Dena Goodman

The Republic of Letters

Politeness was a female attribute because it derived from weakness rather than strength. But it was also a principle of equality, since it redressed the balance between strong and weak, male and female. The government of salonnieres was thus appropriate for a Republic of Letters whose relations were structured by reciprocity and the equality it implied. In this crucial respect, the government of salonnieres was just the opposite of the government of kings, although both were the sources of order in their respective polities.

According to contemporary theories of absolute monarchy, the king was the source of unity and order in a particularistic society. His role was to impose order authoritatively by reconciling the competing claims of the different groups from a position above them all. While the salonniere, too, created order in an otherwise disorderly society, she did so not with an authority imposed from above and sanctioned by God and history but in republican fashion, by consent of the governed—exactly as John Locke had defined legitimate political authority. American colonists looked to Locke for a theory of republican government in the eighteenth century; the citizens of the Republic of Letters experienced its practice in the Parisian salon. Like the president the Americans would later elect, and unlike the French king, the salonniere was neither the source of law nor above it; she was neither a legislator nor an absolute ruler. She brought about order in society by embodying and enforcing the rule of law to which each member of the republic consented.

Because the Republic of Letters was not defined territorially, it was perhaps the only republic in history about which it can be truly said that consent defined citizenship. One could not be born in the Republic of Letters; one could not even move to it. One chose to become a citizen by affirming its values, sharing in its practices, and consenting to the rules of polite discourse by which those values and practices could be realized. Government by salonnieres was government by consent.

And yet, one should not assume that the citizens of the Republic of Letters submitted to the rule of law and the government of women without a struggle. Although it made sense to submit to women because of their ability to suppress their egos and harmonize those of men, it also went completely against male notions of natural gender relations for men to place themselves under the control of women. Women, after all, were traditionally viewed as the source of disorder in society. As Rousseau wrote in the Lettre d d'Alembert, 'Never has a people perished from an excess of wine; all perish from the disorder of women.' In the traditional view, it was not women who established order among men by enforcing the rule of law but law that created order by subjecting wives to their husbands. It is thus easy to understand why Rousseau feared government by women above all. 'Do you think, Sir,' he asked d'Alembert, 'that this order is without its difficulties; and that, in taking so much effort to increase the ascendancy of women, men will be the better governed for it?'