Longing for Conversation: Why the Salon Still Resonates

In my recent article for The Conversation, I argued that young people are hungry for political information but that the digital platforms they turn to, particularly YouTube, often reduce complex issues to simplified narratives.

Shortly after it was published, a reader wrote to tell me about his niece, a recent Master's graduate, who had started organizing salons with her friends: small, self-directed gatherings where young adults talk about ethics, power, ideology, and political theory. How interesting, but unfortunately, how rare. During my own interviews with young people, I never heard about initiatives like this.

But I did hear a deep longing for them. One study participant even compared our 3-hour interview to a “salon party.” He enjoyed talking to me, he said, because he craved a space to think critically and politically, with others.

Salons have a long history. In 18th-century France, salons were spaces of intellectual ferment. Often hosted by elite women salonnières—like Madame de Staël, whose gatherings became hubs for anti-Napoleonic discourse—these salons shaped the Enlightenment and its political legacy.

Of course, as sociologist Norbert Elias reminds us, salons were also deeply embedded in elite courtly culture. And for this reason, arguably, they were less sites of radical democracy than of “good society”,  where conversation was more concerned with the refinement of manners than with structural political change.

But my (more optimistic) read is that salons were terrains of struggle: socially constrained, yes, but also strategically leveraged. In an otherwise politically fraught climate, for example, Madame Geoffrin, used her salon to advance the visibility and legitimacy of Enlightenment thinkers, like Voltaire and Diderot. Mme de Staël, meanwhile, faced years of exile because of her pointed criticism of Napoleon. 

Whatever the historical nature of salons may be, that they are being mentioned at all is noteworthy. The appetite for collective political inquiry is very much alive among young people. And, as researchers, educators, and citizens, we should take that desire seriously.