A Salon-in-Exile : Hortense Mancini and the French Diaspora in Restoration London

Abstract

This open access book re-evaluates the influence of the ancien régime salons, which were the foremost cultural centres in early modern France. Presided over by women, these salons carved out spaces for poetry recitals, performances, and scientific lectures amid polite conversation, enabling mixed-gender intellectual exchange. But what happened when salon attendees were banished from France and exported the salon to a new national audience? How did visitors of different creeds and nationalities share this space? In other words, what happened when the salon model itself went into exile? In A Salon-in-Exile , Annalisa Nicholson explores the translation of the salon from France to England in the late seventeenth century via the first book-length study of the Mazarin salon. Hosted by Hortense Mancini (Duchess of Mazarin) and Charles de Saint-Évremond, the Mazarin circle quickly became one of the most celebrated salons in Europe and the most vibrant Francophone community in London. Across the chapters, Nicholson examines the establishment of the Mazarin salon in 1676 and the activities that it offered – from conversation and gambling to performance and literary collaboration. As a space that brought together the capital’s community of French and European exiles with Restoration London’s elite, the salon fostered engagement with European thought, French literature, and epicurean philosophy. Attending to this oral and written exchange, A Salon-in-Exile provides a new account of co-existence and collaboration in early modern society with analysis of a wide-ranging corpus of letters, memoirs, plays, operas, and essays. By investigating what happens when the model of the salon moved beyond France's borders, Nicholson argues that the salon transformed into a distinctively pan-European space that accommodated its multilingual and multiconfessional membership. The ebook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by UKRI.