that causes Anglophone scholars to reify the categories of social experience under the names "public" and "private." The German title of Habermas's work (Strukturwandel der 6ffentlicheit) did not refer to a public sphere, but, rather, to "Offentlichkeit"- "publicity."

52. Joan B. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere in the Age of the French Revolution (Ithaca, N.Y., 1988). Two historians whose previous work has not focused on women have recently directed their attention to the problem posed by Landes. See Joan Wallach Scott, "French Feminists and the Rights of 'Man': Olympe de Gouges's Declarations," History Workshop 28 (1989), 1-21; and Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley, 1992).

53. Joan Kelly-Gadol, "Did Women Have a Renaissance?" in Becoming Visible: Women in European History, ed. Renate Bridenthal, Claudia Koonz, and Susan Stuard, 2nd ed. (Boston, 1987), 175-201.




argues that the republic that rose from the ashes of the Old Regime was a gendered republic, despite the universalist language of its male creators. The result was a male public sphere and a female private one. A life of domesticity was women's legacy of the French Revolution, and the two centuries of feminism that have followed are women's struggle to re-enter the public sphere from which that Revolution expelled them.54

The relationship between public and private spheres is central to Women and the Public Sphere. Landes explicitly takes off from Habermas and employs his categories; at the same time, she also works within the discourse of feminist political theory, to which these categories are also central. Her feminist perspec- tive is at the basis of a critique of Habermas: the main contention of her work is that the bourgeois public sphere is "essentially, not just contingently, masculinist.'955 Feminist theory, however, assumes an understanding of the relationship between public and private spheres that is significantly different from that of Habermas. "The dichotomy between the private and the public is central to almost two centuries of feminist writing and political struggle," Carol Pateman has written; "it is, ultimately, what the feminist movement is about."'56 Because Landes works within the feminist theoretical framework, she sees the public sphere as unitary and the private sphere as its antithesis.57 The result is that her argument both misses its target and fails to sustain her thesis: it misrepresents both the Old Regime and Habermas's representation of it.

My intention here is not to challenge Landes's conclusion that women were excluded from the public sphere that developed out of the French Revolution, but to suggest a more convincing way of reaching it. Seen in its more ambiguous relationship to the private sphere, Habermas's conception of the authentic public sphere is an extremely useful tool for understanding the role of the most visible women in the Old Regime and may even provide a new direction for a feminist historiography that is not trapped within the public/private opposition. If, as Pateman has concluded, "the feminist total critique of the liberal opposition of private and public still awaits its philosopher," the outlines of its prehis- tory can at least now be discerned.58

In Women and the Public Sphere, Landes argues that "public" women - those women who eschewed the domestic sphere for a life in the public world of the court and the Parisian salons - were "silenced" by those men who "inhabited" the bourgeois public sphere and were thus excluded by them from it, returned to the private sphere they had tried to escape.59 Because Landes's argument is based upon a simple opposition between public and private spheres, she assumes

54. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 199-202. 55. Ibid., 7. 56. Carol Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in The Disorder of

Women (Stanford, 1989), 118. In this vein see Jean Bethke Elshtain, Public Man, Private Woman: Women in Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 1981).

57. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 3. 58. Pateman, "Feminist Critiques," 136. 59. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 5-7.



16 DENA GOODMAN

that which she seeks to prove: that these spheres were essentially gendered. If we maintain the complexity of Habermas's vision of the Old Regime, by contrast, such a simple opposition is not possible. The beauty (and utility) of Habermas's vision of the Old Regime and its transformation into a new, bourgeois, order is precisely in the way in which it complicates the simple dialectic constructed by Koselleck. Habermas's framework, and especially the focus on institutions of sociability that he shares with Aries, reveals a very different public sphere from Landes's "masculinist" one: a public sphere in which women played a recognized and important role.

By calling salonnieres and women of the court (including royal mistresses) "public" women, Landes implies that they were transgressing the bounds of a private sphere within which men sought to confine them. There are two major problems with this assumption. First, Landes does not properly distinguish between women of the court and those of the salons in Habermas's terms. Second, she fails to understand that neither the public sphere of the state (the court), nor the bourgeois public sphere of which the salon was an institution, was fully public, and that the role of women within salons was acceptable in ways that would be impossible after 1793, when the men of the French Revolu- tion drew the line between a male political sphere and a female domestic one. The drawing of that line had as much to do with the collapse of the authentic public sphere as it did with misogyny, for the result was a state that once again sought to attribute all publicity to itself and to dominate a private sphere now reduced to the family. It was the authentic public sphere that was dissolved in the revolutionary process, and with it, a public role for women.

Landes appropriates the idea that salonnieres were public women from Car- olyn Lougee, whose work concerns the seventeenth-century debate about women's nature and role in society. "On the one hand," Lougee writes,

a broad-based defense of woman's character and celebration of feminine qualities provided the basis for justifying and legitimating the major public roles women had assumed through their leadership of the salons. On the other hand, a contrary current of thought combined opposition to the public role of women with a view of woman as weak and still inferior to man, if no longer downright evil.0

Lougee makes no pretenses to employing a Habermasian framework or termi- nology. Furthermore, she identifies the "feminist" position (the defense of women), with a mobilizing bourgeoisie, and the "antifeminist" position with those who sought to maintain birth as the determinant of nobility.6' Landes, on the other hand, discusses only the second of these positions, which she attributes not only to the defenders of the old nobility, but to Montesquieu, Diderot, Rousseau, "bourgeois publicists," and Grub Street hacks. The salonnie'res, she

60. Carolyn C. Lougee, "Le Paradis des Femmes": Women, Salons, and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France (Princeton, 1976), 6.

61. Ibid. This is the central argument of the book.




writes, "were the women against whom men revolted."62 The "male" position is thus identified with a public sphere that excluded women while, at the same time, all women are collapsed into the "other" which must, therefore, be rele- gated to a private sphere. As aristocrats, philosophes, "bourgeois publicists," literary hacks, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau are found to agree on this one issue of women's exclusion from the public sphere (when they cannot have agreed on anything else), so "public" women-salonnieres, women of the court, royal mistresses, and prostitutes -are all lumped together. This is Rousseauism with a vengeance.63 This is not Habermas, and it neither represents fairly the discourse on women in the Old Regime nor contributes to our understanding of the important roles women played in that society. Moreover, if Habermas's framework is used properly, it can help to explain why salonnieres in particular played such a prominent role in the shaping of the authentic public sphere in the eighteenth century. To do so, however, requires first making a distinction between the role of women in this public sphere and that of women in the public sphere of the state.

Most simply, the women who were associated with the absolutist public sphere through the court were associated with secrecy, intrigue, and deception. Influ- ence defined women's power at court, as it had since the Middle Ages when changes in dowry law meant that royal women lost authority. "If they exerted any power at all," explains Susan Stuard, "they derived it from their intimacy with and access to the reigning king. A royal mistress had the same opportunity to influence monarchical policy as the royal queen."64 The privatization of the monarchy under Louis XIV only increased the secrecy of court politics. The result was that male courtiers, like royal wives and mistresses, were reduced to intriguers and influence peddlers. The "feminization" of the aristocracy followed by a few centuries the feminization of court women, as the king's bed- chamber became the center of the royal household and the realm.65

In the eighteenth century, salonnieres were often tarred with the same brush as women of the court, but they also had vocal defenders in the men who regularly attended their salons.66 Thephilosophes frequented the salons of Mme.

62. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 23-24. She discusses Montesquieu on 31-38; Diderot on 45; "bourgeois publicists" on 46-47; and Grub Street hacks on 55-57; "Rousseau's Reply to Public Women," is the title of chapter 3.

63. Indeed, Rousseau's Lettre a d'Alembert sur les spectacles, in which he manages somehow to start out talking about the pernicious effects of the theater and ends up attacking these categories of women (via actresses) is Landes's central text (chap. 3).

64. Susan Stuard, "The Dominion of Gender: Women's Fortunes in the High Middle Ages," in Bridenthal, et al., Becoming Visible, 163.

65. Richelieu had already likened the realm to the royal household in 1635. See his Testament politique, ed. Louis Andre (Paris, 1947), 279-286.

66. See, for example, Andre Morellet, Eloges de Mme. Geoffrin, contemporaine de Mme. de Duffand, par Morellet, Thomas, et d'Alembert... (Paris, 1812). See also Dena Goodman, "Julie de Lespinasse: A Mirror for the Enlightenment," in Eighteenth-Century Women and the Arts, ed. Frederick M. Keener and Susan E. Lorsch (New York, 1988), 3-10; and "Governing the Republic of Letters: The Politics of Culture in the French Enlightenment," History of European Ideas 13 (1991), 183-199.



18 DENA GOODMAN

Geoffrin, Mlle. de Lespinasse, and Mme. Necker not for political advancement, but because these women orchestrated the kind of discourse that Habermas associates with the authentic sphere. Salon discourse was critical and it was subversive because it dealt freely but politely with topics of public concern. The Enlightenment salon functioned as a regulated matrix for the dissemination and publication of works that extended this discourse to the literate public and the tribunal of public opinion.67

While the private dimension of the absolutist public sphere made women associated with it vulnerable to condemnation as secretive intriguers, the situa- tion of the literate public sphere within the private realm protected the salon that was an institution of this "public" sphere from the power of a monarchy that respected the patriarchal authority that was supposed to reign in the home. At the same time, a "public" role for women was legitimated here, since, after all, this public sphere was within the private realm.68 The domestic space of Enlightenment salons protected salonnieres-as it did philosophes- from the limited power of the monarchy; it played on the monarchy's own assertion of a monopoly on publicity by staking out the territory beyond its reach. The Enlightenment salon brought private persons together in relative security to use their reason and collectively to launch their ideas into the arena of public opinion and public debate.

Obviously, there was some overlap between women of the court and salonnieres, just as there was between the men who attended salons and those who were at court, but the spheres of court and salon were fundamentally different. Each was an institution of a certain kind of sociability and discourse that corresponds to one of Habermas's two public spheres. This difference became increasingly apparent as the eighteenth century progressed. While Mme. de Tencin could conspire with her brother, the Cardinal, in the 1720s and 1730s, her protegee, Mme. Geoffrin, was not involved in court politics.69 Mme. Necker,

67. Dena Goodman, "Enlightenment Salons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambi- tions," Eighteenth-Century Studies 22 (1989), 329-350.

68. On women as both a legitimate source of order within the home and a feared source of disorder outside it, see Carol Pateman, "'The Disorder of Women': Women, Love, and the Sense of Justice," in The Disorder of Women, 25. On the symbolic relationship between family and state see Sarah Hanley, "Family and State in Early Modern France: The Marriage Pact," in Connecting Spheres: Women in the Western World, 1500 to the Present, ed. Marilyn J. Boxer and Jean H. Quataert (Oxford, 1987), 54-63; and "Engendering the State: Family Formation and State Building in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16 (1989), 4-27.

69. On the Tencins see Correspondance du cardinal de Tencin, ministre d'Etat, et de Mme de Tencin, sasoeur, avec le duc deRichelieu in the collection, "Memoires historiques du regne de Louis XV" (Paris, 1790); and Jean Sareil, Les Tencin: Histoired'unefamille au dix-huitiemesikcled'apr&s de nombreux documents ineidits (Geneva, 1969).

Mme. Geoffrin did once try to help her friend, the newly-crowned King of Poland, by passing a letter of his to her along to Choiseul, Louis XV's minister. When Choiseul responded negatively, Mme. Geoffrin wrote him a long letter explaining her action as simply that of a friend. "During the last trip to Fontainebleau," she wrote, "I had the honor, M. le Duc, to send you the letter of the King of Poland in which he informed me of his election. In this letter he showed the greatest desire to be recognized by France, and to be allied closely with her. I thought I was doing the King of Poland a favor in sharing it with you.... I see by your letter that the language used by the King of Poland to express these sentiments has displeased you and, rather than helping him, I have only




who was married to the man whom Habermas identifies as having opened the first breach in absolutist secrecy for a public sphere in the political realm with his Compte rendu au roi- the first public accounting of royal finances -was

hardly a court intriguer.70 Landes assumes both that the court and salon were within the same public

sphere, and that that sphere was both fully public and opposed to a domestic private sphere.7' The court, however, was the social institution of the absolutist public sphere, while the salon was at the center of the literate or authentic public sphere in the eighteenth century. As such, court and salon were oppositional. As Habermas explains:

The "town" was the life center of civil society not only economically; in cultural-political contrast to the court, it designated especially an early public sphere in the world of letters whose institutions were the coffee houses, the salons, and the Tischgesellschaften (table societies). The heirs of the humanistic-aristocratic society, in their encounter with the bourgeois intellectuals (through sociable discussions that quickly developed into public criticism), built a bridge between the remains of a collapsing form of publicity (the courtly one) and the precursor of a new one: the bourgeois public sphere.72

In attempting to construct an opposition between a male public sphere and a female private one, Landes has collapsed Habermas's fundamental distinction between the public sphere of the state and that of the private realm.

There was no such thing as a "public" woman in eighteenth-century France. Most women, like most men, functioned within a private realm that had a public face. A literate elite among these men and women formed the institutions of the new public sphere that came to challenge the authority of the monarchy with the discourse of publicity that owed as much to Mme. Necker as it did to her

made you indisposed towards him." In fact, Mme. Geoffrin had shown the letter to lots of people, as was the custom. "All the letters that you have written here since your election have been found charming," she wrote to Stanislas on 7 December 1794. "All my friends were very eager to see the first letter that Your Majesty wrote to me since his election. I have read the first page to them; they have all been enchanted with it, but the letter has not left my hands." In other words, Mme. Geoffrin was trying to cross the boundary between the Republic of Letters, in which letters were freely exchanged and made public, and the absolutist public sphere, in which language was considerably more controlled and communication secretive. Her diplomatic gaffe in simply handing a letter from a friend to the King's minister demonstrates her unfamiliarity with the practices of court intrigue. Her fundamental honesty and openness, which made her a great salonniere, prevented her from being (or wanting to be) a court intriguer. For the letters see Correspondance inddite du Roi Stanislas-Auguste Poniatowski et de Madame Geoffrin (1764-1777), ed. Charles de Moiiy (Paris, 1875).

70. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 69. Surprisingly, Roger Chartier's discussion of the role of the salons in the literate public sphere does not really break out of the mold of court intrigue: he sees the salons merely as staging grounds for advancing the careers of men of letters. He portrays salonnieres as involved in cutthroat competition based on personal rivalry. "A fierce rivalry for the highest distinction thus reigned in the society of the Parisian salons," he concludes. "In the last analysis, what was at stake was control of an intellectual life that had been emancipated from the tutelage of the monarchy and the court" (Cultural Origins, 155-156).

71. Landes, Women and the Public Sphere, 3, 24, 27, 47, 49, 50. On 56-57, she seems to equate Louis XVI's mistress, Mme. du Barry, with salonnieres as equally public women.

72. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 30. On the distinction between court and salon in the seventeenth century see Gordon, "The Idea of Sociability," 150-153.



20 DENA GOODMAN

husband. In 1790, both Monsieur and Madame Necker fled France in the wake of a Revolution that, in the name of absolutes such as nature and transparency, had no place for those who recognized the ambiguities of the Old Regime and sought to negotiate a new order through the manipulation rather than the reification and gendering of categories of privacy and publicity.

The authentic public sphere was, according to Habermas, a part of the private sphere in the Old Regime. It was incompletely public, but in a way that was the mirror image of the absolutist public sphere. While the public sphere of the monarchy remained closed, merely displaying itself and its power to the public, the authentic public sphere remained enclosed within the private sphere, and thus could practice a form of openness unknown and antithetical to the monarchy. It was the ambiguity of this new sphere of activity that gave it the kind of discursive freedom it had and made it such a threat to the monarchy, whose monopoly over publicity it was challenging. The same ambiguity allowed women to play an important role in this public sphere so long as it remained private.

Habermas's authentic public sphere covered a range of discursive loci, from salons to the pamphlet press, each public and private in its own way, but all situated on the unstable ground between what would only later be established as the opposing spheres of public and private, male and female. In the eighteenth century, these were mere terms, ideal poles whose meanings were constantly and fruitfully contested. To see them otherwise is to oversimplify both the discourse and the experience of the Old Regime.73

Louisiana State University

73. These ambiguities are played out most prominently on the discursive level in the proliferation of the epistolary form in the Old Regime. The anecdote about Mme. Geoffrin, Stanislas, and Choiseul related above (n. 69) is but one event in the history of epistolary writing, from the letter books of the seventeenth century to the epistolary novels and pamphlet literature of the eighteenth, that can be seen as the discursive level of the history of the development of public and private spheres. The association of women with letter writing is crucial to this history. See Janet Gurkin Altman, "The Letter Book as a Literary Institution 1539-1789: Toward a Cultural History of Published Correspondences in France," Yale French Studies 71 (1986), 17-62; Writing the Female Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston, 1989); and Dena Goodman, "Michel de Servan and the Plight of Letters on the Eve of the French Revolution," in Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Europe, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London, 1992).



Public Sphere and Private Life/Dena Goodman

Documents

Transcript of Public Sphere and Private Life/Dena Goodman