Salon

The salon is a cultural institution of organized intellectual and social gathering, most closely associated with seventeenth- and eighteenth-century France, in which an educated hostess, or salonniere, convened writers, philosophers, artists and nobility in a private home for structured conversation, debate and the exchange of new ideas. Salons played a significant institutional role in disseminating Enlightenment thought and shaping literary and philosophical taste outside formal academic institutions, and the model spread to other European capitals and to intellectual circles in later periods and places. Historians of the public sphere have treated the salon as an important precursor institution to modern print and broadcast media culture, providing a space for the emergence of public opinion outside court and church authority.