Club de l'Entresol

The Club de l'Entresol (, "Mezzanine Club") was a discussion group and early think tank in Paris, active from 1723 to 1731, created and primarily led by Abbot Pierre-Joseph Alary. Name and background The club's name came from the fact that at its inception, Alary lived in the mezzanine of the of Charles-Jean-François Hénault at 7 place Vendôme, also known as for its original builder in 1708. The club kept its name even as Alary moved to other apartments where the meetings were subsequently held, including when he lived at the Royal Library. The adoption of the word club was suggested by Henry St John, 1st Viscount Bolingbroke, who was exiled in Paris and close to Alary in the early 1720s. It ostensibly echoed the English model of clubs for free discussion of political and economic questions, at a time of widespread Anglophilia in Paris under the Régence. In spite of its English-sounding name, the inspiration for the club was homegrown. Its roots went back to the , a short-lived discussion group led in 1691–1692 by François-Timoléon de Choisy whose members included such luminaries as François Lefebvre de Caumartin, Louis de Courcillon, Louis Cousin, Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle, Barthélemy d'Herbelot, Charles Perrault, and Eusèbe Renaudot. The Académie du Luxembourg was well known to Alary from the memories of the brothers Philippe and Louis de Courcillon and of two of Choisy's relatives, the marquis de Balleroy and the marquis d'Argenson. A more recent experience had been the established at the Louvre by Jean-Baptiste Colbert, Marquess of Torcy, which operated from 1712 to 1715 and again from 1717 to 1720 and from which the club's members drew lessons about how best to organize their activities.