First World War had faced the total collapse of everything in w hich they had believed.4 By then, the potential for free expression had developed in coffee houses elsew here. In seventeenth-century France, le public consisted of the royal court: lecturers, spectators and the audience w ere recipients and critics of art and literature. It w as only w hen Phillip of O rléans m oved the royal residence from Versailles to Paris, that the court lost its central function as the public. All of the great w riters of the eighteenth century w ould first present their m ost im portant ideas in a discours, a lecture to an academ y or to a salon. The salon held the m onopoly of a first edition: a new w ork had to be legitim ized there. In Germ any at that tim e there w as no city w hich could offer a civil institution to replace the public w hich the courts had provided. Elem ents not dissim ilar to the salons appeared in educated “dinner societies”. As in coffee houses, their custom ers com prised private people of all professions and classes, and a high num ber of academ ically trained intellectuals. Citizens from all w alks of life m et w ith m em bers of the socially accepted, yet politically uninfluential, aristocracy in so-called “Germ an Societies”. They w ere secret societies; the absolutist state did not perm it open political equality. For the Stuarts in England, literature and arts served to represent the king. After the reign of Charles II, the court cam e to be the residence of a royal fam ily that lived a m ore or less secluded life. The increased im portance of civil society w as consolidated by the new institutions of the public – the coffee houses in their heyday betw een 1680 and 1730. The salons in France, the societies in Germ any and the coffee houses in England w ere centres of w hat w as first literary criticism , and later also political criticism . A parity of the educated from both aristocracy and the m iddle class began to develop. In the first decade of the eighteenth century, London already had som e 3,000 coffee houses, each of w hich had an JUTTA W O LKE
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