Louis-Sébastien Mercier
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Louis-Sébastien Mercier
Mercier, Louis-Sébastien (1740-1814). French polymath who was for long judged in accordance with the dismissive evaluation of his contemporaries; for he was a resolute nonconformist in all things who fell foul of censorship, of the Comédie-Française, of the literary establishment, of the monarchy, of Robespierre, of Napoleon … but who has found more favour with the Romantics and the late 20th c.
He was first known, throughout France and Europe, as the author of some 50 drames bourgeois, which all suffered from the curse of the genre: a surfeit of didacticism and high moral purpose. Conversely, his prefaces to those plays and his manifestos are of capital importance because they contain visionary opinions and insights which were to resurface with the young Victor Hugo. Indeed, Jules Janin was to characterize the Nouvel essai sur l'art dramatique (1773) as Mercier's Préface de Cromwell. With exactly the same prescience, Mon bonnet de nuit (1784) contains a rich collection of thoughts concerning the future of French poetry (which any historian of Romanticism must read), while, similarly, the basic contention of Néologie (1801)—in which Mercier once again bridges the rationalism of the 18th c. and the burgeoning literary imagination of the 19th—is that French poets will be mere versifiers until such time as a revolution has been accomplished in imagery and vocabulary. Prefiguring Hugo once more, it was really Mercier who put a ‘bonnet rouge’ on the dictionary.
The earliest of Mercier's works which is still read for genuine enjoyment and stimulation is L'An 2440 (1770), a work of political radicalism which—springing from a novel conjunction of past experience, present observation, and prophetic extrapolation—is the only genuinely creative contribution to Utopian literature in the 18th c. Mercier's fame is, however, inseparable from his Tableau de Paris (1781-9) and Le Nouveau Paris (1793-8), 18 volumes of disorganized sketches of Parisian life seen through its people, its places, and its institutions, which appeared to his classical contemporaries as a peripatetic's artless, even chaotic, collection of ‘choses vues’, but which—with its vitality, its acuity of vision, its implicit classification of social types, and its underlying antithesis between grandeur and misère—possibly prefigures Balzac. One can fairly say that Mercier's historical importance and literary qualities have only been properly assessed by modern criticism, which sees his œuvre as original, imaginative, and exciting.
[John Renwick]
Bibliography
- H. Temple Patterson, Poetic Genius: Sébastien Mercier into Victor Hugo (1960)
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Louis-Sébastien Mercier
| Louis-Sébastien Mercier | |
|---|---|
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| Born | June 6, 1740 Paris, France |
| Died | April 25, 1814 (aged 73) Paris, France |
| Occupation | Writer |
| Nationality | French |
Louis-Sébastien Mercier (6 June 1740 – 25 April 1814) was a French dramatist and writer.
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Early life and education
He was born in Paris to a humble family: his father was a skilled artisan who polished swords and metal arms. Mercier nevertheless received a decent education.
Literary career
Mercier began his literary career by writing heroic epistles. He early came to the conclusion that Boileau and Racine had ruined the French language, and that the true poet was he who wrote in prose.
He wrote plays, pamphlets, and novels, and published prodigiously. Mercier often recycled passages from one work to another and expanded on essays he had already written. Mercier’s keen observations on his surroundings and the journalistic feel of his writing meant that his work remained riveting despite the nature of its composition. "There is no better writer to consult," Robert Darnton writes, "if one wants to get some idea of how Paris looked, sounded, smelled, and felt on the eve of the Revolution."[1]
The most important of his miscellaneous works are L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (1771); L'Essai sur l'art dramatique (1773); Néologie ou Vocabulaire (1801); Le Tableau de Paris (1781–1788); Le nouveau Paris (1799); Histoire de France (1802) and Satire contre Racine et Boileau (1808).
He decried French tragedy as a caricature of antique and foreign customs in bombastic verse, and advocated the drame as understood by Diderot. To the philosophers he was entirely hostile. He denied that modern science had made any real advance; he even carried his conservatism so far as to maintain that the earth was a circular flat plain around which revolved the sun.
Mercier wrote some sixty dramas, among which may be mentioned Jean Hennuyer (1772); La Destruction de la ligue (1782); Jennval (1769); Le Juge (1774); Natalie (1775) and La Brouette du vinaigrier (1775).
L'An 2440 (The Year 2440)
Mercier's L'An 2440, rêve s'il en fut jamais (literally, "The Year 2440: A Dream If Ever There Was One"; translated into English as Memoirs of the Year Two Thousand Five Hundred) is a utopian novel set in the year 2440. An extremely popular work (it went through twenty-five editions after its first appearance in 1771), the work describes the adventures of an unnamed man, who, after engaging in a heated discussion with a philosopher friend about the injustices of Paris, falls asleep and finds himself in a Paris of the future. Darnton writes that "despite its self-proclaimed character of fantasy...L'An 2440 demanded to be read as a serious guidebook to the future. It offered an astonishing new perspective: the future as a fait accompli and the present as a distant past. Who could resist the temptation to participate in such a thought experiment? And once engaged in it, who could fail to see that it exposed the rottenness of the society before his eyes, the Paris of the eighteenth century?"[2]
Mercier's hero notes everything that catches his fancy in this futuristic Paris. Public space and the justice system have been reorganized. Its citizens' garb is comfortable and practical. Hospitals are effective and based on science. There are no monks, priests, prostitutes, beggars, dancing masters, pastry chefs, standing armies, slavery, arbitrary arrest, taxes, guilds, foreign trade, coffee, tea or tobacco and all useless and immoral previously-written literature has been destroyed.
Mercier's future is not wholly utopian. The extremes of wealth and poverty have been abolished; nevertheless, the poor still exist. There is little economic development and the population of France has only increased by 50%.
Political views
In politics he was a moderate, and, as a member of the Convention, he voted against the death penalty for Louis XVI. During the Reign of Terror, he was imprisoned, but he was released after the fall of Robespierre, whom he termed a "Sanguinocrat" (roughly, ruler by bloodshed).
See also
Notes
| French literature |
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| By category |
| French literary history |
| French writers |
| Portals |
| France · Literature |
- ^ Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 118.
- ^ Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers, 120.
References
- (French) Bibliotheca Augustana
- Léon Béclard, Sébastien Mercier, sa vie, son œuvre, son temps d’après des documents inédits, Paris: Honoré Champion, 1903, réimp. Hildesheim ; New York: G. Olms, 1982.
- Jean-Claude Bonnet, Le Paris de Louis Sébastien Mercier : cartes et index topographique, Paris, Mercure de France, 1994.
- Jean-Claude Bonnet, Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814) : un hérétique en littérature, Paris, Mercure de France, 1995.
- Élisabeth Bourguinat, Les Rues de Paris au XVIIIe siècle : le regard de Louis Sébastien Mercier, Paris, Paris Musées, 1999.
- Paulette L. Castillo, Les Deux Paris de Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Thèse d’honneur de 1977 de Smith College, Northampton.
- Anne-Marie Deval, Sébastien Mercier, précurseur, Thèse de l’Université de Californie à Los Angeles, 1968.
- R. Doumic in the Revue des deux mondes (15 July 1903)
- Louis de Bordes de Fortage, Sébastien Mercier à Bordeaux, Bordeaux, Gounouilhou, 1918.
- Gilles Girard, Inventaire des manuscrits de Louis-Sébastien Mercier conservés à la Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal, Reims, Département de français de l’université, 1974.
- Hermann Hofer, Louis-Sébastien Mercier précurseur et sa fortune : avec des documents inédits : recueil d’études sur l’influence de Mercier, Munich, Fink, 1977.
- Anne Le Fur, Le Paris de Louis Sébastien Mercier : cartes et index toponymique, Paris, Mercure de France, 1994.
- Mario Mormile, La Néologie révolutionnaire de Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Rome, Bulzoni, 1973.
- René Pomeau, L’Imaginaire d’anticipation de Louis-Sébastien Mercier à George Orwell, Paris, Palais de l’Institut, 1998.
- Enrico Rufi, Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Paris, CNRS éditions, 1996.
- Laurent Turcot, Le promeneur à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris, Gallimard, 2007.
- Nedd Willard, La Moralité du théâtre de Louis-Sébastien Mercier, Paris, [s.n.], 1955.
- Nedd Willard, Le Génie et la folie au dix-huitième siècle, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1963.
This article incorporates text from a publication now in the public domain: Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press.
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Oxford Companion to French Literature
The New Oxford Companion to Literature in French. Copyright © 1995, 2005 by Oxford University Press. All rights reserved.
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