'Transgressing Boundaries: Worldly Conversation, Politeness and Sociability in Ancien Regime France, 1660-1789'

Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments Introduction 1 I Societe and the Scene of Politeness 27 II The Culture of Representation 48 III The Honnete Homme and the Art of Pleasing 65 IV Amour-propre and Sociability in Worldly and Moralist Discourse 85 V On Polite and Impolite Conversation 119 VI Politeness and the Space of Sociability 139 VII The Worldly and Educational Aspect of Cultivated Conversation 175 VIII Figurative Style and the New Linguistic System 207 IX The Claim for Authentic Sociability 225 X Conclusion: The Golden Mean as the Foundation of Modern Culture 243 Bibliography 251 Index 268

About the Author :
Tuomas Tikanoja is a post-doctoral researcher whose research interest covers the cultural and intellectual history of the Enlightenment. He received his PhD in intellectual and cultural history from the University of Helsinki in 2009. He is an affiliated member of the Besterman Centre for the Enlightenment, University of Oxford. He has won several awards, including the Niilo Helander Foundation and Alfred Kordelin Foundation, for his work in this field of study. For further information, see the websites below: Tuomas Tikanoja, Ph.D., M.Sc. Home Page: http://www.saunalahti.fi/~tuotika/Kotisivu.html Academia: http://independent.academia.edu/TuomasTikanoja Email: tuomas.tikan@saunalahti.fi

Review :
"This is quite an interesting work and it adds significant nuance to the ongoing scholarly conversation about the importance of sociability and politeness to baroque and enlightenment intellectual and cultural history. The book is an important reminder that early modern sociability was as complex and variegated as the early modern social order itself. It is a book that should be read by early modernists and I hope that it will garner some attention in the field." Brian Cowan Associate Professor and Canada Research Chair in Early Modern British History McGill University "Tuomas Tikanoja's Transgressing Boundaries is a contribution to scholarship on the salon culture of ancien regime France that has flourished particularly since Dena Goodman's The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment (1994). Not all scholars have agreed with Goodman's thesis that the salons presided over by Madam Geoffrin, Madam Lespinasse, Madam Necker and other high society women functioned like coffee houses in England, as breeding grounds for democratic ideas. As acknowledged by Tikanoja, scholars indebted to Norbert Elias such as Steven Kale and Antoine Lilti have insisted instead that the salons were far from revolutionary or republican, for they were overwhelmingly aristocratic in both ideology and social practice. Tikanoja's book essentially defends the view of Goodman and her inspiration, Jurgen Habermas, that the salons helped to create a 'bourgeois public sphere' where men (predominantly) of different ranks exchanged ideas freely without control by the state, laying the groundwork for eventual challenge to the traditional, political and social order. Tikanoja makes this case with impressive learning, demonstrating a wide knowledge of literary and archival sources, though skeptics of Habermas or Goodman are not likely to find themselves seriously challenged ... By Tikanoja's own account, [the French salons] seemed in fact both elitist and conservative, dominated by elegant chit-chat on innocuous subjects or harmless theories, and punctuated, as one imagines, by a pinch of snuff or a wave of a fan. This is a very different world from the English coffee-house which could be, by all accounts, a space for quite impolite and voluble debate on politics and religion. Diderot or Helvetius might talk atheism or democracy at Baron d'Holbach's house, but at the salons of Madam de la Ferte-Imbault, anti-Christian or seditious conversation was actively discouraged. There the commerce of ideas differed quite sharply from the challenging and provocative writings of the philosophes, often published beyond the nation's borders. This difference between French philosophical writing and French high society suggests that there was no necessary connection between polite salon culture, however socially mixed, and the revolutionary tendencies that eventually prevailed in France. Kale and Lilti may well be right that these salons were essentially 'aristocratic' to the extent that they promoted the status quo rather than radical change. Jonathan Israel may also be right in dismissing their ideological significance altogether. Tuomas Tikanoja has nonetheless provided a learned, thorough and often absorbing discussion of politeness in salon culture that should be consulted by all scholars interested in this topic." Professor Nicholas Hudson. University of British Columbia French History (2014). First published online November 2, 2014.