Abstract
Back to the question of France's centrality in the history of the Enlightenment. Given all the recent work on "multiple Enlightenment" and "global Enlightenment", what role can we still attribute to France in this history? I propose that the new writing strategies described in the previous lecture have their most important roots in seventeenth-century French mundane culture, and that "enlightened self-culture" can be linked to the institutions that prepared nobles of this period to enter court and city life. In this way, I revisit the link between sociability and the Enlightenment - sociability understood as an object of study, an intellectual practice and a national quality.
