French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740–1814) passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre but today remains an understudied writer. In this penetrating study—the first in English devoted to Mercier in decades—Michael Mulryan explores his unpublished writings and urban chronicles, Tableau de Paris (1781–88) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798), in which he identified the city as a microcosm of national societal problems, detailed the conditions of the laboring poor, encouraged educational reform, and confronted universal social ills. Mercier’s rich writings speak powerfully to the sociopolitical problems that continue to afflict us as political leaders manipulate public debate and encourage absolutist thinking, deepening social divides. An outcast for his polemical views during his lifetime, Mercier has been called the founder of modern urban discourse, and his work a precursor to investigative journalism. This sensitive study returns him to his rightful place among Enlightenment thinkers.
List of Illustrations
Introduction
1 The Desolation of Festive Space in Tableau de Paris
2 Authoritarian versus Enlightened Approaches to Urban Space in Tableau de Paris
3 Art and Society in Tableau de Paris
4 Mercier’s “New” Chaotic Paris: Surviving a Moral Vacuum among the Delusional, the Dethroned, and the Disenfranchised
5 The Regeneration of the French Citizen: The “Homme Nouveau” as the Cornerstone Mercier’s Modern Urbs
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Notes
Bibliography
Index
