On Periphery of Paris Sociability: Representations and Realities

If, unconvinced by the stereotype of frustration, due to exclusion from the centre of institutional cultural power, as the driving motivation of many French revolutionary leaders, we consider the biographies of some of them in the 1770s and 1780s, we deal with a potentially confusing mesh of representation (particularly self-representation) and reality, but we also form the impression of an interesting dimension of self-sufficiency. These figures presented themselves as outsiders by choice and disposition: one of them was a well-known Parisian writer, Sylvain Maréchal (1750-1803), a representative of 18th century materialism, or of what would now be called radical Enlightenment. We rediscover the anomalous salon of an eccentric bourgeois atheist, Guillaume Wasse (1774-5) - attended by, among others, the notoriously anti-clerical playwright Baculard d’Arnaud, Monvel, and younger writers such as Imbert or François de Neufchâteau. This literary scene – now forgotten by historians – appears or is remembered in a tellingly different way, on the one hand in Maréchal’s letters to Jacques Lablée (Russian State Archive of Political and Social History) and in Lablée’s memoirs, on the other hand in Madame Roland’s memoirs, where we learn that is was no proto-republican “band of brothers”, but it included women writers, who read their works aloud. The second point is the meaning of Maréchal’s criticisms of Freemasonry in 1781, the same year another Mason, in another country, wrote Ernst und Falk, justifying the hypothesis that both Lessing and Maréchal could in fact be committed to a redefinition of the discourse of Enlightenment inside that multi-faceted international institution, in a confrontation that implied power issues in more than one sense.