The Age of Conversation By Benedetta Craveri New York Review Books, 488pp. £17.99
Medieval society, when it sought to describe its own constituent parts and their functions, was normally content to sketch out a simple tripartite structure. There were the peasants, who worked; the clergy, who prayed; and the knights, who fought.
Even by the 14th century this was looking somewhat inadequate as a theory: there were many who worked who were clearly not peasants, most significantly the growing class of artisans, merchants and men of money and business. Also, many clerics - the only generally literate class - were more occupied in government and administration than in praying. What did still appear to be the case was that the great property owners were indeed primarily preoccupied with fighting or, in the absence of a decent war, one of its peacetime substitutes, hunting, jousting, duelling or grabbing small parcels of land from their neighbours.
The ideological underpinning of the medieval classification of the three estates was that this division had been instituted by God for the benefit of all men. Thus, in the common formula, peasants did not simply work but worked "to feed us", as indeed priests did not just pray but prayed for our souls.
If it had ever been widely accepted that the landowning, arms-bearing class fought for us, that is to protect all classes from strangers who might kill them, this conceit was wearing a little thin by the end of the 16th century. The peace of 1598 ended nearly 40 years of bloody and exhausting religious civil strife in France. Further sporadic revolts in the next century were put down by the new king, Louis XIII, who wished to crush not only Protestantism but the nobles' ability to take up arms to advance their own interests. The work of consolidation of royal power he and his prime minister, Cardinal Richelieu, initiated was continued by their successors, Louis XIV and Cardinal Mazarin, who went a long way towards curbing the troublemaking capacities of the "great families" and at Versailles turned the once proud French nobleman and warrior into that most ridiculous and superfluous of creatures, a courtier.
Reeling under the shock of these changes, yet unwilling simply to give up the ghost as a class, the nobility henceforth sought a new self-definition and a new role. It is Benedetta Craveri's thesis, in this study of the French literary salon over two centuries, that the aristocracy, and particularly aristocratic women, found this role in the pursuit of style and in the creation of a new and complex art of "self-presentation".
"The outward signs of nobility - titles, positions, lands, palaces, clothing, and jewels," she writes, could no longer be trusted, since they could all be simply bought by new men, upstarts without noble blood. What remained was lineage, or "breeding", and its signs, a particular refined way of living, speaking, acting and behaving that would mark oneself off from the swinish, low-born others who seemed to be doing so well in so many new and confusing spheres of activity.
Craveri traces the development of sets of notions about manners, sensibility and correct behaviour as they were laid down by a succession of influential salon hostesses, from the Marquise Cathérine de Rambouillet in the 1610s, through the Mesdames de Sévigné and de Lafayette, and on through the next century to various aspirant midwives to the Enlightenment, such as Madame de Tencin and Mademoiselle de Lespinasse.
The physically weaker sex had much to gain from erecting around itself a protective sphere of civility and politesse. A world in which marriage for love, or even companionship, was exceptional, childbirth highly dangerous and husbands frequently several decades older than their wives and prone to drinking, gambling, whoring and catching the pox was no arcadia for women. Aristocratic women therefore created their own arcadia in their beautiful drawing rooms, where they, and men who would consent to behave, even temporarily, like women, would deliciously gossip, compose verses, read out exquisitely witty letters and discourse endlessly on the precise nature of love and the correct way to conduct affairs of the heart.
The society that emerged in the salons was a highly sophisticated but not especially learned or creative one. Humanist culture tended not to be available to women, even rich and powerful ones. Thus the grandes dames did not on the whole produce much important literature (Lafayette and Sévigné being partial exceptions). What they did produce, or at least preside over, was a vast quantity of sparkling conversation. Conversation, however, being normally a perishable commodity, how can Craveri convince the reader of her subjects' brilliance? Often, it seems, we are simply required to accept her assurances on this score.
It does not help, of course, if one is cursed with a natural propensity to harbour sour thoughts about one's betters. La Bruyère, who was in a position to know, wrote: "No matter with what skill the great manage to seem other than they are, they cannot conceal their malignity." And conceal it they do not. "If one is bored at court," writes Mademoiselle de Montpensier, "one goes to one's country estates, where one has one's own court. There one orders things to be built and one is amused." Quite.
Indeed almost the only really likable figure among the hostesses is the retired but not quite repentant courtesan, Ninon de Lenclos, who in her vigorous late 70s writes sensibly: "The mind has great advantages over the body; yet the body often satisfies little tastes, which recur and which relieve the soul of its sad reflections."
Dr Craveri has written a substantial work of deep scholarship in an engaging and lucid style. She is not to be blamed if her subjects, though arguably historically important, do not excite much admiration. Indeed it is hard to avoid the conclusion that the principal function of all their delicatesse, all the endless codifying and refining of just what it was to be poli or honnête or whatever, was to convey a sense of self-worth to a class which no longer had any function and which in fact did nothing.
Craveri relates how, in late 18th-century Paris, little groups of the new Enlightenment philosophes, men of spirit and intelligence though frequently of "common" birth, would often gather under a tree on their way home from performing at the stifling salons to continue their conversations, argue, shout, laugh, and, one likes to think, pass wind boisterously in the open air.
Though the excess of blood which was to be spilled in the coming 1789 revolution is to be regretted, the common man's fart in the face of the desiccated values of the ancien régime was the beginning of a new and welcome phase of human creativity which had been held back too painfully for too long.
Enda O'Doherty is an Irish Times journalist
Social History
Enda O'Doherty