Clubs & Sociétés

Debating societies became well-established institutions in London and provincial cities, catering for the taste for public debate among the lower and middling sorts. Topics could be frivolous, but when societies debated politics, religion, and the economy they were felt to voice threateningly radical opinions.

Dr. Alexander Hamilton's (1712-56) Annapolis, Maryland “Tuesday Club” (1745-56) reflected the Scottish-born physician’s life-long, transatlantic pursuit of sociability and identity. After moving to Annapolis in 1739, Hamilton struggled with isolation and poor health. He especially missed Edinburgh’s Whin-Bush Club, which he considered the most civil and successful of all tavern clubs. During a five-month journey through northeastern America in 1744, Hamilton attended various taverns in the hopes of finding a model for his own version of the Whin-Bush Club in Annapolis. Upon returning to Annapolis, Hamilton founded the Tuesday Club, itself a direct reflection of the Whin-Bush Club. Over the next eleven years, the Tuesday Club became a respected and well-attended outlet for sociability, satire, and camaraderie among educated colonists. Hamilton’s death in 1756 marked the Club’s end, illustrating the Scottish physician’s profound impact on British America’s sociable scene.

The eighteenth century saw a proliferation of so-called Hell-fire Clubs, the members of which were invariably accused by society of promoting heavy drinking, sexual license, blasphemy, and Satanism, even if reality differed considerably from club to club.

Early modern literary academies were spaces of in-person and epistolary interaction and intellectual sociability. From the highly institutionalised royal academies to the academies salonnières of Italy, they incarnated the practices of the educated, intellectual classes in Europe.

This entry examines the political clubs of the French Revolution, focusing especially on the Jacobin Club. It explores the reasons why the clubs strayed from their initial ideals of civil debate and succumbed to lethal factionalism.