Annika Mörte Alling

Le Moment Stendhal. Par François Vanoosthuyse

gendered identities and intellectual labour, namely that it makes Du Châtelet’s work, which was not that of a salonnière, insufficiently feminine for inclusion in his study. Soit. The pay-off is not, however, a demonstration that the salonnières considered themselves or were considered by their contemporaries to be performing intellectual labour in hosting their salons. (Was it Saint-Simon who said being a duke was a métier?) In any case, such a demonstration, were it to be possible, would require recognizing the historicity of the conception of intellectual activity in terms of labour, and attending, as a result, to the question of when, under what conditions, and as performed by whom, the acts of thinking, reading, writing, and discussing began to be thought of in terms of labour. Such a recognition is absent from this study. (Frustrated readers will find sustenance in Dinah Ribard’s ‘Le Travail intellectuel: travail et philosophie, XVII–XIX siècle’, Annales. Histoire, sciences sociales, 65 (2010), 715–42.) What then is this book? Despite the Introduction, which mentions constructionism, neuroscience, material instantiation, and rhetorical performance, the book is a pretty traditional history of ideas — the attractive claim that texts will be read ‘as performances of rhetorical personae’ (p. 15) is swiftly abandoned in favour of references to ‘Mme de Lambert’s disgust with’ x and ‘Diderot’s anxious efforts’ to do y (p. 17). What the book does, then, is provide an account of some early modern French and British ideas of manliness, femininity, and effeminacy, of the nature and scope of men and women’s intellectual capacities, and of the hopes and fears of the effects on men of the company of women, ranging from Guez de Balzac to Louise d’Épinay, via Madeleine de Scudéry, Poullain de La Barre, Fontenelle, Malebranche, Mme de Lambert, Shaftesbury, Hume, Antoine-Léonard Thomas, Diderot, and Suzanne Necker. It is a shame that no room was made for discussion of the Abbé de Choisy or the Chevalier d’Éon, despite the stated interest in gender fluidity (p. 15). Disappointed readers will have to make do with the typographical transgendering of Pascal as ‘Pascale’ (p. 318, note 3). There is no bibliography, but there are endnotes where readers can find references to scholars whose names are absent from the main body of the text and most even from the index (unlike those of, say, Samuel Moyn, Antoine Lilti, and Darrin McMahon) — names such as Dena Goodman, Elena Russo, and, especially, Katharine J. Hamerton, on whose intellectual labour the best parts of this book depend.