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 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).

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

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