La salle à manger : naissance et adoption d’une pièce réservée au repas (xviie-xixe siècle)

The appearance and development of the dining room in France was part of a general move towards the specialisation of the use of a house’s different rooms, from the seventeenth to eighteenth centuries. Up until then, the living spaces in a dwelling, at all levels in society, were ‘polyvalent’ spaces where only the furniture denoted the use. Consequently, and according to the season or to the number of guests, the room where meals were eaten could vary. In the architecture of social elites, the bedroom or the antechamber could fulfil this dining function, before a specific room began to appear, known in French as the ‘salle à manger’, the dining room. The expression appears in manuscript sources at the beginning of the seventeenth century. Subsequently, there is a gradual process of appropriation and generalisation throughout society during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. The development of this room is to be seen then in a rich context of social and architectural changes.