The Paris salons
1720–1789* · Event
In drawing rooms run by women — Madame Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, Madame Necker — the Enlightenment holds its weekly meetings: philosophes, scientists, ambassadors and the odd spy, arguing over dinner under rules of wit the hostesses enforce. The salons made dangerous ideas respectable, funded the Encyclopédie's contributors, and gave Europe a capital of conversation until the Revolution swept the whole world away.
On these timelines: The Enlightenment, Arts and Thoughts, Master, Women in history, France
More from The Enlightenment
- Age of Enlightenment (1685)
- Locke's An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1689)
- Kant's 'What is Enlightenment?' (1784)
- Locke's A Letter Concerning Toleration (1689)
- Voltaire's Treatise on Tolerance (1763)
- Rousseau's Discourse on Inequality (1755)
- Voltaire's Philosophical Dictionary (1764)
- Voltaire and the Calas affair (1762)
Around 1720
- Seven Years' War (1756)
- Glorious Revolution (1688)
- Industrial Revolution (1760)
- Reign of Peter the Great (1682)
- American Revolution (1765)
- Jacobite rising of 1745 (1745)
- Salem witch trials (1692)
- Siege of Vienna (1683) (1683)
- Industrial Revolution begins (1760)
- Newton's Principia Mathematica (1687)