Historians have generally accepted the argument that the
salon culture through which women participated in the public sphere
of eighteenth-century France faded in the 1780s, foreshadowing and
complementing the general exclusion of women from politics by the French
Revolution. This article presents evidence that salon sociability came
back to life in the aftermath of the French Revolution, giving upper-class
women renewed access to the public sphere as part of the partial
reconstruction of aristocratic power. Napoleon encouraged this revival as
part of a strategy for winning the support of traditional elites, but he
deplored powerful women and struggled to contain salonni�res by
reducing them to hostesses. He supported the development of ministerial
salons centered on male notables and exiled Madame de Sta�l, France's
most prominent salonni�re, in order to silence political dissent
in high society. Salons recovered significantly with the liberalization
of the public sphere during the Restoration and the July Monarchy,
along with the influence of salonni�res, who presided over a
new mondanit� (society life) linked closely with the political
sociability of elites, and supported by an enduring nostalgia for
the elegant society of the past. Nevertheless, the connection between
mondanit� and politics slowly weakened, and upper-class women
saw their informal political role diminished due to the rise of modern
institutions designed to organize the political life of a widening
middle-class electorate. The salon's decreasing significance within the
public sphere occurred after the consolidation of modern gender norms
and the juridical inscription of women's second-class status.
The work of Arthur de Gobineau has presented scholars with a number of interpretive problems concerning his status as a race theorist, his place in the history of racial thought, and the influence of his work on subsequent thinkers. This essay addresses the particularly vexing issue of the origins of Gobineau's racism from the perspective of his affiliation with French royalists in the 1840s and challenges the existing scholarship on the derivation ofL'Essai sur l'inégalité des races humainesby placing theEssaiin the context of his international experience as a member of the French diplomatic corps. Although disillusioned with legitimist politics during the July Monarchy, Gobineau never abandoned his youthful ideological priorities. From the perspective of his royalist past, theEssaiappears as part of an extended rumination on the decadence of the French aristocracy and its failure to stem the tide of revolution and bureaucratic centralization. As such, Gobineau's racism can best be understood as a royalist heresy rather than a continuation of his aristocratic elitism or a clean break with his earlier preoccupations.
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