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This book examines Louis Sébastien Mercier’s impassioned representations of social injustice in Paris at the end of the eighteenth century. Mercier’s urban chronicles argue that society must enact Enlightenment values to educate the populace as a whole; otherwise, representative democracy and social equity are impossible to sustain, and widespread fanaticism is impossible to prevent.
List of contents
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
About the author
MICHAEL J. MULRYAN is an associate professor of French at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia. His research focuses on the representation of urban space and the marginalized in eighteenth-century literature. He is the coeditor of Eighteenth-Century Escape Tales: Between Fact and Fiction (Bucknell University Press) and coeditor and cotranslator of an educational treatise by Mercier.
Summary
French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist Louis Sebastien Mercier passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre. In this penetrating study Michael Mulryan explores his unpublished writings and urban chronicles, returning him to his rightful place among Enlightenment thinkers.
