Republic of Letters

Republic of Letters (Respublica literaria) is most commonly used to define intellectual communities in the late seventeenth and eighteenth-century. For the most part it is accepted that the Republic of Letters emerged in the seventeenth century as a self-proclaimed community of scholars and literary figures that stretched across national boundaries but respected differences in language and culture.^[1] During this time, the Republic of Letters was a term most commonly used among European nations as well as the United States of America. Because of societal constraints on women, the Republic of Letters consisted mostly consisted of men. As such, many scholars interchangeably use ‘Republic of Letters’ with ‘men of letters’.

As is evident from the term, the circulation of letters was necessary for its function because it enabled intellectuals to correspond with each other from great distances. All citizens of the seventeenth-century Republic of Letters corresponded by letters and they considered it their duty to bring others into the Republic through the expansion of correspondence.^[2]

It is important to note that the origin of this term still remains controversial. The term first appeared in its Latin form in the fifteenth century and was used increasingly in the sixteenth and seventeenth, so that by the end of that century it featured in the titles of several important journals.^[3] Currently, the consensus is that Pierre Bayle first coined the term in his journal Nouvelles de la Republique des Lettres in 1964. But there are some historians who disagree and some have gone as far as to say that its origin goes dates back to Plato’s Republic.^[4] Part of the difficulty is that unlike an academy or literary society, it existed only in the minds of its members.^[5]

Besides its origins, historians still debate about its importance in the Enlightenment. Today, most Anglo-American historians, whatever their point of entry to debate, stolidly occupy a common ground: the Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment were distinctive identities.^[6]

Controversy

In the particular case of the Enlightenment, Anglo-American historians have turned their attention to its dissemination and promotion, anxious to discover the mechanisms by which the Enlightenment could have played a role in the collapse of the Ancien Regime.^[7] This attention to the mechanisms of dissemination and promotion has lead historians to debate on the importance of the Republic of Letters during the Enlightenment.

Dena Goodman

In 1994, Dena Goodman published The Republic of Letters: : A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. In her novel, she described the Enlightenment as not a set of ideas but rather a rhetoric. It was essentially an open-minded discourse of discovery where like-minded intellectuals adopted a traditionally feminine mode of discussion to explore the great problems of life. Enlightenment discourse was purposeful gossip and indissolubly connected with the Parisian salons. ^[8]. Goodman questions the degree to which the public sphere is necessarily masculine. Under the influence of Habermas's Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, she proposes an alternative division that defines women as belonging to an authentic public sphere of government critique through salons, Masonic lodges, academies, and the press^[9]

Like the French monarchy, the Republic of Letters is a modern phenomenon with an ancient history. References to the Respublica literaria have been found as early as 1417. Nevertheless, the concept of the Republic of Letters emerged only in the early seventeenth-century and became widespread only at the end of that century.^[10] Paul Dibon defines the Republic of Letters as it was conceived in the seventeenth-century as:

An intellectual community transcending space and time, [but] recognizing as such differences in respect to the diversity of languages, sects, and countries...This state, ideal as it may be, is in no way utopian, but...takes form in [good] old human flesh where good and evil mix.

^[11]

By the eighteenth century, the Republic of Letters was composed of French men and women, philosophes and salonnieres, who worked together to attain the ends of philosophy, broadly conceived as the project of Enlightenment.[5] In her opinion, the central discursive practices of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters were polite conversation and letter writing, and its defining social institution was the Parisian salon.[6]

By the eighteenth century, the Republic of Letters was composed of French men and women, philosophes and salonnieres, who worked together to attain the ends of philosophy, broadly conceived as the project of Enlightenment.^[12] In her opinion, the central discursive practices of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters were polite conversation and letter writing, and its defining social institution was the Parisian salon.^[13]

By the middle of the eighteenth-century French men of letters had merged the discourses of sociability to forge the commonplace that France was the most civilized because it was the most sociable and most polite of nations. French men of letters saw themselves as the leaders of a project of Enlightenment that was both cultural and moral, if not political. By representing French culture as the leading edge of civilization, they identified the cause of humanity with their own national causes and saw themselves as at the same time French patriots and upstanding citizens of a cosmopolitan Republic of Letters. Voltaire, both a zealous champion of French culture and the leading citizen of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters, contributed more than anyone else to this self-representation of national identity.^[14]

Over the course of the seventeenth and eighteen centuries, the growth of the Republic of Letters paralleled that of the French monarchy. This history of the Republic of Letters is interwoven with that of the monarchy from its consolidation after the Wars of Religion until its downfall in the French Revolution. Dena Goodman finds this to be very important because this provides a history of the Republic of Letters, from its founding in the seventeenth century as an apolitical community of discourse through its transformation in the eighteenth century into a very political community whose project of Enlightenment challenged the monarchy from a new public space carved out of French society.^[15]

Susan Dalton

In 2003, Susan Dalton published Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres. Dalton supports Dena Goodman's view that women played a role in the Enlightenment. On the other hand, Dalton does not agree with Goodman for using Habermas's idea of the public and private spheres. While the public sphere has the capacity to include women, it is not the best tool for mapping the full range of political and intellectual action open to them because it provides an overly restrictive definition of what is properly political and/or historically relevant. In fact, this is the wider problem with relying on any public/private division: it shapes and even limits the vision of women’s political and intellectual action by defining it in relation to specific venues and institutions because these are identified as the arenas of power and, ultimately, historical agency. ^[16]

To study in a wider form of Republic of Letters, Dalton analyzed the correspondence of salon women to display the link between intellectual institutions and the various types of sociability. In particular, she examined the correspondence of two French and two Venetian salon women at the end of the eighteenth century in order to understand their role in the Republic of Letters. These women were Julie de Lespinasse (1732-76), Marie-Jeanne Roland (1754-93), Giustina Renier Michiel (1755-1832) and Elisabetta Mosconi Contarini (1751-1807).^[17]

To engage in literary commerce, to send news, books, literature – even compliments and criticism – was to show one’s commitment to the community as a whole. Given the importance of these exchanges for ensuring the perpetuation of the republic of letters as a community, Lespinasse, Roland, Mosconi, and Renier Michiel worked to reinforce cohesion through friendship and loyalty. Thus sending a letter or procuring a book was a sign of personal devotion that engendered a social debt to be fulfilled. In turn, one’s ability to fulfill these charges marked one as a good friend and therefore a virtuous member of the Republic of Letters. The fact that both qualities had to overlap explains the practice of recommending one’s friends and acquaintances for literary prizes and governmental posts. If women were able to make recommendations that carried weight for both political posts and literary prizes, it was because they were thought capable of evaluating and expressing the values integral to relation in the Republic of Letters. They could judge and produce not only grace and beauty but also friendship and virtue.^[18]

By tracing the nature and extent of their participation in intellectual and political debates, it was possible to show the degree to which women’s actions diverged not only from conservative gender models but also from their own formulations concerning women’s proper social role. Although they often insisted on their own sensibility and lack of critical capacities, the salon women Susan Dalton studied also defined themselves as belonging to the Republic of Letters not only with reference to the very different conception of gender offered by the gens de letters but also with reference to a wider, gender-neutral vocabulary of personal qualities revered by them even when it contradicted their discourse on gender.^[19]

Anne Goldgar

In 1995, Anne Goldgar published Impolite Learning Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters, 1680-1750. Goldgar sees the Republic as a cluster of learned scholars and scientists, whose correspondence and published works (usually in Latin) reveal a community of conservative nitpickers with preference for substance over style. Lacking any common institutional attachments and finding it difficult to attract aristocratic and courtly patrons, the community created the Republic of Letters to boost morale as much as for any intellectual reason.^[20] Goldgar argues that, in the transitional period between the seventeenth century and the Enlightenment, the most important common concern of members of the Republic of Letters was their own conduct. In the conception of its won members, ideology, religion, political philosophy, scientific strategy, or any other intellectual or philosophical framework were not as important as their own identity as a community^[21]

The philosophes, by contrast, represented a new generation of men of letters who were consciously controversial and politically subversive. Moreover, they were urbane popularizers, whose style and lifestyle was much more in tune with the sensibilities of the aristocratic elite who set the tone for the reading public. Goldgar’s view was implicitly anticipated in Dena Goodman’s feminist account of the French Enlightenment, published the previous year. ^[22]

Certain broad features can, however, be painted into the picture of the Republic of Letters. The existence of communal standards highlights the first of these: that the scholarly world considered itself to be in some ways separate from the rest of society. Seventeenth and eighteenth-century scholars felt that, at least in the academic realm, they were not subject to the norms and values of the wider society. Unlike their non-scholarly counterparts, they thought they lived in an essentially egalitarian community, in which all members had equal rights to criticize the work and conduct of others. Moreover, the Republic of Letters in theory ignored distinctions of nationality and religion ^[23]

The conventions of the Republic of Letters were a great convenience to scholars throughout Europe.^[24] Scholars in correspondence with each other felt free to ask for assistance in research whenever it was necessary; indeed one of the functions of the commerce de letters, the purely literary correspondence, was to promote opportunities for research.^[25] Even cities which could in no sense be called isolated, such as Paris or Amsterdam, always lacked certain amenities of scholarship. Many books published in the Netherlands, for example, only found their way to Dutch presses because they were prohibited in France. Manuscripts necessary for research were often in libraries inaccessible to people in other towns. Literary journals usually could not provide enough information with sufficient rapidity to satisfy the needs of most scholars^[26]

The role of intermediary was also prominent in the Republic of Letters. Scholars wrote on behalf of others asking for hospitality, books, and help in research. Often the involvement of an intermediary was a matter of simple convenience. However, the use of an intermediary frequently had underlying sociological meaning. A request ending in failure can be both embarrassing and demeaning; refusal to perform a service could mean that the solicited part prefers not to enter into a reciprocal relationship with someone of lower status.^[27]

But an intermediary did not merely bear the brunt of refusal; he also contributed to a transaction’s success. The ability to use an intermediary indicated that a scholar had at least one contact in the Republic of Letters. This gave proof of his membership in the group, and the intermediary would usually attest to his positive scholarly qualities. In addition, the intermediary usually had wider contacts and consequently higher status within the community. ^[28]

Although status differences did exist in the Republic of Letters, such differences in fact strengthened rather than weakened the community. The ethos of service, combined with the advantage of gaining status by obliging others, meant that someone of higher ranking was moved to assist his subordinates. In doing so, he reinforced ties between himself and other scholars. By arranging help for a scholar, he forged or hardened links with the person served, while at the same time reinforcing his reciprocal ties with the final provider of the service. ^[29]

Other historians with controversial arguments

Dean Goodman’s approach has found favor with the medical historian Thomas Broman. Building on Habermas, Broman argues that the Enlightenment was a movement of intellectual transparency and laicization. While members of the RoLs lived hermetically sealed from the outside world, talking only to one another, their enlightened successors deliberately placed their ideas before the bar of a nascent public opinion. The Republic of Letters was located in the cabinet, the Enlightenment in the market-place.^[30]

For most Anglo-American historians, the classic Enlightenment is a forward-looking movement, the Republic of Letters passé, an outdated construction of the seventeenth century. But in John Pocock’s eyes there are two Enlightenments: one, associated with the author of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, which is erudite, serious, and scholarly grounded in the Republic of Letters; the other, the trivial Enlightenment of the Parisian philosophes. The first is a product of a peculiarly English/British and Protestant liberal political and theological tradition and points to the future; the second lacks the anchor of socio-historical analysis and leads unintentionally to Revolutionary mayhem.^[31]

In the 1930s, the French historian [[Paul Hazard] homed in on the age of Pierre Bayle and argued that the cumulative effect of the many different and mordant strands of intellectual curiosity in the last quarter of the seventeenth century created a European cultural crisis, whose negative harvest the philosophes were to reap. The Republic of Letters and the Enlightenment were insolubly interconnected. Both were movements of criticism. ^[32]

According to Peter Gay, building on Ernst Cassirer’s much earlier study of the intellectual progenitors of Kant, the Enlightenment was the creation of a small group of thinkers, his family of philosophes or ‘party of humanity’, whose coherent anti-Christian, ameliorist, and individualistic programme of reform developed from very specific cultural roots. The Enlightenment was not the offspring of the Republic of Letters, let alone the culmination of three centuries of anti-Augustinian critique, but rather the result of the singular marriage of Lucretius and Newton. When a handful of French freethinkers in the second quarter of the eighteenth century encountered the methodology and achievements of Newtonian science, experimental philosophy and unbelief were mixed together in an explosive cocktail, which gave its imbibers the means to develop a new science of man. Since Gay’s work was published, his interpretation of the Enlightenment has become an orthodoxy in the Anglo-Saxon world.^[33]

Printing Press

Very soon after the introduction of printing with moveable type, the Republic of Letters became closely identified with the press.^[34] The printing press also played a prominent role in the establishment of a community of scientists who could easily communicate their discoveries through the establishment of widely disseminated journals. Because of the printing press, authorship became more meaningful and profitable. The mean reason was that it provided correspondence between the author and the person who owned the printing presses - the publisher. This correspondence allowed the author to have a greater control of its production and distribution. The channels opened up by the great publishing houses meant provided a gradual movement towards an international Respublica with set channels of communication and particular points of focus (e.g. university towns and publishing houses), or simply the home of a respected figure^[35]

Newspapers

Journals

Salons

Universities

Figures often associated with the Republic of Letters

Notes

^ Dalton (2003), 7.
^ Goodman (1994), 17.
^ Goldgar (1995), 2.
^ Lambe (1988), 273.
^ Goldgar (1995), 2.
^ Brockliss (2002), 8.
^ Brockliss (2002), 6.
^ Brockliss (2002), 7.
^ Dalton (2003), 4
^ Goodman (1994), 14.
^ Goodman (1994), 15.
^ Goodman (1994), 9.
^ Goodman (1994), 3.
^ Goodman (1994), 4.
^ Goodman (1994), 12.
^ Dalton (2003), 4.
^ Dalton (2003), 5
^ Dalton (2003), 7
^ Dalton (2003), 8
^ Brockliss (2002), 6.
^ Goldgar (1995), 7.
^ Brockliss (2002), 7.
^ Goldgar (1995), 3.
^ Goldgar (1995), 19.
^ Goldgar (1995), 15.
^ Goldgar (1995), 19.
^ Goldgar (1995), 31.
^ Goldgar (1995), 31.
^ Goldgar (1995), 32.
^ Brockliss (2002), 7.
^ Brockliss (2002), 7.
^ Brockliss (2002), 5.
^ Brockliss (2002), 5.
^ Lambe (1998), 273.
^ Lambe (1998), 274.

References

Brockliss, L.W.B. 2002. Calvet’s Web: Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters in Eighteenth-Century France. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Dalton, Susan. 2003. Engendering the Republic of Letters: Reconnecting Public and Private Spheres. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Ostrander, Gilman. 1999. Republic of Letters: The American Intellectual Community, 1776-1865. Madison, Wls: Madison House.
Goldgar, Anne. 1995. Impolite Learning: Conduct and Community in the Republic of Letters. 1680-1750. New Haven: Yale University Press.
Goodman, Dena. 1994. The Republic of Letters: A Cultural History of the French Enlightenment. Ithaca NY: Cornell University Press.
Lambe, Patricke. 1988. "Critics and Skeptics in the Seventeenth-Century Republic of Letters.” The Harvard Theological Review 81(3):271-296.