All the pictures still haven’t made it to the walls, some boxes are still full but the table is out so it seems fitting to first unpack conversation. You see, I am opening a Salon - an idea that at first seems innocently quaint but has once again become as subversive as when they first began 400 years ago. Back then, the means of shutting down conversation were more overtly violent; Giordano Bruno was burned alive for suggesting the universe is infinite and Galileo tried and died under house arrest for saying Earth moves around the Sun. Even as late as 1766 - mid Enlightenment! - persecution of free thought was so bad they tormented and beheaded then burnt Chevalier de la Barre’s body on a pyre, only 19 years old ,with a copy of Voltaire’s Philosophical Dictionary on his chest, for the terrible crime of failing to doff his hat at a religious procession. Religious wars and Inquisition made opinions into matters of life and death; thousands of people were slaughtered in Paris on St Bartholomew Day for being Protestant, men, but mostly women were tortured and burnt alive, their land seized for the crime of herbalism, defiance and rebellion- otherwise knowns as witchcraft.
17th century Europe ran on licenced thought - printing required a royal privilége, publish without one and the public executioner burnt your books on the steps , sometimes with the printer in tow. Catholic Church maintained Index Librorum Prohibitory - a formal list of forbidden books that survived until 1966 featuring Copernicus, Descartes and most of the Enlightenment. Universities themselves were just arms of the Church, thoughts formed there were pushed through the meat grinder of predetermined beliefs until no resistance formed. Fear kept people compliant, gated thought bred stupidity and superstition - a timeless formula for an enchanted cycle upholding systems of power.
When thinking becomes dangerous and discussion even more so, fear tells us to retreat into our shells and nod at the nonsense, hoping it will pass and society will return to reason without our input. History shows this is the least successful strategy for we allow ignorance time to entrench itself and torture everyone for much too long. Without thinkers such as Montesquieu, Voltaire, Cesare Beccaria, Denis Diderot and Locke leading reforms, the witch trials would have not ended when they did. What is less known is that even those celebrated philosophers had to be careful- had to gain influence, place their ideas in the vicinity of the right ears; ones that wouldn’t execute and persecute them but give thoughts time to percolate, ferment and ripen into a foothold of change.
For some fear spells Flee Everything And Run, for others it means Face Everything And Rise, the latter was certainly the case for the women who facilitated Salons during the Enlightenment. In 1610 Catherine de Vivonne, Marquise de Rambouillet became so bored of the brutality of court she rebuilt her Paris townhouse around a chambre bleue- a Blue Room, inventing the whole format: wit and intelligence above bloodline, mixed company, conversation as art form with a woman presiding as a host and moderator. This template became a 2 century long operating system for sustaining dangerous ideas from their inception deep underground to their fruiting, emergence and normalisation.
Madame Geoffrin, a bourgeois widow with no title, became the most powerful cultural broker in Europe from her dining room on rue Saint- Honoré: Mondays for artists, Wednesdays for philosophers. Kings queued for a seat at her table while she secretly bankrolled Encyclopédie with sums worth millions today. The Encyclopédie was Enlightenment’s flagship product - invented, funded, defended and largely staffed through Salons, banned twice by the king and the pope. Her moderating technique, a gentle phrase: “Voilà qui est bien” (”There, that will do”), was used to keep everyone alive when talk veered into areas that could get people arrested.
There was Madame de Lambert, whose salon was called the antechamber of the Académie française: no one got elected without passing through her drawing room first. A woman with no vote, deciding the votes. Julie de Lespinasse, the muse of Encyclopaedia had no fortune or banquet but her chat was so good d’Alembert , co-editor of Encyclopédie literally lived in her house. Voltaire’s decades long correspondent Madame du Deffand was blind yet acidic and brilliant. And then of course, there was a living room Napoleon himself, with whole armies at his behest found so threatening he had to exile its founder Germaine de Staël. An emperor scared of a woman’s sofa.
Growing up in Yugoslavia, there were things that you couldn’t say but their ferment multiplied in the imposed silence like black mould, fungal poison throbbing and expanding in minds unequipped for rational discourse precisely because that muscle was never allowed to flex. The prevention caused the disease because the only cure was more free speech, not less. Voltaire spoke: “It is dangerous to be right in matters where established men are wrong” , but he also said “Écrasez l’infâme”, “Destroy the infamous”, urging people to rally against intolerance, injustice, and oppression by the Catholic Church and tyrannical institutions, denouncing abuses of power, superstition, and social injustice. I tried that during Covid , speaking out about nonsensical rules and human rights violations and became cancelled. That’s when I realised the old darkness was back, slogans had won and only handfuls of us were still defending the ideals we inherited. Smirking its way through the unexamined rooms inside human minds, self satisfied and immune to questioning, the Inquisition was back in a new cyber form.
6 years later the world has lived through muted accounts and limited reach, “fact check” labels quietly retracted long after they did their damage, deplatformings and debankings, encyclopaedias edited toward a single acceptable narrative, vanishing websites, limiting access to advanced AI models if they ask it questions the system doesn’t like- Wrongthink is back in a big way but they no longer need to burn books on the steps, they either make sure no one can find them or that they don’t even want to think.
As always in polarity, darkness is only half of the story - the light survived before, in rooms like this one. I refuse to glaze my eyes or mind with opaque ignorance, unexplored beliefs and recycled thought no matter how fashionable the black mirror says they are this season. So, welcome to my Salon. House rules are simple : argue the idea, never the human, bring receipts, not cognitive biases and logical fallacies. Sit with discomfort it brings within: that’s how you know the conversation is real. The hostess pours for everyone , whatever they believe.
Coat is on the hook, wine is poured. What conversations have you been forbidden from having? Comments are open.