Western Civilization - History Of European Society

The Culture of Old Regime Europe373

open houses for intellectuals, and his daughter,
Dorothea von Schlegel, built on this habit to emulate
the French salons. Most German salons, however,
insisted upon a stricter sexual respectability than char-
acterized Parisian salons.
The coffeehouse served a similar cultural role for
other social strata. Coffeehouses—and sometimes tav-
erns, which were less expensive and less formal—served
as meeting houses, reading rooms, and debating halls.
The daily newspaper was at the center of this phenom-
enon. Dailies were born and began to flourish in the
eighteenth century, starting with the Daily Courantin
London in 1702. Moscow had a newspaper later that
same year, Berlin a daily paper from 1704, and Rome
from 1716. Paris even had a women’s newspaper, advo-
cating the equality of the sexes—Le Journal des dames,
founded in 1759—before it had a daily newspaper.
Larger Sunday newspapers appeared in London in

1780. Until the technological innovations of the mid-
      nineteenth century, however, these newspapers re-

mained expensive and their circulation low. Subscrip-

tion libraries and “reading societies” appeared in the

German states as early as 1704. But the coffeehouse

provided the most popular solution by subscribing to

multiple newspapers, holding public readings of news-

paper stories for the benefit of the illiterate majority,

and providing the sociable setting. The towns and

cities of eighteenth-century Europe were filled with

coffeehouses. The first coffeehouse opened in Paris in

1672 and soon failed; in 1754, however, fifty-six were

flourishing. There were none in London in 1650, but

more than two thousand had opened by 1725. The first

coffeehouse in central Europe opened in Vienna in

1683, after a few sacks of coffee were taken from a re-

treating Turkish army. After the eighteenth-century

boom, the Viennese all but lived in fifteen thousand

coffeehouses. Coffeehouses became so popular in

Berlin that Frederick the Great blocked the importation

of coffee as a drain on the national wealth—a hint at

how expensive coffee was initially.

Illustration 20.3

The Salon of Madame Geoffrin. Marie-Therèse Geoffrin

(1699–1777) was the hostess of one of the most influential salons

of eighteenth-century France. In presiding over such private

meetings of writers, philosophers, artists, and politicians, women

played a central role in the shaping and transmission of the ideas

of the Enlightenment.