Louis-Sébastien Mercier Explained

Louis-Sébastien Mercier
Birth Date:1740 6, df=yes
Birth Place:Paris, France
Death Place:Paris, France
Occupation:Writer
Nationality:French

Louis-Sébastien Mercier (6 June 1740 – 25 April 1814) was a French dramatist and writer, whose 1771 novel L'An 2440 is an example of proto-science fiction.

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. Early on, he came to the conclusion that Boileau and Racine had ruined the French language and that the true poet 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."

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 of his century, he became entirely hostile. He denied that modern science had made any real advances; in a jesting passage, he even carried his conservatism so far as to maintain that the earth was a circular flat plane 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 [sic]; and into German as Das Jahr zwey tausend vier hundert und vierzig: Ein Traum aller Träume) is a utopian novel set in the year 2440. This extremely popular work (it went through twenty-five editions after its first appearance in 1771) 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?"

Political and religious views

In politics he was a moderate, and, as a member of the National 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).

Mercier was a Freemason and member of the Lodge of Nine Sisters; a board (or, as it is known in French, a planche)—an official document laying out Mercier's perspective as a member of this Masonic lodge, states the following in French:

I have sometimes said to myself, if of all the stirring books in the world there were only one left, what a language there would be in this book, with all its accessories, as well as it as speech, though it would be mute! I assure you that thanks to this book, the torch of human knowledge may not be extinguished. Well, then! Let's enjoy thought for its own sake, not as a matter of ostentation. Every man carries within him both this book and language, the language designed to resound in future centuries. This unknown man...has what it takes to be heard and respected, to propagate the useful ideas it has pleased the Eternal to bestow upon us. Dare, after that, dare to assign him a rank, an inner rank dictated by your blindness. Man is a book that has not been published before. Let’s lift up our ideas together to a sphere greater than the one inhabited by Vanity. Let’s talk, let's not belittle anyone, let's not judge haughtily. Let us be Masons, my brothers, and not academicians.[1]

Works

See also

Notes

  1. Robert Darnton, The Forbidden Best-Sellers of Pre-Revolutionary France (New York: W.W. Norton, 1996), 118.
  2. Darnton, Forbidden Best-Sellers, 120.

Sources

External links

Notes and References

  1. Web site: Mercier . Louis-Sébastien . Soyons maçons et non académiciens . October 10, 2024 . Bibliothèque Nationale de France.

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