Reviving the art of sociability : Madame de Genlis’s Post-Revolutionary Salon at the Arsenal

Abstract

Madame de Genlis is famous as a critic of the philosophes thanks largely to her society dialogue of the 1820s, Les dîners du baron d’Holbach (1822). Her portrait of positive sociability, Les soupers chez la maréchale de Luxembourg (1828), is far less famous. The soupers establish Genlis’s ideal of courtly sociability as superior to what she saw as perverse Enlightenment sociability and the incivility of the Revolutionary period. Yet these stylized dialogues are far from straightforward-ly historical representations of high society conversations. Instead, they are practical models for conversation, calculated to serve as a moral tonic for a divided society. Issuing from her experi-ence as a salonnière at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Genlis’s fictionalized dialogues of the 1820s reinvent the idea of eighteenth-century sociability to suit the tastes of the leaders of the nine-teenth century.