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Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to
the Old Regime
Author(s): Dena Goodman
Source: History and Theory, Vol. 31, No. 1 (Feb., 1992), pp. 1-20
Published by: Wiley for Wesleyan University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2505605
Accessed: 25-03-2015 11:23 UTC
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DENA GOODMAN
ABSTRACT
This article challenges the false opposition between public and private spheres that is
often imposed upon our historical understanding of the Old Regime in France. An
analysis of the work of Jurgen Habermas, Reinhart Koselleck, Philippe Aries, and
Roger Chartier shows that the "authentic public sphere" articulated by Habermas was
constructed in the private realm, and the "new culture" of private life identified by Aries
was constitutive of Habermas's new public sphere. Institutions of sociability were the
common ground upon which public and private met in the unstable world of eighteenthcentury France. Having superimposed the "maps" of public and private spheres drawn
by Habermas and Aries upon one another, the article then goes on to examine recent
studies by Joan Landes and Roger Chartier to show the implications of drawing or
avoiding the false opposition between public and private spheres for our understanding
of the political culture of the Old Regime and Revolution.
Public sphere and private life - these domains are now the focus of considerable
interest among historians of the Old Regime on both sides of the Atlantic.
1989 saw the publication of English translations of the two works most closely
associated with public sphere theory and the history of private life: Jurgen
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DENA GOODMAN
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DENA GOODMAN
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PrivateRealm
Civil society(realmof
commodityexchange
and social labor)
(marketof cultureproducts)
"Town"
Court(courtly-noble
society)
FIGURE1
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DENA GOODMAN
Privatbereich
Burgerliche Gesellschaft
(Bereich d. Warenverkehrs
u. d. gesellsch. Arbeit)
Staat
(Bereich d. "Polizei")
literary.Offentlichkeit
(Clubs, Presse)
Kleinfam. Binnenraum
(birgerl. Intelligenz)
(Kulturgutermarkt)
Hof
(adlig-hof. Gesellschaft)
"Stadt"
FIGuRE2
Figure I as it appears in the German edition.
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and mystery appeared as historical twins."' Moreover, he continues, "the mystery, this element that seems so flatly to contradict the spirit of the Enlightenment, needs clearing up, for the Masonic mystery will lead us to the core of the
morality-policy dialectic. What the mystery covers - ambivalently, as we shall
see - is the political reverse of the Enlightenment."20
In Habermas's hands, the institutions of bourgeois and Enlightenment sociability become the social structures of the authentic public sphere. It was in these
institutions of sociability that private individuals gathered to use their reason
and form civil society; it was through the creation of these institutions that they
created a new public sphere to challenge and eventually appropriate the old
public sphere of the monarchy.
The processin whichthe state-governedpublicspherewas appropriatedby the public
of privatepeoplemakinguse of theirreasonand was establishedas a sphereof criticism
of publicauthority,wasone of functionallyconvertingthe publicspherein the worldof
lettersalreadyequippedwithinstitutionsof the publicand withforumsfor discussion.'
For Habermas, the great virtue of these new institutions of sociability was their
publicity. By identifying the bourgeois public sphere as the authentic public
sphere, he reverses Koselleck's picture. No longer are real politics going on in
the state, and secret, pseudo-politics confined to the private world of lodges,
clubs, and cafes. In Habermas's view, "the principle of publicity" which underlay these new institutions of sociability came to challenge "the practice of
secrets of state."22The bourgeois public sphere was authentic precisely because
it was open; its true publicity revealed as illegitimate the monarchy's claims to
represent the public opaquely, rather than with the new transparency. The veil
lay not over the real, hidden, economic interest of the bourgeoisie, but over the
political practices of the state. Yes, Habermas admits, there was a "fictitious
identity of the two roles assumed by the privatized individuals who came together to form a public: the role of property owners and the role of human
beings pure and simple,"23but there was no hypocrisy involved. To the contrary,
the identification was possible because the two self-definitions did converge as
a single front that held its principle of publicity up against the real hypocrisy
of a state that claimed to represent the public through secrecy.
Public and private, open and secret: the different ways in which Koselleck
and Habermas manipulate and apply these terms constitute the significant divergence between their two understandings of the Old Regime. The shift achieved
by Habermas is to theorize the development of a new and authentic public
sphere out of the private sphere, whereas for Koselleck any reconciliation of
the opposition between public and private spheres by the bourgeoisie and its
ideological representatives remains a deception.
19.
20.
21.
22.
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DENA GOODMAN
"Is it possible to write a history of private life?" Philippe Aries asks in introducing The Passions of the Renaissance, volume three of A History of Private
Life. His answer to this question is yes: the history of private life is the history
of the transformation of a medieval society in which public and private spheres
24. Furet, Interpreting the French Revolution, transl. Elborg Forster (Cambridge, Eng., 1981);
Baker, Inventing the French Revolution (Cambridge, Eng., 1989); Ozouf, Festivals and the French
Revolution, transl. Alan Sheridan (Cambridge, Mass., 1988); Hunt, Politics, Culture, and Class
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are confounded into a modern one in which they are fully distinguished.27Not
surprisingly, Aries argues that this transformation began at the end of the
seventeenth century - at precisely the same time that Habermas's public sphere
of the state emerged. Not surprisingly, since both Habermas and Aries assume
an undifferentiated sphere of social and political activity, out of which, respectively, public and private spheres were articulated over the course of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Aries, however, is looking not at the larger
world out of which state and society will slowly be articulated, but at the
community out of which individuals will come to know themselves separately
from their village and their family.
Like Habermas, Aries identifies three main "events" as responsible for the
shift by which differentiation was accomplished: (1) the rise of the state; (2)
increased literacy; (3) and new forms of religion.28Aries points to various areas
that were manifestations of this transformation, but he focuses on the development of individualism and the family as the structures of daily life constructed
from these elements. "The 'social space' liberated by the rise of the state and the
decline of communal forms of sociability was occupied by the individual, who
established himself- in the state's shadow, as it were - in a variety of settings."29
Only after 1800, he argues, did the family take the place of the individual as
the focus of private life.
In the history of private life, the eighteenth century was characterized by new
forms of sociability that took place in the new social settings occupied by
individuals. "Here," writes Aries,
a newculturedeveloped,a sociallife thatrevolvedaroundconversation,correspondence,
and readingaloud. People met in intimateprivaterooms or arounda lady'sbed ....
In the eighteenthcenturysome of these groupsadoptedformalrulesand organizedas
clubs,intellectualsocieties,or academies,losingsomeof theirspontaneityin theprocess.
Theybecamepublicinstitutions.Othercirclesshedsomeof theirgravityandturnedinto
literarysalons.30
Aries's "new culture" of private life is Habermas's bourgeois public sphere,
located in those same new centers of sociability on which Habermas had focused. The "conviviality" that Aries thinks had "ceased to be a major factor in
society by the end of the nineteenth century," was the defining feature of the
public sphere whose rise and fall were traced by Habermas.
"As I see it," Aries reflects, "the entire history of private life comes down to
a change in the forms of sociability."3' We could just as easily say that the entire
history of the public sphere comes down to the same thing. This is because the
structures and institutions of sociability give both the Annaliste interested in
private life and the Marxist concerned with the public sphere the social base
27.
28.
29.
30.
31.
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DENA GOODMAN
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state created privacy as secrecy, as that which could not be displayed in public,
from parts of the body, to social behaviors, to the government itself defined as
the secret du roi.37
To explain the publicity of the private sphere, Chartier turns to Habermas:
If the "private"is a productof the modernstate, the "public"is by no meansa state
monopoly. In Englandby the end of the seventeenthcenturyand in Franceduringthe
eighteenth,a publicspacebeganto developoutsideof government.It grewout of the
privatesphere,a consequenceof what JurgenHabermashas called the publicuse of
reasonby privateindividuals.The public social life of the Enlightenmenttook many
forms, only some of which were institutionalized.Discussionand criticismgradually
cameto focus on the authorityof the state itself. In literarysocieties,Masoniclodges,
clubs,andcafes, peoplelearnedto associateas intellectuals,recognizingall participants
regardlessof status, as equals.38
Within the History of Private Life itself, then, Chartier has inscribed the public
face of the private realm, identifying it with the institutions of sociability that
Aries, a few pages earlier, had called "public institutions." And yet, as Daniel
Gordon points out, the Passions of the Renaissance does not develop this line
of thinking, focusing rather on Aries's central concern: the dissolution of community and the creation of isolation and intimacy.39Like his mentor, Chartier
was only beginning to be aware of the relationship between public sphere theory
and the history of private life.
In his most recent work, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution,
Chartier has made a real attempt to bring together the work of the historians
of political culture with his own work on popular culture, reading practices,
and the history of the book.40A chapter entitled "The Public Sphere and Public
Opinion" is based on Habermas's theory (primarily as it has been interpreted by
Keith Baker), and establishes the framework within which, in the next chapter,
Chartier can talk about book publication and diffusion.4'
What is interesting here is not simply that the histories of Aries and Habermas
converge, but that they emerged as answers to very different questions and
within independent intellectual traditions. While Habermas writes as a reforming Marxist sociologist of the Frankfurt School, Aries was an Annaliste
historian whose work on the history of childhood and attitudes toward death
were tongue dure'estudies of mentality.42 Aries explicitly criticized teleological
37. On the secretdu roi see Baker,Inventingthe FrenchRevolution,169-170.
38. Chartier, "Introduction" to Passions of the Renaissance, 17.
39. Daniel Gordon, "The Idea of Sociability in Pre-Revolutionary France," (Ph.D. Dissertation,
University of Chicago, 1990), 367-368.
40. Roger Chartier, The Cultural Origins of the French Revolution, transl. Lydia G. Cochrane
(Durham, N.C., 1991).
41. Unlike Habermas and Baker, Chartier frequently reminds the reader that "between the people
and the public there was a clear break. From Malesherbes to Kant, the line of demarcation ran
between those who could read and produce written matter and those who could not." (Cultural
Origins,37).
42. On Habermas see Peter Hohendahl, "Jirgen Habermas: 'The Public Sphere' (1964)," transl.
Patricia Russian, New German Critique 3 (1974), 45-48; and The Institution of Criticism (Ithaca,
N.Y., 1982), 242-280. Aries's major work is the pathbreaking Centuries of Childhood: A Social
History of Family Life, transl. Robert Baldick (New York, 1962).
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DENA GOODMAN
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with the paradox that "the long process of invention of the private sphere
culminated with the institution of the full dominance of the public sphere."46
How can it be, he asks, that the culmination of the age characterized in The
Passions of the Renaissance as that of the emergence of the private sphere, was
a revolution that sought to dissolve the private under the gaze of the state? "The
Revolution and its exclusive passion for publicness thus seems incongruous in
an age that delighted in a new and more intimate organization of ordinary
life."47Chartier resolves this paradox precisely by recognizing the dependence
of the revolutionary public sphere on the Old Regime private sphere. There is
a continuity, he explains, between the new political culture of the Revolution
and the sphere of the individual. "Indeed, it was the constitution of the private
as a form of experience and a set of values that made possible the emergence
of a space both autonomous of state authority and critical of it."48Drawing
primarily on the work of Sarah Maza, Chartier identifies judicial memoirs and
libelles as two strategies by means of which the new public sphere of the 1780s
was fed by conflicts that were produced by its private side: the politicizing of
disputes within families, and the public revelation of moral corruption in the
monarchy.
The omnipresenceof politicsimposedby the Revolutionwas thus not contradictoryto
the privatizationof conductand thoughtsthat precededit. Quite the contrary:it was
preciselythe constructionof a spacefor libertyof action, removedfromstateauthority
and relianton the individual,that permittedthe rise of the new publicspacethat was
at onceinheritedfromandtransformedby thecreativeenergyof revolutionarypolitics.49
To push Chartier's conclusion one step further: Was it not, then, because the
authentic public sphere was one face of the private realm that the men of the
Terror, once they had eliminated the public sphere of the monarchy, were unable
to fix limits between public and private, and argued for a transparent politics
that became a new form of despotism? If the Terror was about the domination
of the intimate by the public, of the individual and the family by the state, its
discourse erupted as a contestation about the meaning of public and private in
a new society in which what had been a private realm with two faces was now
the whole of state and society.
Following Chartier's lead, I would suggest that historians of the Old Regime
and the Revolution need to place at the center of historical attention the problematic relationship between public and private spheres. If, as Habermas argues,
46. Chartier,CulturalOrigins,195.
47. Ibid., 196.
48. Ibid.
49. Ibid., 196-197. He builds this case earlier, in chapter 2 (especially 34-37). Maza's work on
the memoirs and libelles can be found in the following articles: "Le Tribunal de la nation: les
memoires judiciaires et l'opinion publique a la fin de l'Ancien R6gime," Annales ESC (1987), 7390; "The Rose-Girl of Salency: Representations of Virtue in Prerevolutionary France," EighteenthCentury Studies 22 (1989), 395-412; "Domestic Melodrama as Political Ideology: The Case of the
Comte de Sanois,"American Historical Review 94 (1989); "The Diamond Necklace Affair Revisited
(1785-1786), The Case of the Missing Queen," in Eroticism and the Body Politic, ed. Lynn Hunt
(Baltimore, 1990), 63-89.
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DENA GOODMAN
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argues that the republicthat rose from the ashes of the Old Regime was a
genderedrepublic,despitethe universalistlanguageof its male creators.The
resultwas a malepublicsphereand a femaleprivateone. A life of domesticity
waswomen'slegacyof the FrenchRevolution,andthetwo centuriesof feminism
that have followed are women'sstruggleto re-enterthe public sphere from
which that Revolutionexpelledthem.54
The relationshipbetweenpublicand privatespheresis centralto Womenand
the PublicSphere.Landesexplicitlytakesoff from Habermasand employshis
categories;at the same time, she also works within the discourseof feminist
politicaltheory,to whichthesecategoriesarealso central.Her feministperspective is at the basis of a critiqueof Habermas:the main contentionof her work
is thatthe bourgeoispublicsphereis "essentially,not just contingently,masculinist.'955Feministtheory,however,assumesan understandingof the relationship
betweenpublic and privatespheresthat is significantlydifferentfrom that of
Habermas."Thedichotomybetweenthe privateand the public is centralto
almosttwo centuriesof feministwritingand politicalstruggle,"CarolPateman
has written;"itis, ultimately,whatthe feministmovementis about."'56Because
Landesworks within the feministtheoreticalframework,she sees the public
sphereas unitaryand the privatesphereas its antithesis.57The resultis that her
argumentboth missesits targetand fails to sustainher thesis:it misrepresents
both the Old Regimeand Habermas'srepresentationof it.
My intentionhere is not to challengeLandes'sconclusionthat womenwere
excludedfrom the publicspherethat developedout of the FrenchRevolution,
butto suggesta moreconvincingway of reachingit. Seenin its moreambiguous
relationshipto the private sphere, Habermas'sconception of the authentic
publicsphereis an extremelyusefultool for understandingthe role of the most
visible womenin the Old Regimeand may even providea new directionfor a
feministhistoriography
thatis not trappedwithinthe public/privateopposition.
If, as Patemanhas concluded,"thefeministtotal critiqueof the liberalopposition of privateand publicstill awaitsits philosopher,"the outlinesof its prehistory can at least now be discerned.58
In WomenandthePublicSphere,Landesarguesthat"public"women- those
womenwho eschewedthe domesticspherefor a life in the publicworldof the
courtand the Parisiansalons- were"silenced"by those men who "inhabited"
the bourgeoispublicsphereand werethus excludedby them from it, returned
to the privatespherethey had tried to escape.59BecauseLandes'sargumentis
basedupona simpleoppositionbetweenpublicandprivatespheres,sheassumes
54. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,199-202.
55. Ibid., 7.
56. Carol Pateman, "Feminist Critiques of the Public/Private Dichotomy," in The Disorderof
Women(Stanford, 1989), 118. In this vein see Jean Bethke Elshtain, PublicMan, PrivateWoman:
Womenin Social and Political Thought (Princeton, 1981).
57. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,3.
58. Pateman, "Feminist Critiques," 136.
59. Landes, Womenand the Public Sphere,5-7.
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DENA GOODMAN
that which she seeks to prove: that these spheres were essentially gendered. If
we maintain the complexity of Habermas's vision of the Old Regime, by contrast, such a simple opposition is not possible. The beauty (and utility) of
Habermas's vision of the Old Regime and its transformation into a new, bourgeois, order is precisely in the way in which it complicates the simple dialectic
constructed by Koselleck. Habermas's framework, and especially the focus on
institutions of sociability that he shares with Aries, reveals a very differentpublic
sphere from Landes's "masculinist"one: a public sphere in which women played
a recognized and important role.
By calling salonnieres and women of the court (including royal mistresses)
"public"women, Landes implies that they were transgressing the bounds of a
private sphere within which men sought to confine them. There are two major
problems with this assumption. First, Landes does not properly distinguish
between women of the court and those of the salons in Habermas's terms.
Second, she fails to understand that neither the public sphere of the state (the
court), nor the bourgeois public sphere of which the salon was an institution,
was fully public, and that the role of women within salons was acceptable in
ways that would be impossible after 1793, when the men of the French Revolution drew the line between a male political sphere and a female domestic one.
The drawing of that line had as much to do with the collapse of the authentic
public sphere as it did with misogyny, for the result was a state that once again
sought to attribute all publicity to itself and to dominate a private sphere now
reduced to the family. It was the authentic public sphere that was dissolved in
the revolutionary process, and with it, a public role for women.
Landes appropriates the idea that salonnieres were public women from Carolyn Lougee, whose work concerns the seventeenth-century debate about
women's nature and role in society. "On the one hand," Lougee writes,
a broad-baseddefenseof woman'scharacterand celebrationof femininequalitiesprovidedthe basisforjustifyingandlegitimatingthe majorpublicroleswomenhadassumed
throughtheirleadershipof the salons. On the otherhand, a contrarycurrentof thought
combinedoppositionto the publicrole of womenwith a view of woman as weak and
still inferiorto man, if no longerdownrightevil.0
Lougee makes no pretenses to employing a Habermasian framework or terminology. Furthermore, she identifies the "feminist" position (the defense of
women), with a mobilizing bourgeoisie, and the "antifeminist" position with
those who sought to maintain birth as the determinant of nobility.6' Landes, on
the other hand, discusses only the second of these positions, which she attributes
not only to the defenders of the old nobility, but to Montesquieu, Diderot,
Rousseau, "bourgeois publicists," and Grub Street hacks. The salonnie'res, she
in
60. Carolyn C. Lougee, "LeParadisdesFemmes":Women,Salons,and SocialStratification
France(Princeton, 1976), 6.
Seventeenth-Century
61. Ibid. This is the central argument of the book.
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DENA GOODMAN
de nombreuxdocumentsineidits(Geneva,1969).
Mme. Geoffrin did once try to help her friend, the newly-crowned King of Poland, by passing
a letter of his to her along to Choiseul, Louis XV's minister. When Choiseul responded negatively,
Mme. Geoffrin wrote him a long letter explaining her action as simply that of a friend. "During
the last trip to Fontainebleau," she wrote, "I had the honor, M. le Duc, to send you the letter of
the King of Poland in which he informed me of his election. In this letter he showed the greatest
desire to be recognized by France, and to be allied closely with her. I thought I was doing the King
of Poland a favor in sharing it with you.... I see by your letter that the language used by the King
of Poland to express these sentiments has displeased you and, rather than helping him, I have only
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DENA GOODMAN
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73. These ambiguities are played out most prominently on the discursive level in the proliferation
of the epistolary form in the Old Regime. The anecdote about Mme. Geoffrin, Stanislas, and
Choiseul related above (n. 69) is but one event in the history of epistolary writing, from the letter
books of the seventeenth century to the epistolary novels and pamphlet literature of the eighteenth,
that can be seen as the discursive level of the history of the development of public and private
spheres. The association of women with letter writing is crucial to this history. See Janet Gurkin
Altman, "The Letter Book as a Literary Institution 1539-1789: Toward a Cultural History of
Published Correspondences in France," Yale French Studies 71 (1986), 17-62; Writing the Female
Voice: Essays on Epistolary Literature, ed. Elizabeth C. Goldsmith (Boston, 1989); and Dena
Goodman, "Michel de Servan and the Plight of Letters on the Eve of the French Revolution," in
Conceptions of Property in Early Modern Europe, ed. John Brewer and Susan Staves (London,
1992).
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