The literary salon is among the few truly original institutions in the history of French culture. The literary assemblies first noted in sixteenth-century France were naturally not without precedent – notably in sixteenth-century Italy. However, no other country ever produced a tradition of such gatherings. For, whereas most European nations at one time or another knew some degree of salon activity – salons were particularly prevalent throughout Europe in the eighteenth century – only in France did salons flourish without interruption for nearly two centuries. During that time, a veritable culture developed in the salons. The influence of that culture was so powerful that at certain periods – particularly in the late seventeenth and the early eighteenth centuries – French culture seemed almost synonymous with salon culture. An important aspect of salon culture' influence can be noted in the definition of literary criticism as it was first practised on a large scale in France.

In France the salon tradition really began around 1610, when the Italian-born marquise de Rambouillet, having deemed the French court insufficiently sophisticated, decided to establish an alternate court in her townhouse near the Louvre. The Revolution of 1789 brought the salon tradition to an abrupt end, just as it terminated so many other institutions that had flourished under the ancien régime. The salon did resurface in the nineteenth century. Once the tradition had been broken, however, the new assemblies recovered neither the flavour nor the prestige of their precursors.

While the true tradition was still alive, the salons were not yet referred to by that name – ‘salon’ designated only the formal reception rooms in which assemblies were generally held in the eighteenth century rather than the gatherings themselves.