Wesleyan University

Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to
the Old Regime
Author(s): Dena Goodman
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 1-20
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605
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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 eighteenthcentury 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'sTheStructuralTransformationof 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 real1. 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'sDe 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.

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DENA GOODMAN

izationthat the public spherearticulatedby Habermasis a dimensionof the

privatespheredelineatedby Chartierandhis collaborators,the falseopposition
betweenthemcan be collapsed.The next step in our understandingof the Old
Regime,I am suggesting,requiresa joint effortand mutualunderstandingof
thoseworkingwithinthesetwo theoreticalandhistoricalframeworks.Theresult
will be an integrationof the richeststrainsin currenthistoricalthinkingand a
vision of the Old Regimeas the momentin whichall attemptsat oppositional
definitionsof public and private were contested and undermined.The very
instabilityof conceptionsof public and privatespheresthat characterizedthe
years leadingup to the FrenchRevolutionhelped to create the volatile and
shiftinggroundupon which both criticismand revolutionwere constructed.
In what follows, I will firstpresentthe mapsof publicand privatespheresas
they have been drawnby the theoristsof the publicsphereand the historians
of privatelife. A discussionof the convergenceof these two visionsof the Old
Regimeandthe historiographical
traditionsfrom whichthey derivewill leadto
the examinationof two recentbooks: RogerChartier,TheCulturalOriginsof
the FrenchRevolution(1991); and Joan D. Landes, Womenand the Public
Spherein the Age of the FrenchRevolution(1988).A betterunderstandingof
the relationshipbetweenpublicand privatespherescan shed light on both the
originsof the FrenchRevolutionin the Old Regimeand the role and position
of women in the politicalcultureof the Old Regime.
I. THE PUBLIC SPHERE: HABERMAS AND KOSELLECK

In TheStructuralTransformationof the PublicSphere,JurgenHabermaspresents an interpretationof the creationof modern(bourgeois)societythrough

thehistoricalarticulationof anauthenticpublicspherein the eighteenthcentury.
His argumentcan be readas a criticalelaborationof that advancedby Reinhart
Koselleckin Critiqueand Crisis:Enlightenmentand the Pathogenesisof Modern Society, firstpublishedin Germanin 1959, and translatedinto Englishin
1988.2Sincethe focus of Koselleck'sworkis narrowerthan Habermas'sit provides a good startingpoint for an understandingof public spheretheory.
Koselleck'sargumenttakes the form of a dialecticin whichabsolutismand
criticismconfront each other; from their confrontationemergebourgeoissociety and the FrenchRevolution."Absolutismnecessitatedthe genesis of the
Enlightenment,and the Enlightenmentconditionedthe genesisof the French
2. ReinhartKoselleck,Critiqueand Crisis:Enlightenmentand the Pathogenesisof 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 specificanalyses 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, "ZurKritik 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.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

Revolution,"he explainsin his introduction."It is around these two theses

that the action of this book takes place."3Criticismin intellectualactivityand
absolutismin politics, he argues, both emergedout of the ReligiousWars.
Absolutismfoundits theoreticalbasisin the doctrineof raisond'6tat,a doctrine
that allowedit to establishpolitics outsidethe rangeof moralconsiderations.
But if the systemof absolutismsoughtcarefullyto excludemoralityfrom politics, it did not, in theory at least, intrude upon the now private sphere of
individualconscience.Peace was achievedthroughthe separationof political
(public)authorityandobediencefrompersonal(private)moralityand religious
conscience.Only externalactions could be judged by the establishedpowers;
the internalmovementsof the heart were one's own businessand so were removed from the public arenawhereconflictcould arise.4
The Republicof Lettersconceivedby Pierre Bayle toward the end of the
seventeenthcenturywasestablishedin the privatespherecarvedout by religious
conscience over the course of the precedingcentury. There critical reason
reigned,and it was to assurethe autonomyof criticismthat Bayle removedit
fromthe politicaldomainof the absolutemonarchyto the veryheartof its own
Republicof Letters.It was the rigorousseparationof criticismfrom politics,
Koselleckargues,that madehistoricallypossible- if not inevitable- the seeminglycontradictorypoliticizationof criticismin the eighteenthcentury.Defining
itself in oppositionto the absolutiststate, criticismeventuallymadeof politics
its foremostobject. "Intellectualcriticism,"he writes,"basedon the separation
of the non-politicalRepublicof Lettersandthe politicalState,now took refuge
in thisseparationandat the sametimebroadenedit so as to extendits intellectual
judgement- ostensiblyneutralandin the nameof impartialtruth- to the State
as well."5
Criticism,intitiallydefinedas the antithesisof absolutism,was transformed
into its opponentin the handsof the philosopher.For Koselleck,this was not
a happyturnof events. Criticismbecamehypocrisy,and the criticbecamethe
usurperof sovereignauthority,employingthe terms of neutralityand objectivity in orderto seize power for himself. "Criticism,"concludesKoselleck,
"goesfarbeyondthatwhichhadoccasionedit andis transformedinto the motor
of self-righteousness."6
It wasthephilosopher'assumptionof powerin the name
of societythat led inevitablyto the JacobinRevolution.Theirhypocrisywould
becomethe hypocrisyof the Terror.7
Koselleck'sargumentis elegant,as all good dialecticsare. But the simplicity
behindthat eleganceis also its weaknessas historicalexplanation.Koselleck
sets up a fundamentaloppositionbetweenthe publicsphereof absolutismand
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, Koselleckdependsheavilyon a readingof Hobbes in

constructingthis phaseof his argument.
5. Ibid., 110-114.
6. Ibid., 119.
7. Ibid., 119-120.

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DENA GOODMAN

accordingto a simplehistoricaldialectic,becomesthe frameworkupon which

Habermascanweavea morecomplexandsatisfyingpictureof the Old Regime.
WhereasKoselleckmadea simpleidentificationof the publicwiththe state,
and saw the privaterealm of conscienceas the by-productof state policy,
Habermasbeginswith an inquiryinto the meaningof the term"public."In the
MiddleAges, he argues,therewas no publicsphere"inthe senseof a separate
realmdistinguishedfromthe privatesphere."Publicitybecamea kindof "status
attribute"of those with power-it representedthe powerof the person,rather
than articulatinga sphereof social action.8
Since there was no public sphere, there was no privatesphereeither. Like
Koselleck,Habermasidentifiesthe emergenceof the privatespherewith the
Reformation.9Unlike Koselleck,he sees the public spherenot simplyas that
from whichthe privatewas delineated,but as itself in the processof definition
atthesametime."Thefirstvisiblemarkof the analogouspolarizationof princely
authority,"he explains, "was the separationof the public budget from the
territorialruler'sprivate holdings."'0Out of an undifferentiatedexperience,
simultaneousdevelopmentswereoccurringthat articulatedpublicand private
spheresin differentways.The establishmentof the privatesphereof individual
consciencewas not, in Habermas'sscheme,the resultof state policy, but was
a simultaneousand analogousdevelopment.The privatespheredid not simply
emergefrom the rib of the absolutistAdam.
Whatthe statedidcreate,however,wasits ownobject:thepublic.Thepublic,
accordingto Habermas,was initiallythe objectof state power,the "addressees
of publicauthority."In particular,he is thinkingof mercantilistpolicy, which
addressedeconomicindividuals."Civilsociety,"he continues,"cameinto existence as the corollaryof a depersonalizedstate authority.""
UnlikeKoselleck,whosedialecticis moreHegelianthan Marxist,Habermas
works within Marxistdiscourse,as his identificationof the public and civil
societywiththe bourgeoisiedemonstrates."Thisstratumof 'bourgeois'wasthe
realcarrierof the public,whichfromthe outsetwasa readingpublic,"he writes.
"In this stratum . . ., the state authorities evoked a resonance leading the

publicum, the abstractcounterpartof public authority,into an awarenessof

itself as the latter'sopponent,that is, as the publicof the now emergingpublic
sphere of civil society."'2 This is Habermas's version of class consciousness,

althoughit is prettyfar removedfrom any simplenotions of economicstatus

and interest.
And criticism,for Habermas,was neitherthe naiveinventionof Koselleck's
Bayle nor the nefarioushypocrisyof his heirs in the Enlightenment.For Habermas,criticismdeveloped"inthe zone of continuousadministrativecontact"
8. Habermas, Structural Transformation, 7.
9. Ibid., 11.
10. Ibid., 12.
11. Ibid., 18-19.
12. Ibid., 23.

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PUBLIC SPHEREAND PRIVATELIFE

Sphereof Public
Authority

PrivateRealm
Civil society(realmof
commodityexchange
and social labor)

Public spherein the

politicalrealm

State (realmof the

"police")

Publicspherein the world

of letters(clubs,press)
Conjugalfamily'sinternal
space(bourgeois
intellectuals)

(marketof cultureproducts)
"Town"

Court(courtly-noble
society)

FIGURE1

Diagramof therelationshipbetweenpublicandprivatespheresfrom Habermas,Structural Transformation, 30.

betweenthe state and its subjects. It developedin this "critical"zone because

subjectswereprivatepersonswho found certainof theiractivitiesthe objectof
publicpolicy, and thus wereprovokedinto usingtheir reasonto make critical
judgments.'3 A new public sphere,similarto Koselleck'sRepublicof Letters,
formedin oppositionto the state:"Thepublicumdevelopedinto the public,the
subjectuminto the [reasoning]subject,the receiverof regulationsfrom above
into the rulingauthorities'adversary."'4
In Habermas'spicture, criticismdid not illegitimatelyand surreptitiously
invadethe publicsphereof the state. By expandingthe Republicof Lettersinto
an authenticpublicsphere,Habermaslegitimizesit. Criticismis now seenas the
properdiscourseof the "bourgeoispublic sphere,"in which "privatepeople
come togetheras a public."'5What for Koselleckwas mere utopianismthat
maskedrealpoliticaland economicrelations,is for Habermasthe greathistorical developmentof the modernworld:the sphereof publicopinion. He finds
in the bourgeoispublicsphere,its criticaland open discourse,and the public
opinion that representsit, the best hope for a modern democraticpolitical
structure.
In Habermas'spositiveview, then, what is the relationshipbetweenpublic
and privatespheres?[Figure11What he calls the "authentic"publicsphereis
part of the privaterealm. Thereare thus two public spheres:the inauthentic
publicsphereof stateauthority,andthe authenticone of privatepeoplecoming
togetheras a publicthroughthe publicuse of theirreason.The authenticpublic
spheredividesfurtherinto threeaspects,whichdevelopin the followingorder:
first,the marketof cultureproducts;second, the Republicof Letters,with its
institutionsof intellectualsociability;and, third,the publicspherein the political realm.Theauthenticpublicsphere,moreover,whichis in the privaterealm,
is distinguishedfrom the intimateprivatespherewhichitself has two aspects:
13. Ibid., 24.
14. Ibid., 26.
15. Ibid., 27.

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DENA GOODMAN
Privatbereich

Burgerliche Gesellschaft
(Bereich d. Warenverkehrs
u. d. gesellsch. Arbeit)

Sphare d. offentl. Gewalt

politische
Offentlichkeit

Staat
(Bereich d. "Polizei")

literary.Offentlichkeit
(Clubs, Presse)

Kleinfam. Binnenraum
(birgerl. Intelligenz)

(Kulturgutermarkt)

Hof
(adlig-hof. Gesellschaft)

"Stadt"

FIGuRE2
Figure I as it appears in the German edition.

civilsociety,whichis concernedwithproductionandexchangeof commodities;

and the bourgeoisfamily. The town, in whichthe authenticpublicspherewas
manifestedin the Old Regime,"wasthe life centerof civil society":the public
face of the privaterealm. In the town, institutionsof sociabilityand publicity
weredevelopedto counterthose of the court, and it was therethat the public
spherein the political realmemergedto confront the state.'6
If criticismis the discourseof the criticalzone wherestate and societymeet,
thenthe authenticpublicsphereis the groundthatmediatesbetweenthe private
life of individualsas producersand reproducers,and theirpublicroles as subjects and (later)citizensof the state: it is the publicgroundof "society."It is
alsothe groundof the Enlightenment,andthusHabermasalso sometimesrefers
to the "literate"
publicsphere,sincethe publicwasfirsta readingpublic,andthe
critical reasoning of private persons on political issues had a literary precursor.17

Both Habermasand Koselleckare particularlyinterestedin the institutions

in which criticismand the public spheretook social shape. These institutions
of sociability- clubs, cafes, salons, academies,and so on - providethe social
base of the intellectualhistoryKoselleckand Habermaswrite, a locus for the
bourgeoisieexcludedfromstatepoliticsandthe philosophes who constructtheir
ideology.'8Koselleck'smain focus, however, is the Masoniclodges, for they
best representthe hiddenpowerof the new class. For Koselleck,the secretrites
of the Illuminatirepresentthe darkshadowsof Enlightenmentandbecomethe
figureof its bourgeoishypocrisy."Onthe Continent,"he asserts,"therewere
two social structuresthat left a decisiveimprinton the Age of Enlightenment:
the Republicof Lettersandthe Masoniclodges.Fromthe outset,Enlightenment
16. Ibid., 29-30. Thediagramgivenhereis fromtheAmericaneditionof Habermas'swork.The
diagramin the Germanedition is slightly different.[Figure2] It indicatesless clearlythat the
authenticpublicsphereis in theprivaterealm,sinceit lackstheverticallinesof demarcationbetween
the variouszones.Onthe otherhand,it indicatesmoreclearlythatthe authenticpublicsphere,and
not simplythe"marketof cultureproducts"is associatedwiththetown.(Habermas,Strukturwandel
der 6!fentlichkeit[Berlin,1965],41.)
17. Habermas,StructuralTransformation,29.
18. Koselleck,Critiqueand Crisis,65-69; Habermas,StructuralTransformation,31-43.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

and mystery appeared as historical twins."' Moreover, he continues, "the mystery, this element that seems so flatly to contradict the spirit of the Enlightenment, 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 processin whichthe state-governedpublicspherewas appropriatedby the public
of privatepeoplemakinguse of theirreasonand was establishedas a sphereof criticism
of publicauthority,wasone of functionallyconvertingthe publicspherein the worldof
lettersalreadyequippedwithinstitutionsof the publicand withforumsfor 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 underlay these new institutions of sociability came to challenge "the practice of
secrets of state."22The 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,"23but 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 divergence 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.
20.
21.
22.

Koselleck, Critiqueand Crisis,62.

Ibid., 70.
51.
Habermas, StructuralTransformation,
Ibid., 52.

23. Ibid., 56.

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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 postMarxist 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 European 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 studyis a productof the earlypostwarperiod.It representedan attemptto examine
the historicalpreconditionsof GermanNational Socialism,whose loss of realityand
Utopianself-exaltationhad resultedin hithertounprecedentedcrimes.Therewas also
the contextof the cold war. Here, too, I was tryingto enquireinto its Utopian roots
which,it seemed,preventedthe two superpowersfromsimplyrecognisingeachotheras
America
opponents.... It was in the Enlightenment,to whichboth liberal-democratic
and socialistRussiarightlyretracedthemselves,that I began to look for the common
roots of their claim to exclusivenesswith its moral and philosophicallegitimations.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,26Koselleck 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 introducing 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 FrenchRevolution(Berkeley,1984).See also TheFrenchRevolutionand the Creationof

ModernPolitical Culture:vol.1, The Political Cultureof the Old Regime,ed. KeithM. Baker
(Oxford, 1987);and vol. 2, ThePolitical Culture of the French Revolution, ed. Colin Lucas (Oxford,
1988).
25. Koselleck, Critique and Crisis, 5 and 1.
26. Habermas, Structural Transformation, chap. 5.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

are confounded into a modern one in which they are fully distinguished.27Not
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, respectively, 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.28Aries 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 newculturedeveloped,a sociallife thatrevolvedaroundconversation,correspondence,
and readingaloud. People met in intimateprivaterooms or arounda lady'sbed ....
In the eighteenthcenturysome of these groupsadoptedformalrulesand organizedas
clubs,intellectualsocieties,or academies,losingsomeof theirspontaneityin theprocess.
Theybecamepublicinstitutions.Othercirclesshedsomeof theirgravityandturnedinto
literarysalons.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.
28.
29.
30.
31.

Philippe Aries, "Introduction," to Passions of the Renaissance, 1-2.

Ibid., 3-4.
Ibid., 7.
Ibid., 8.
Ibid., 9.

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10

DENA GOODMAN

upon which to erect notions of mentality,ideology, and discoursewithout,

however, having to perpetuatemechanisticdistinctionsbetween "base"and
"idea"and "reality,"that both seek to transcendthrough
"superstructure,"
integration."

At the end of Aries'sIntroductionto Passions of the Renaissanceone finds

that at the end of his own life, the masterof privatelife historywas beginning
to see that his work and that of those interestedin the publicsphereweretwo
sides of the same coin. He acknowledgedfurtherthat he had formulatedthe
problemof the developmentof the relationshipbetween public and private
spherestoo simplisticallybecausehe hadbeen"alienatedfrompoliticalhistory."
Whereashe hadalwayslookedat the privatesphereas thatwhichretreatedfrom
the publicspacesof streetor villageor castlecourt, his friendsand colleagues
gavedifferentmeaningto the termsandthe distinctionbetweenthem:they held
the politicalviewof the publicas thatwhichrefersto the state,andof the private
as that whichwas beyondthe controlof the state. "Thisapproach,centeredon
the state,"Aries concludes,"is not withoutparallelsto the other, centeredon
In an epilogueto Passionsof theRenaissance,Chartierconcludes
sociability."33
in his own voicethat it was one of the intentionsof thatwork"tousethe history
of privatelife as a means of understandingthe differentdefinitionsof public
space:villageor neighborhood,jurisdictionof the sovereign,or realmsubject
to criticismby what is held to be public opinion."34
In his own introductionto partone of Passionsof the Renaissance,Chartier
affirmshis commitmentto Aries'sproject of definingthe boundarybetween
publicandprivatespheresin earlymodernEuropein termsof the state,religion,
and literacy."It is generallyagreed,"he writes, "thatthe limits of the private
sphere depend primarilyon the way public authorityis constitutedboth in
doctrineand in fact."35But ChartiercomplicatesAries'spicture,just as Habermashad complicatedKoselleck's,by focusing on the privatizationof the
state and the publicizationof the privatesphere. NorbertElias is Chartier's
guide in explaininghow, throughthe court, the state "instituteda new way of
beingin society, characterizedby strictcontrolof the instincts,firmermastery
of the emotions,anda heightenedsenseof modesty."36
The seventeenth-century
32. The interestin suchstructuresof sociabilityand theirusefulnessfor integratingsocialpractices and beliefs is what broughtthe work of anotherGermansociologist, NorbertElias, into
the developingframeworkof what RogerChartierhas dubbed"culturalhistory."See Chartier,
transl.LydiaCochrane
CulturalHistory:BetweenPracticesand Representations,
"Introduction,"
(Ithaca,N.Y., 1988), 1-16.
9-11. Ina note,Chartierexplainsthatthislastsectionof the Introduc33. Aries,"Introduction,"
tion is basedon the recollectionshe andthe othercollaboratorshadof "thethoughtsthat [Aries's]
seminar[onthe Historyof PrivateSpace]inspiredin PhilippeAries,"Passionsof theRenaissance,
615, n. 2 to "Introduction."
34. Chartier,"Epilogue"to Passionsof the Renaissance,610.
to Passionsof the Renaissance,15.
35. Chartier,"Introduction"
36. Ibid., 16. He refersspecificallyto Elias'sTheCivilizingProcess,transl.EdmundJephcott,
2 vols. (NewYork, 1978and 1982).An Englishtranslationof Chartier'sintroductionto the French
editionof Elias'sother majorwork, The CourtSociety,transl.E. Jephcott(New York, 1983)is
includedin CulturalHistoryunderthe title, "SocialFigurationand Habitus:ReadingElias,"71-94.

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PUBLIC SPHEREAND PRIVATELIFE

11

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 productof the modernstate, the "public"is by no meansa state
monopoly. In Englandby the end of the seventeenthcenturyand in Franceduringthe
eighteenth,a publicspacebeganto developoutsideof government.It grewout of the
privatesphere,a consequenceof what JurgenHabermashas called the publicuse of
reasonby privateindividuals.The public social life of the Enlightenmenttook many
forms, only some of which were institutionalized.Discussionand criticismgradually
cameto focus on the authorityof the state itself. In literarysocieties,Masoniclodges,
clubs,andcafes, peoplelearnedto associateas intellectuals,recognizingall participants
regardlessof 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.39Like 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.40A 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 reforming 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'estudies of mentality.42 Aries explicitly criticized teleological
37. On the secretdu roi see Baker,Inventingthe FrenchRevolution,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).

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DENA GOODMAN

history,of whichHabermas'sMarxistdialecticprovidedone version,in favor

of an historicalapproachthat treatedthe earlymodernperiodas "something
autonomousand original.... Somethingunique,neithera continuationof the
MiddleAges nor an adumbrationof the future."43
But while Aries wantedto
look at the period from the sixteenthto the eighteenthcenturiescoveredby
volume three of A History of Private Life as a moment that had value and
meaningin itself, it is also clear that he saw this as a period when mentality
changedwith a Foucauldianepistemicshift. LikeFoucault,Ariesdisplacedthe
of 1789to thecenturythatpreceded
transformative
momentfromthee've'nement
it, furtherdistancinghimselffromthe Marxistparadigm.In doingso, however,
Aries located the center of interest in exactly the same place as Habermas
had, for in his attemptto make the culturalspheremore than superstructure,
Habermasgave it an importancethat shiftedthe focus of the Marxistdialectic
away from the Revolutionand to the eighteenthcentury,when an authentic
public spherewas articulatedand establishedfor the first and only time.4
III. CONVERGENCE AND IMPLICATIONS

The convergenceof public spheretheory and the history of privatelife lies

in two complementarystrainsin the historiographyof the Old Regime and
Revolution:one thattalksprimarilyof politicalcultureandpublicopinion,and
a secondthat looks at sociability.Often, however,they are talkingabout the
samething:Aries'sinstitutionsof sociabilityand Habermas'sinstitutionsof the
public spherereveal sociabilityas a dimensionof political culture:the social
structuresby which and within which prerevolutionarydiscoursewas shaped
and protopoliticalexperiencewas gained.45
RogerChartiereffectsa morecomplexsynthesisof publicsphereand private
life historiographyand 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 Enlightenment: Freemasonry and Politics in 18th-Century Europe (Oxford, 1991). Chartier rightly distinguishes 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.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

13

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."47Chartier 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."48Drawing
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 omnipresenceof politicsimposedby the Revolutionwas thus not contradictoryto
the privatizationof conductand thoughtsthat precededit. Quite the contrary:it was
preciselythe constructionof a spacefor libertyof action, removedfromstateauthority
and relianton the individual,that permittedthe rise of the new publicspacethat was
at onceinheritedfromandtransformedby thecreativeenergyof revolutionarypolitics.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 problematic relationship between public and private spheres. If, as Habermas argues,
46. Chartier,CulturalOrigins,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), 7390; "The Rose-Girl of Salency: Representations of Virtue in Prerevolutionary France," EighteenthCentury 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.

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DENA GOODMAN

the authenticpublic spheredevelopedwithinthe privatesphere;if the public

sphereof the statewasprivatein the sensethatit wassecretive,whilethe private
spherehad a public face; if the institutionsof the public sphereand those of
privatesociabilitywerethe same;thenwe needto startusingthesetermsin more
sensitivewaysif they areto help us to get at the experienceof men and women
in the Old Regime.We needto get awayfrom rigidlyoppositionalthinkingthat
assumestwo spheresor two discourses,one publicandthe otherprivate.If these
are indeed mutuallyexclusivecategoriesof experiencein today'sworld, they
were not in the eighteenthcentury, when the monarchywas predicatedon
secrecyand a new form of publicitydevelopedwithin-and preciselybecause
it was within- the privatesphere.
Theeighteenthcenturywasthe historicalmomentin whichpublicandprivate
sphereswerein the processof articulation,such that no stabledistinctioncan
or could be made betweenthem-a moment in which individualsneeded to
negotiate their actions, discursiveand otherwise, across constantly shifting
boundariesbetween ambiguouslydefined realms of experience.If, as Kant
pointedout, the eighteenthcenturywas not an enlightenedage, but an age of
enlightenment,it wasin the samesensean age of definitionin whichnothingwas
firmlydefined.50Ratherthan reifyingthese fundamentalcategoriesof human
experienceso thattheyfalsifya changingrealityandthe attemptsmadethrough
discourseto comprehendit, we needto appreciatethe conflictsand ambiguities
that they illuminate."To illustratewhat I mean, let me concludewith an exampleof the way in whicha too-rigidunderstandingof the oppositionbetween
publicandprivatespheresfailsto accountfor thecomplexityof theOldRegime.
In recentyearsa feministhistoriographyhas emergedto challengethe notion
that the FrenchRevolutionwas a liberatingmomentin the historyof women
just becauseit is seen as one in the historyof man. The work that has broken
thisgroundandfocusedtheattentionof historianson it is JoanLandes'sWomen
and the Public Spherein the Age of the FrenchRevolution(1988).52As Joan
Kelly asked the question:"Did Women Have a Renaissance?""3
Joan Landes
has asked:"Didwomen have a FrenchRevolution?"Her answer,like Kelly's
before her, is a resounding"no!"In Womenand the Public Sphere, Landes
50. ImmanuelKant,"Whatis Enlightenment?"
in PerpetualPeaceandOtherEssays,transl.Ted
Humphrey(Indianapolis,1983),44.
51. Perhapsit is the notion of spheres,whichinvokesthe invisiblebut inviolableorbitsof the
planets,theveryimageof thelawsof nature,thatcausesAnglophonescholarsto reifythecategories
of socialexperienceunderthe names"public"and"private."The Germantitleof Habermas'swork
(Strukturwandel
der6ffentlicheit)didnot referto a publicsphere,but, rather,to "Offentlichkeit""publicity."
52. JoanB. Landes,WomenandthePublicSpherein theAge of theFrenchRevolution(Ithaca,
N.Y., 1988).Twohistorianswhosepreviousworkhasnot focusedon womenhaverecentlydirected
theirattentionto the problemposedby Landes.See Joan WallachScott, "FrenchFeministsand
the Rightsof 'Man':Olympede Gouges'sDeclarations,"History Workshop28 (1989), 1-21; and
Lynn Hunt, TheFamilyRomanceof the FrenchRevolution(Berkeley,1992).
53. Joan Kelly-Gadol,"Did WomenHave a Renaissance?"in Becoming Visible:Womenin
EuropeanHistory, ed. RenateBridenthal,ClaudiaKoonz, and SusanStuard,2nd ed. (Boston,
1987), 175-201.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

15

argues that the republicthat rose from the ashes of the Old Regime was a
genderedrepublic,despitethe universalistlanguageof its male creators.The
resultwas a malepublicsphereand a femaleprivateone. A life of domesticity
waswomen'slegacyof the FrenchRevolution,andthetwo centuriesof feminism
that have followed are women'sstruggleto re-enterthe public sphere from
which that Revolutionexpelledthem.54
The relationshipbetweenpublicand privatespheresis centralto Womenand
the PublicSphere.Landesexplicitlytakesoff from Habermasand employshis
categories;at the same time, she also works within the discourseof feminist
politicaltheory,to whichthesecategoriesarealso central.Her feministperspective is at the basis of a critiqueof Habermas:the main contentionof her work
is thatthe bourgeoispublicsphereis "essentially,not just contingently,masculinist.'955Feministtheory,however,assumesan understandingof the relationship
betweenpublic and privatespheresthat is significantlydifferentfrom that of
Habermas."Thedichotomybetweenthe privateand the public is centralto
almosttwo centuriesof feministwritingand politicalstruggle,"CarolPateman
has written;"itis, ultimately,whatthe feministmovementis about."'56Because
Landesworks within the feministtheoreticalframework,she sees the public
sphereas unitaryand the privatesphereas its antithesis.57The resultis that her
argumentboth missesits targetand fails to sustainher thesis:it misrepresents
both the Old Regimeand Habermas'srepresentationof it.
My intentionhere is not to challengeLandes'sconclusionthat womenwere
excludedfrom the publicspherethat developedout of the FrenchRevolution,
butto suggesta moreconvincingway of reachingit. Seenin its moreambiguous
relationshipto the private sphere, Habermas'sconception of the authentic
publicsphereis an extremelyusefultool for understandingthe role of the most
visible womenin the Old Regimeand may even providea new directionfor a
feministhistoriography
thatis not trappedwithinthe public/privateopposition.
If, as Patemanhas concluded,"thefeministtotal critiqueof the liberalopposition of privateand publicstill awaitsits philosopher,"the outlinesof its prehistory can at least now be discerned.58
In WomenandthePublicSphere,Landesarguesthat"public"women- those
womenwho eschewedthe domesticspherefor a life in the publicworldof the
courtand the Parisiansalons- were"silenced"by those men who "inhabited"
the bourgeoispublicsphereand werethus excludedby them from it, returned
to the privatespherethey had tried to escape.59BecauseLandes'sargumentis
basedupona simpleoppositionbetweenpublicandprivatespheres,sheassumes
54. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,199-202.
55. Ibid., 7.
56. Carol Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in The Disorderof
Women(Stanford, 1989), 118. In this vein see Jean Bethke Elshtain, PublicMan, PrivateWoman:
Womenin Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 1981).
57. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,3.
58. Pateman, "Feminist Critiques," 136.
59. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,5-7.

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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 differentpublic
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 Revolution 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 Carolyn Lougee, whose work concerns the seventeenth-century debate about
women's nature and role in society. "On the one hand," Lougee writes,
a broad-baseddefenseof woman'scharacterand celebrationof femininequalitiesprovidedthe basisforjustifyingandlegitimatingthe majorpublicroleswomenhadassumed
throughtheirleadershipof the salons. On the otherhand, a contrarycurrentof thought
combinedoppositionto the publicrole of womenwith a view of woman as weak and
still inferiorto man, if no longerdownrightevil.0
Lougee makes no pretenses to employing a Habermasian framework or terminology. 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
in
60. Carolyn C. Lougee, "LeParadisdesFemmes":Women,Salons,and SocialStratification
France(Princeton, 1976), 6.
Seventeenth-Century
61. Ibid. This is the central argument of the book.

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATE LIFE

17

writes, "werethe women againstwhom men revolted."62

The "male"position
is thus identifiedwith a publicspherethat excludedwomenwhile, at the same
time, all womenare collapsedinto the "other"whichmust, therefore,be relegated to a privatesphere.As aristocrats,philosophes, "bourgeoispublicists,"
literaryhacks,and Jean-JacquesRousseauare found to agreeon this one issue
of women'sexclusionfromthe publicsphere(whenthey cannothaveagreedon
anythingelse), so "public"women-salonnieres, women of the court, royal
mistresses,and prostitutes-are all lumpedtogether.This is Rousseauismwith
a vengeance.63
This is not Habermas,and it neitherrepresentsfairly the discourseon womenin the Old Regimenor contributesto our understandingof
the importantroles women played in that society. Moreover,if Habermas's
frameworkis usedproperly,it can helpto explainwhysalonnieresin particular
playedsuch a prominentrole in the shapingof the authenticpublic spherein
the eighteenthcentury.To do so, however,requiresfirstmakinga distinction
betweenthe roleof womenin this publicsphereandthatof womenin the public
sphereof the state.
Mostsimply,thewomenwhowereassociatedwiththeabsolutistpublicsphere
throughthe courtwereassociatedwith secrecy,intrigue,and deception.Influence definedwomen'spower at court, as it had since the MiddleAges when
changesin dowrylaw meantthat royal womenlost authority."If they exerted
any powerat all," explainsSusanStuard,"theyderivedit from their intimacy
withandaccessto the reigningking.A royalmistresshadthe sameopportunity
to influencemonarchicalpolicy as the royal queen."64
The privatizationof the
under
XIV
monarchy
Louis
only increasedthe secrecyof court politics. The
resultwas that male courtiers,like royalwivesand mistresses,werereducedto
intriguersand influencepeddlers.The "feminization"of the aristocracyfollowed by a few centuriesthe feminizationof court women, as the king'sbedchamberbecamethe centerof the royal householdand the realm.65
In the eighteenthcentury,salonniereswereoften tarredwith the samebrush
as women of the court, but they also had vocal defendersin the men who
regularlyattendedtheirsalons.66
Thephilosophesfrequentedthe salonsof 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., BecomingVisible,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.

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DENA GOODMAN

Geoffrin,Mlle.de Lespinasse,andMme.Neckernot for politicaladvancement,

but becausethese women orchestratedthe kind of discoursethat Habermas
associateswith the authenticsphere. Salon discoursewas criticaland it was
subversivebecauseit dealtfreelybut politelywithtopicsof publicconcern.The
Enlightenmentsalonfunctionedas a regulatedmatrixfor the disseminationand
publicationof worksthat extendedthis discourseto the literatepublicand the
tribunalof publicopinion.67
While the privatedimensionof the absolutistpublic spheremade women
associatedwith it vulnerableto condemnationas secretiveintriguers,the situation of the literatepublic spherewithinthe privaterealmprotectedthe salon
that was an institutionof this "public"spherefrom the powerof a monarchy
that respectedthe patriarchalauthoritythat was supposedto reignin the home.
At the sametime, a "public"role for womenwas legitimatedhere, since, after
all, this public spherewas within the privaterealm.68The domesticspace of
Enlightenmentsalons protectedsalonnieres-as it did philosophes- from the
limitedpowerof the monarchy;it playedon the monarchy'sown assertionof
a monopoly on publicityby staking out the territorybeyond its reach. The
Enlightenmentsalonbroughtprivatepersonstogetherin relativesecurityto use
theirreasonandcollectivelyto launchtheirideasintothe arenaof publicopinion
and publicdebate.
Obviously,there was some overlap between women of the court and salonnieres,just as therewasbetweenthe menwho attendedsalonsandthose who
wereat court,but the spheresof courtand salon werefundamentallydifferent.
Each was an institution of a certain kind of sociability and discoursethat
correspondsto one of Habermas'stwo publicspheres.This differencebecame
increasinglyapparentas the eighteenthcenturyprogressed.While Mme. de
Tencincould conspirewith her brother,the Cardinal,in the 1720sand 1730s,
herprotegee,Mme.Geoffrin,wasnot involvedin courtpolitics.69Mme.Necker,
67. Dena Goodman, "EnlightenmentSalons: The Convergence of Female and Philosophic Ambitions," 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:Womenin the WesternWorld,1500 to the Present,ed. MarilynJ. Boxerand Jean H.

Quataert (Oxford, 1987), 54-63; and "Engenderingthe State: Family Formation and State Building
in Early Modern France," French Historical Studies 16 (1989), 4-27.

du cardinalde Tencin,ministred'Etat,et de Mme de

69. On the Tencinssee Correspondance
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 nombreuxdocumentsineidits(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

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PUBLIC SPHERE AND PRIVATELIFE

19

who was marriedto the man whom Habermasidentifiesas havingopenedthe

firstbreachin absolutistsecrecyfor a publicspherein the politicalrealmwith
his Compte rendu au roi- the first public accounting of royal finances -was

hardlya court intriguer.70

Landesassumesboth that the court and salon were withinthe same public
sphere,and that that spherewas both fully public and opposedto a domestic
privatesphere.7'Thecourt, however,wasthe socialinstitutionof the absolutist
publicsphere,whilethe salonwasat the centerof the literateor authenticpublic
spherein the eighteenthcentury.As such, court and salon wereoppositional.
As Habermasexplains:
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 attemptingto constructan oppositionbetweena male publicsphereand a

femaleprivateone, Landeshas collapsedHabermas'sfundamentaldistinction
betweenthe public sphereof the state and that of the privaterealm.
France.
Therewas no such thing as a "public"womanin eighteenth-century
Mostwomen,likemostmen,functionedwithina privaterealmthathada public
face. A literateeliteamongthesemen andwomenformedthe institutionsof the
new public spherethat came to challengethe authorityof the monarchywith
the discourseof publicitythat owed as muchto Mme. Neckeras it did to her
madeyou indisposedtowardshim."In fact, Mme.Geoffrinhadshownthe letterto lots of people,
as was the custom."Allthe lettersthatyou havewrittenheresinceyourelectionhavebeen found
charming,"she wroteto Stanislason 7 December1794."Allmy friendswereveryeagerto see the
firstletterthatYourMajestywroteto me sincehis election.I havereadthe firstpageto them;they
haveall beenenchantedwithit, buttheletterhasnot left myhands."In otherwords,Mme.Geoffrin
was tryingto cross the boundarybetweenthe Republicof Letters,in which letterswere freely
exchangedand madepublic,andthe absolutistpublicsphere,in whichlanguagewas considerably
morecontrolledandcommunicationsecretive.Herdiplomaticgaffein simplyhandinga letterfrom
a friendto the King'sministerdemonstratesherunfamiliaritywith the practicesof courtintrigue.
Her fundamentalhonestyand openness,whichmadeher a greatsalonniere,preventedher from
being (or wantingto be) a court intriguer.For the letterssee Correspondanceindditedu Roi
Poniatowskiet de MadameGeoffrin(1764-1777),ed. Charlesde Moiiy (Paris,
Stanislas-Auguste
1875).
69. Surprisingly,RogerChartier'sdiscussionof the
70. Habermas,StructuralTransformation,
roleof thesalonsin theliteratepublicspheredoes not reallybreakout of the moldof courtintrigue:
he seesthe salonsmerelyas staginggroundsfor advancingthecareersof menof letters.He portrays
salonnieresas involvedin cutthroatcompetitionbasedon personalrivalry."Afiercerivalryfor the
highestdistinctionthus reignedin the society of the Parisiansalons,"he concludes."In the last
analysis,whatwas at stakewas controlof an intellectuallife that had beenemancipatedfromthe
tutelageof the monarchyand the court"(CulturalOrigins,155-156).
71. Landes,Womenand thePublicSphere,3, 24, 27, 47, 49, 50. On 56-57, she seemsto equate
Louis XVI'smistress,Mme. du Barry,with salonnieresas equallypublicwomen.
30. On thedistinctionbetweencourtandsalonin the
72. Habermas,StructuralTransformation,
seventeenthcenturysee Gordon,"TheIdea of Sociability,"150-153.

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DENA GOODMAN

20

husband.In 1790,both Monsieurand MadameNeckerfled Francein the wake

of a Revolutionthat, in the nameof absolutessuchas natureandtransparency,
had no place for those who recognizedthe ambiguitiesof the Old Regimeand
sought to negotiate a new order through the manipulationratherthan the
reificationand genderingof categoriesof privacyand publicity.
The authenticpublicspherewas, accordingto Habermas,a partof the private
spherein the Old Regime.It was incompletelypublic,but in a waythat was the
mirrorimage of the absolutistpublic sphere. While the public sphereof the
monarchyremainedclosed, merelydisplayingitself andits powerto the public,
the authenticpublic sphereremainedenclosedwithinthe privatesphere,and
thus could practicea form of opennessunknownand antitheticalto the monarchy.It was the ambiguityof this new sphereof activitythat gave it the kind
of discursivefreedomit had and madeit such a threatto the monarchy,whose
monopoly over publicity it was challenging. The same ambiguity allowed
women to play an importantrole in this public sphereso long as it remained
private.
Habermas'sauthenticpublicspherecovereda rangeof discursiveloci, from
salons to the pamphletpress, each public and privatein its own way, but all
situatedon the unstablegroundbetweenwhat would only laterbe established
as the opposingspheresof publicandprivate,maleandfemale.Inthe eighteenth
century,these were mere terms, ideal poles whose meaningswere constantly
and fruitfullycontested. To see them otherwiseis to oversimplifyboth the
discourseand the experienceof 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).

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