Marie Thérèse Geoffrin

Marie Thérèse Geoffrin (French pronunciation: [maʁi teʁɛz ʁɔdɛ ʒɔfʁɛ̃], née Rodet; 26 June 1699 – 6 October 1777) was a French salon holder who has been referred to as one of the leading female figures in the French Enlightenment. From 1750 to 1777, Madame Geoffrin played host to many of the most influential Philosophes and Encyclopédistes of her time.

Her association with several prominent dignitaries and public figures from across Europe has earned Madame Geoffrin international recognition. Her patronage and dedication to both the philosophical men of letters and talented artists that frequented her house is emblematic of her role as guide and protector. In her salon on the Rue Saint-Honoré, Madame Geoffrin demonstrated qualities of politeness and civility that helped stimulate and regulate intellectual discussion. Her actions as a Parisian salonnière exemplify many of the most important characteristics of Enlightenment sociability.

Born in 1699, Madame Geoffrin was the first child of a bourgeois named Pierre Rodet, a valet de chambre for the Duchess of Burgundy, and Angélique Thérèse Chemineau, the daughter of a Parisian Banker. Marie Thérèse's mother died a year later in giving birth to her son Louis. At age seven, Marie Thérèse and her brother were taken to live with their grandmother Madame Chemineau on the rue Saint-Honoré. At thirteen, she was engaged to be married to the widower Pierre François Geoffrin, a lieutenant-colonel of the National Guard and a prosperous general cashier of the Saint-Gobain Venetian mirror manufactory. Despite the fact that he was forty-nine years old, and Marie Thérèse was barely fourteen years old, Monsieur Geoffrin had inherited a substantial fortune from his first wife, and the chance for "an excellent settlement" was thought to be quite suitable by Madame Chemineau. The marriage took place on 19 July 1713. Nearly two years after the wedding, she gave birth to her first child, a daughter named also Marie Thérèse, and the future Marquise de La Ferté-Imbault. Her second child, a son, (who was to die later in childhood) was born two years later. It was not until Madame Geoffrin was over thirty years old that her connection to the salons would become established. Her husband, Pierre François Geoffrin died 20 December 1749, a fact that was hardly noticed by Mme Geoffrin's visitors—indeed, Madame Geoffrin hardly seemed to notice herself.

Geoffrin was unable to receive a formalized education. It has been suggested, most notably by Dena Goodman, that the salon itself acted as a schoolhouse, where Geoffrin and other salonnières could train. Goodman writes, "For Madame Geoffrin, the salon was a socially acceptable substitute for a formal education denied her not just by her grandmother, but more generally by a society that agreed with Madame Chemineau's (her grandmother's) position." She also states, "Her earliest schoolmasters were Fontenelle, the abbe de Saint-Pierre, and Montesquieu. Madame de Tencin played a large role in Madame Geoffrin's rise in society. Goodman states, "Madame Geoffrin made a daring step for a devout girl when, at the age of eighteen, but already a wife and mother, she began to frequent the afternoon gatherings at the home of Madame de Tencin." After Madame de Tencin's death in December 1749, Madame Geoffrin inherited many of de Tencin's former guests, thereby solidifying her own salon.

Madame Geoffrin's popularity in the mid-eighteenth century came during a time where the center of social life was beginning to move away from the French court and toward the salons of Paris. Instead of the earlier, seventeenth-century salons of the high nobility, Madame Geoffrin's salon catered generally to a more philosophical crowd of the Enlightenment period. Goodman, in "Enlightenment Salons", writes, "In the eighteenth century, under the guidance of Madame Geoffrin, Julie de Lespinasse, and Suzanne Necker, the salon was transformed from a noble, leisure institution into an institution of the Enlightenment." Goodman writes:

"Geoffrin, who acted as a mentor and model for other salonnières, was responsible for two innovations that set Enlightenment salons apart from their predecessors and from other social and literacy gatherings of the day. She invented the Enlightenment salon. First, she made the one-o'clock dinner rather than the traditional late-night supper the sociable meal of the day, and thus she opened up the whole afternoon for talk. Second, she regulated these dinners, fixing a specific day of the week for them. After Geoffrin launched her weekly dinners, the Parisian salon took on the form that made it the social base of the Enlightenment Republic of Letters: a regular and regulated formal gathering hosted by a woman in her own home which served as a forum and locus of intellectual activity."

Her dinners were held twice weekly. Mondays were specifically for artists. Wednesdays were generally reserved for Men of Letters.

Goodman writes, "Enlightenment salons were working spaces, unlike other Eighteenth-century social gatherings, which took place as their model." She continues, "The Enlightenment was not a game, and the salonnières were not simply ladies of leisure killing time. On the contrary, Enlightenment salonnières were precisely those women who fought the general malaise of the period by taking up their métier."