In France, academies are institutions and learned societies which monitor, foster, critique and protect French cultural production.
Academies were more institutional and more concerned with criticism and analysis than those literary gatherings today called salons which were more focused on pleasurable discourse in society, although certain gatherings around such figures as Marguerite de Valois were close to the academic spirit.
The first half of the seventeenth century saw a phenomenal growth in private learned academies, organized around a half-dozen or a dozen individuals meeting regularly.
From the 17th to the 20th century, the Académie de peinture et sculpture organized official art exhibitions called salons.
In the 19th century, the salon system frequently incited criticism from artists for the bland or academic quality of the artwork, while radical artists (like Édouard Manet or Gustave Courbet) would not be received or would be greatly censored by the "respectable" public.
The salon system thus forced radical and modern artists to seek alternative or unofficial exhibition sites.