1. See Jon Cowans, ‘Habermas and French History: The Public Sphere and the Problem of Political Legitimacy’,French History, 13 (1999) pp. 134–60, and Dale Van Kley, ‘In Search of Eighteenth-Century Parisian Public Opinion’,French Historical Studies, 19 (1995) pp. 215–26. The author would like to acknowledge the support of the British Academy in funding research for this article, and the helpful comments of the anonymous readers forCultural and Social History, as well as the assistance of Alan Forrest, Colin Jones, David Kammerling Smith, and Laura Mason in reading drafts.
2. see Cowans, ‘Habermas', and for earlier examples, Dena Goodman, ‘Public Sphere and Private Life: Toward a Synthesis of Current Historiographical Approaches to the Old Regime’,History and Theory, 31 (1992) pp. 1–20; Margaret C. Jacob, ‘The Mental Landscape of the Public Sphere: A European Perspective’,Eighteenth-Century Studies, 28 (1994) pp. 95–113; William Reddy, ‘Postmodernism and the Public Sphere: Implications for an Historical Ethnography’,Cultural Anthropology, 7 (1992) pp. 135–69.
3. Harold Mah, ‘Phantasies of the Public Sphere: Rethinking the Habermas of Historians',Journal of Modern History, 72 (2000) pp. 153–82, p. 154. And thus, of course, I invoke it.
4. Mah, ‘Phantasies', pp. 156–64. In French, of course, the translation is even more explicit:espace public. See, for example, Raymonde Monnier,L'Espace public démocratique: essai sur l'opinion à Paris de la Révolution au Directoire(Paris, 1994).