The World of the Salons is a revisionist study of the French salon of the eighteenth century, arguing that it was a place governed by social hierarchy, not equality, connected to the world of the Court, and not the fount of the Enlightenment as has traditionally been believed. Antoine Lilti's Le Monde des salons is the most thorough and important study of eighteenth-century French salons to date. Methodologically sophisticated, it distinguishes between how contemporaries talked about salons and what actually took place in them. In doing so, it explodes several myths. First, it puts the lie to recent interpretations that have depicted salons as crucibles of modern egalitarianism