Louis Sébastien Mercier: Revolution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Paris

By Michael J. Mulryan

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 In this penetrating study—the first in English devoted to Mercier in decades—Michael Mulryan explores his unpublished writings and urban chronicles, Tableau de Paris (1781–88) and Le Nouveau Paris (1798), in which he identified the city as a microcosm of national societal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.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Bucknell University Press
• Release date: Sep 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9781684484898

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Cover: Louis Sébastien Mercier, REVOLUTION AND REFORM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PARIS by Michael J. Mulryan

Louis Sébastien Mercier

TRANSITS

LITERATURE, THOUGHT & CULTURE, 1650–1850

Series editors:

Miriam Wallace, New College of Florida

Mona Narain, Texas Christian University

A landmark series in long-eighteenth-century studies, Transits publishes monographs and edited volumes that are timely, transformative in their approach, and global in their engagement with arts, literature, culture, and history. Books in the series have engaged with visual arts, environment, politics, material culture, travel, theater and performance, embodiment, connections between the natural sciences and medical humanities, writing and book history, sexuality, gender, disability, race, and colonialism from Britain and Europe to the Americas, the Far East, the Middle/Near East, Africa, and Oceania. Works that make provocative connections across time, space, geography, or intellectual history, or that develop new modes of critical imagining are particularly welcome.

Recent titles in the series:

Louis Sébastien Mercier: Revolution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Paris

Michael J. Mulryan

Alimentary Orientalism: Britain’s Literary Imagination and the Edible East

Yin Yuan

Thomas Holcroft’s Revolutionary Drama: Reception and Afterlives

Amy Garnai

Families of the Heart: Surrogate Relations in the Eighteenth-Century British Novel

Ann Campbell

Eighteenth-Century Environmental Humanities

Jeremy Chow, ed.

Political Affairs of the Heart: Female Travel Writers, the Sentimental Travelogue, and Revolution, 1775–1800

Linda Van Netten Blimke

The Limits of Familiarity: Authorship and Romantic Readers

Lindsey Eckert

For more information about the series, please visit www.bucknelluniversitypress.org.

Louis Sébastien Mercier

REVOLUTION AND REFORM IN EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY PARIS

MICHAEL J. MULRYAN

LEWISBURG, PENNSYLVANIA

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Mulryan, Michael J., author.

Title: Louis Sébastien Mercier : revolution and reform in eighteenth-century Paris / Michael J. Mulryan.

Description: Lewisburg, Pennsylvania : Bucknell University Press, [2023] | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2022061431 | ISBN 9781684484881 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781684484874 (paperback) | ISBN 9781684484898 (epub) | ISBN 9781684484904 (pdf)

Subjects: LCSH: Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 1740–1814—Criticism and interpretation. | Mercier, Louis-Sébastien, 1740–1814— Political and social views. | Paris (France)—Social conditions—18th century. | Paris (France)—Intellectual life.

Classification: LCC PQ2007.M6 M85 2023 | DDC 848/.609—dc23/eng/20230511

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022061431

A British Cataloging-in-Publication record for this book is available from the British Library.

Copyright © 2023 by Michael J. Mulryan

All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without written permission from the publisher. Please contact Bucknell University Press, Hildreth-Mirza Hall, Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA 17837-2005. The only exception to this prohibition is fair use as defined by U.S. copyright law.

References to internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Bucknell University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

The paper used in this publication meets the requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

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Distributed worldwide by Rutgers University Press

For my beloved wife, Laura, and our miraculous boys, Liam and Jacob

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 of Mercier’s Modern Urbs

Conclusion

Acknowledgments

Notes

Bibliography

Index

ILLUSTRATIONS

Figure I.1 Membre du Comité des recherches (Research committee member)

Figure I.2 Decrottez là ma pratique (Boot polishing there, that is my trade)

Figure 1.1 Feu d’artifice tiré à la place de Louis XV le 30 mai 1770 (Fireworks on La Place Louis XV on May 30, 1770)

Figure 2.1 Fiacres (Horse-Drawn Carriages)

Figure 2.2 Ruisseaux (Streams)

Figure 3.1 La Petite loge (Private Box)

Figure 4.1 Les Aristocrates désespérés d’apercevoir la Fête du 14 juillet au Champ de mars (Aristocrats in a state of despair on witnessing the Bastille Day celebration on the Champ de Mars)

Figure 5.1 La Régénération de la nation française, en 1789 (The Regeneration of the French Nation in 1789)

Louis Sébastien Mercier

INTRODUCTION

I uttered it, this ignoble word? Will I be forgiven? Do you see him, this man who, thanks to his hook, picks up what he finds in the muck, and throws it into his sack? Do not turn your head away; no pride, no fake sensitivity either. This vile rag is primeval matter, which shall become the ornament of our libraries, and the precious treasure of the human mind. This rag picker precedes Montesquieu, Buffon, and Rousseau.… You owe to him this matter which will be transformed into paper, the origin of which seems so vile.… Honor to the rag picker!

—Louis Sébastien Mercier, Tableau de Paris

What a man this Sanson is! He comes and goes like anyone else, he sometimes goes to Vaudeville theater; he laughs, looks at me; my head escaped him, and he knows nothing about it; and since he is very indifferent about it, I do not tire of contemplating this indifference with which he sent a multitude of people into the other world, as much from the lowest as from the highest social ranks; he might begin again if … and why not? Isn’t that his trade?

—Louis Sébastien Mercier, Le Nouveau Paris

THESE QUOTES FROM LOUIS SÉBASTIEN MERCIER’S (1740–1814) urban chronicles encapsulate his originality as a writer and his courage as a journaliste engagé.¹ Speaking directly to the reader, he urges them to acknowledge their connection and their debt to one of the lowliest members of society and one of the most allegedly ignoble ones. Mercier assertively explains that progress is never possible without the collaboration of all social categories, including ones that are dismissed by many. In much of his Tableau de Paris (1781–1788), he not only perceptively details the contributions of the laboring poor but also brilliantly captures their dignity as people. One of his greatest contributions as a protosociologist and journalist was to base his observations of social groups on direct experience. He did not hesitate to visit all corners of the city to reveal how people were interconnected and also to show the seldomly acknowledged debt the elite had toward the poor. In his passage on the rag picker, for example, Mercier displays what he perceives to be true nobility.

Figure I.1 Membre du Comité des recherches: qui fait bien son métier ne craint point les injures, il est bon quelquefois (Research committee member; anyone who does their job well does not fear insults, it is sometimes good), representing a ragpicker. Unidentified artist, 1790. Reproduced with permission of the Bibliothèque nationale de France (BNF).

Ironically, during the French Revolution that brought about the demise of the nobility, respect for the dignity of human life was not more present than before, yet, as Mercier points out, death is also a great equalizer. The fact that a royal executioner like Sanson, who continued his duties during the revolution, could go about life as normal is inconceivable to Mercier yet an undeniable reality. Mercier, who was imprisoned for his dedication to democratic ideals as a writer and a politician, just barely missed the blade of the guillotine himself. As a public intellectual and journaliste engagé, he had the courage to defend the dignity of human life regardless of the personal cost it entailed. In spite of the setbacks both he and the French people faced during the turbulent time that was the end of the eighteenth century, Mercier never lost his optimism and his faith that humanity could change for the better, for he believed ardently in the power of the written word to change hearts and minds. In spite of the dramatic changes to which he was a witness, this is a source of continuity in his oeuvre.

An extraordinary polymath, Louis Sébastien Mercier was a man whose literary reputation was all but forgotten by the scholarly community until the twentieth century. Parisian by birth, he was a direct witness of the downfall of the ancien régime, the main events of the French Revolution, and the duration of Napoleon’s dictatorial reign. For the majority of his life (1760–1808), he was a productive author; he wrote poetry, numerous plays, novels, a well-known utopia (The Year 2440: A Dream if There Ever Was One, 1771), an important theoretical text on theater (On Theatre or a New Essay on the Dramatic Art, 1773), interesting pre-romantic texts (Dreams included in My Night Cap, 1784–1786), two urban chronicles (Tableau de Paris [1781–1788] and Le Nouveau Paris [1798] on revolutionary Paris), and finally his Néologie (1801), a dictionary that serves as a manifesto against linguistic prescriptivism. He also edited and wrote for newspapers, including the widely read Journal des dames (1775–1777) and Annales patriotiques et littéraires de la France (1789–1794), a popular newspaper during the early days of the revolution, which he cofounded with Jean-Louis Carra.² Even though Mercier was also known for copying and pasting portions of writings from his previously published works (this is especially the case for previously published newspaper articles he included in Le Nouveau Paris),³ his oeuvre is not that redundant. Mercier’s originality lies not only in how he represents urbs but also how he uses the city as a focal point for analyzing social problems, as a lens through which the city dweller can learn how to mitigate universal social ills. Although Paris is not the linchpin in every one of his works, it often takes center stage. Mercer was fascinated by the city and at heart a proud Parisian, but his obsession with the city goes beyond mere fondness or infatuation. He rather has difficulty avoiding the capital because it is so central to his activism. Moreover, his proto-Haussmannian and protosocialist views of the city reflect his perspective as an urban reformer: he often ponders whether destroying parts of the city to build anew would not be a more effective approach for constructing a just society, rather than attempting to rehabilitate hopelessly corrupt corners of the capital.

Mercier’s sole biographer, Léon Béclard, notes that Mercier’s social station was in between that of the people and the bourgeoisie,⁴ even though Mercier identified most with la petite bourgeoisie himself. However, Béclard has a point in stating that even though Mercier’s family had wealth (his father polished weapons in his own shop, and they had several properties), his boyhood home in Paris near the Seine was a humble one.⁵ It was this vantage point that arguably made him who he was: he was educated but of a modest home and from the heart of Paris where he was able to witness the people’s daily life from a very young age. Although Mercier does not provide detailed definitions of how he viewed the bourgeoisie, there are some clues: he states, for example, that true bourgeois are merchants (like his father) and do not deal in trade and that la petite bourgeoisie do not get the respect they deserve.⁶ Although he finds bourgeois marriage practices risible, given the emphasis on dowries over people, he views women’s role as rightfully subservient to that of the husband.⁷ In his dictionary, he provides an entry for bourgeois, solely providing quotes by Corneille and Voltaire in which they praise the social category’s worth, but in a note he states in his voice that the word citoyen has replaced the term bourgeois in the wake of the revolution.⁸ Like in Voltaire’s quote, who states that the bourgeoisie represents rights, Mercier associates the social category with civic rights that they lacked under the ancien régime.⁹ He also openly expresses his disdain for members of the grande bourgeoisie who parrot nobles and perpetuate social injustice to the same degree, flaunting their excessive wealth.¹⁰ In other words, Mercier defends his identity as a member of the petite bourgeoisie because he views it as a social rank based on merit and one that values education. Although at times condescending toward the ignorant, he was not elitist and did his best to denounce aspects of the system he viewed as askew or unjust. He thought Enlightenment philosophy should be used to move society forward rather than ossify it in the skeleton of harmful traditions, including in the world of letters.

As a militant intellectual, Mercier was profoundly influenced by the works of the great philosophes, even though he could be critical of their antireligious positions and their excessively abstract thought. On the model of Voltaire, he bravely fought for what he thought was right. He was, for example, an outspoken critic of Maximilien Robespierre and of Napoleon. Enormously prolific, devoted to the public good, and deeply involved in the cultural and political life of his time, throughout his long career Mercier embodies what it meant to be to be a dedicated homme de lettres engagé in the long eighteenth century.

Mercier would become an outcast for his polemical views, such as a disdain for the French Academy, universities, and the fine arts. It was during his years as a student at the Collège des Quatre Nations when he had the opportunity to frequent the theater and Parisian cafés that he developed such radical opinions.¹¹ Like other regulars of the Café Procope, he spoke freely and critiqued art and literature with a great deal of candor. As Mercier notes, This is where I started to show myself as a literary heretic and frankly stated: I tried reading several of these vaunted authors, but I did not like them.¹² Later on in life, he transferred his penchant for publicly defending his beliefs from literary circles to the political stage.

Mercier was an actor and a victim during the turbulent years of the French Revolution. As an elected representative of the National Convention (1792–1793) and also of the Council of Five Hundred (1795–1797), he participated in some of the most important events of the time. During a verbal confrontation with Robespierre, he audaciously denounced the militaristic policies of the convention after the arrest of the Girondins in June 1793.¹³ He was also imprisoned (October 3, 1793–October 24, 1794) for signing a petition supporting the Girondins before their demise.¹⁴ Mercier’s attitude remained unchanged as a witness of the excesses of Bonaparte, whom he castigated publicly after the Corsican’s rise as dictator and emperor. Such harangues in the salons did not go unnoticed by Napoleon’s spies, however, and Mercier was thus warned by the minister of police, Rovigo, that he would send him incognito to Bicêtre, a Parisian prison. Mercier responded virulently and courageously, "Mercier in Bicêtre!!! … You? Know … that you cannot make me disappear incognito. Put me in f … Bicêtre! I challenge you to do it!!!"¹⁵ Rovigo declined to act on his threat.

Both his courage when facing such adversity and his unwillingness to compromise morally can be associated with Mercier’s membership in the Cercle Social, which stood for the same principles. As Gary Kates puts it in his monograph on the group, it went from being a clique of Parisian politicians and then a club of a few thousand members to the most prominent Girondin publishing company.¹⁶ When it was a club, Mercier was an active member, and some of his works were published by its press. The Cercle Social was different, initially at least, from other clubs such as the Cordeliers or the Jacobins because its goal was not developing legislation but rather to ponder political principals as a group of intellectuals.¹⁷ Like any other organization of the time with members who were politicians, however, the group’s future was determined by politics: in this case, its decline was due to its Girondin leadership’s loss to the Jacobins on the ideological front. Mercier was undoubtedly influenced by much of the discourse the Cercle Social promoted and contributed to its philosophy as well: its members strongly believed in the power of public education, in instruction of the masses through publications, in the necessity of social regeneration to ensure the future of a strong republic, and in representative democracy.¹⁸ When it was a club (Confédération des amis de la verité [October 13, 1790–July 15, 1792]), moreover, it met in what Mercier considered to be the heart of Paris, the Palais Royal with thousands of people regularly attending its meetings.¹⁹ Kates concludes in his book on the Cercle Social that the members of the club, like the Girondins generally, were more effective as intellectuals than as statesmen.²⁰ Kates cites Mme Roland’s famous description of Mercier to describe the moral nature of the members of the Cercle Social: explaining that being a good writer is only one part of being an effective politician, she states that the good Mercier, easy going, a more likeable fellow than most men of letters is nothing but a zero in the Convention (Kates’s translation).²¹ One could argue that it was Mercier’s unwillingness to compromise morally when embroiled in the political scene that defined who he was as an intellectual and made him great.

From his writings and his actions, it can be said with certainty that Mercier fully lived up to his own belief in the duties of an homme de lettres: like other notable figures of the time, such as Voltaire, he publicly exclaimed that the writer is no longer just an author of literary works but also a philosophe and as such an activist.²² His position on the duties of a responsible writer is consistent throughout his writings. In his essay on writers in French society published in 1778, for example, he explains, A writer must have the misfortune of being unhappy with everything bad that is going on in his homeland, the reason why an affluent subject, or one that is too happy, would perhaps not be profoundly indignant enough toward bad people.²³ His militant attitude toward urban reform is particularly noteworthy in his chronicles since in his urban descriptions, he displays both his literary prowess and his commitment to justice.

At times, enamored with the City of Lights as a curious observer, at others as a victim of its violence, in the thousands of pages that fill Tableau de Paris and Le Nouveau Paris, he painstakingly describes a myriad of contemporaneous urban phenomena and historical events. Both works can be considered vast urban chronicles whose chapters can be read in any order. By inventing his own genre, Mercier succeeded in representing simultaneously the greatness and the depravity of the French capital. For him, large cities concentrate and exacerbate the social and political problems that afflict a country. This study’s purpose is to demonstrate how Mercier represents, throughout his oeuvre, social division in urban space, the homme nouveau, and the society the new citizen can generate, a society that is not plagued by its exploitation of the poor. This book examines his writings on the city of Paris, with a special emphasis on his most important works, among which the most prominent are Tableau de Paris and Le Nouveau Paris. However, many of his unpublished writings from the Mercier collection at the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal (Arsenal Library) in Paris reveal the full picture concerning Mercier’s stance on the laboring poor from his most active years as an author.

In his study of French urban literature from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, Karlheinz Stierle asserts that Mercier is the founder of modern urban discourse.²⁴ As Stierle notes, Mercier is aware of his limited ability to capture the totality of urban and social phenomena but nonetheless succeeds in revealing hidden realities like never before because he understands the system of multiple processes of differentiation at work in the city. Mercier’s conception of a configuration of contrasts is an effective strategy for describing the city and its residents because, as Stierle explains, everything in an urban environment attempts to distinguish itself from everything else, and the larger the city is, the more complex the system becomes.²⁵ It is through Mercier’s contrasts that he illustrates his understanding of the instability of the city, [and] the work of its becoming, as a work or process of differentiation.²⁶ Mercier is the first author to explicitly attach a positive value to differentiation as an approach for describing the city.²⁷

Mercier interprets Paris’s grandeur and pettiness via an accurate contemporaneous portrayal of Parisians and how they live. In Tableau de Paris, he explains, I will speak of public and private mores, of prevailing ideas, of the current state of our minds, and of everything that has struck me in this bizarre heap of crazy or reasonable but constantly changing customs.²⁸ He defines Paris not by its buildings, … its churches …, its monuments²⁹ but rather by describing Parisians’ interactions with one another. Their present customs define the space in which they live and vice versa.³⁰

He also understood the relevance that this endeavor would have for posterity: "I dare to believe that, in one hundred years, people will revisit my Tableau, not for the quality of the painting, but because my observations, whatever they may be, must be connected to those of the next century, which will benefit from our folly and our reason. Knowledge of the people among whom one lives, will always be the most essential piece of knowledge to any writer who intends to say a few useful truths, proper for correcting the error of the moment."³¹

Mercier’s approach to the city in achieving his goal is thus twofold. He is an acute observer and an ardent reformer.³² He posits that pinpointing corruption within Paris is the most efficient way of reforming it: To denounce such abuses is to prepare their ruin.³³ It is natural, then, that he also focuses on the opposition between the life of the rich and that of the poor. The author’s criticism of the gap between these two groups goes beyond the traditional moralists’ condemnations and is more concrete than the philosophes’ political considerations of the same issue. He visits neglected corners of the city, including the haunts of marginalized social categories, and claims to depict them as they are: I have done research in all classes of citizens and have not held disdain toward any of the objects farthest removed from Paris’s haughty opulence, in order to better establish through these oppositions the moral physiognomy of this gigantic capital.³⁴

MORALISTS’ INFLUENCE ON MERCIER’S REPRESENTATION OF THE LABORING POOR IN TABLEAU DE PARIS

The moralists who had an impact on Mercier’s representation of the poor were Jean de La Bruyère (1645–1696), who published his famous Les Caractères ou les mœurs de ce siècle from 1684 to 1696, and Marivaux (1688–1763), who published diverse writings on Parisians including Le Spectateur français (1721–1724) and Lettres sur les habitants de Paris (1717–1718). Although there are similarities between these authors and Mercier, the main distinction is that Mercier takes the reader directly to the concrete reality of the street to see how the laboring poor actually lived and shows, as a protosociologist, how les petits and les grands are interconnected and interdependent within urban space. He does not just criticize members of different social categories’ foibles, moreover, as being linked to the unchangeable nature of humanity but rather exposes an unjust system that can and should be changed. In spite of the urban populace’s great disadvantages, Mercier’s compassion, respect, and even admiration for the marginalized goes well beyond his predecessors’ social criticism.

La Bruyère wrote his collection of moral portraits drawn from city and courtly life from the 1670s until 1684 when the first edition of Les Caractères was published and then which the author continually revised and expanded until 1696.³⁵ In his article on La Bruyère and Mercier’s urban descriptions, Horst Dieter Hayer articulates the differences between these two authors’ approaches to the city. As he cogently states, The city, in La Bruyère’s work, does not mean Paris. It is a sociological category that designates the urban elite in opposition to the court. La Bruyère limits his description of Parisian society to that elite. The people remain excluded.³⁶ As Hayer points out, there are passing references to Paris’s poor but nothing significant or flattering; La Bruyère does describe the people of the countryside, however.³⁷ Mercier’s object of description is much greater than that of La Bruyère; not limiting his urban lens to elite society and as Hayer puts it, he embraces the totality of social reality by yielding a large space to the inferior classes.… He does not do moral portraits of them but rather gives concrete descriptions of their lives by insisting on the most graphic, the most brutal, and the most shocking aspects of them.³⁸ Mercier replaces that moral portrait with the tableau, a concrete and quick painting.³⁹

One section of La Bruyère’s work is worth quoting here because it does reveal Mercier’s debt to the great moralist, albeit a small one. In the section, De l’homme, he describes the peasantry as wild animals, blackened and sunburned, who when they get up from their task of laboring the soil, one can recognize that they actually have a human face, and they are in fact men; as the author explains, they deserve to be able to eat since we do not have to toil thanks to them.⁴⁰ Like La Bruyère, Mercier forces us to recognize not only the laboring poor’s humanity but also their utility.

Mercier’s tableaux of the Parisian poor are starkly different from portraits of La Bruyère and notably much more extreme in their denunciation of an unjust society that underappreciates their worth and their contributions, reproaches that amount to a demand for substantial change to the ancien régime. One of his most striking and touching chapters on the topic concerns les décrotteurs (bootblacks/boot polishers) of Paris, who according to Mercier, provide an invaluable service to ambitious young men who could never enter an aristocrat’s home without clean boots, since the mud of Paris, which embodies the city’s corruption, is not only filthy but also toxic and a reminder of the poverty that pervades the city. However, les décrotteurs also often do stunts in Parisian theaters instead of actors, thereby protecting those more fortunate than them from harm. Unlike most trades, they do not need to buy a privilege to practice theirs; all they need is a stand and a couple of brushes.⁴¹ Not only are they exempt from the woes of feudal stumbling blocks, but their social microcosm represents a better world: There is not jealousy among them; you summon a bootblack, four or five of them come running with their stand in hand, and in their zeal push it a bit briskly against your leg. You choose one of them, and the others leave joyfully without making a fuss. The strong does not beat on the weak. The skillful does not try to destroy or ridicule his colleague.⁴²

For Mercier, their virtue is undeniable. He cites yet another example of the outrageous exploitation of the indigent, including bootblacks, when the city gave the poor free tickets to a show in the new opera to see if the building was sound, so that more respected Parisians could safely enjoy the space after the poor risked their lives to see if it was secure. As Mercier implies, these modest and useful workers are much more noble than wealthier Parisians who could not go about their daily lives in the same way without their boot-polishing friends.⁴³

Unlike La Bruyère, Marivaux does provide numerous descriptions of the urban poor in his journalistic writings. In his Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, he describes Paris as a microcosm of the world, like Mercier, but his version of Paris is much more exclusive: he only selectively depicts the urban poverty and completely excludes foreigners, as Jérôme Bouron has noted.⁴⁴ For Mercier, the city is a creuset (melting pot) of which he attempts to describe every member, including foreigners and French subjects from all the provinces, unlike Marivaux. He provides detailed analyses of the types of provincials that practice certain trades: the noble Savoyards, who are often chimney sweeps, bootblacks, and woodcutters, who send their money back home to feed their parents; or the Auvergnats who often practice the laborious trade of the water carrier, hauling large buckets of water, one on each shoulder, up several flights of stairs all day long so Parisians can have a continuous supply of water; Limousins are often masons, Normands, stonecutters, Gascons, wigmakers, workers from Lorraine, traveling cobblers, and Lyonnais, sedan chair carriers.⁴⁵ Although he acknowledges the cruel injustices to which these workers are subjected because of the greed of the wealthy, Mercier also describes the violent nature of some of the itinerant poor who lack resources and education.⁴⁶ He recognizes the brutality of poverty and the ignorance that often accompanies it without however dehumanizing the indigent: he lauds their work ethic, compassion for one another, and their generosity.

Figure I.2 Decrottez là ma pratique (Boot polishing there, that is my trade). Original drawing by Jean-Baptiste Marie Poisson, engraving by Henri-Joseph Godin, circa 1774. Reproduced with permission of the BNF.

In his letter on Parisians, Marivaux describes the people as passive beings, as animallike creatures with very little individuality: the soul of the people is like a … machine incapable of feeling and of thinking by itself and the people are like a huge mastiff; the mastiff barks at everything that goes by; throw him a piece of bread, and he caresses you.⁴⁷ Mercier uses similar metaphors quite differently: it is rather the representatives of the absolutist government he labels mastiffs who imprison the people, like sheep in a field, the field being Paris, to be able to better control them.⁴⁸ Mercier does not attribute the people’s passivity to their nature or natural inferiority but rather to their political situation: the populace is reduced to tears before police officers; it kneels before its chief, he is a king for this rabble.⁴⁹ As Mercier notes, Republican citizens do not act in this passive way and implies that this should be the future metamorphosis of the Parisian populace.⁵⁰

Both Mercier and Marivaux do proclaim that man should not be judged based on his birthright but rather on/by his virtue and that the laboring poor tend to have more Christian virtue than the elite. In yet another journalistic piece, L’Indigent philosophe (1727), Marivaux is openly critical of the perception of social privilege. He exclaims, for example, that in a domestic, I see a man; in his master, I only see that as well, everyone has their own trade; one serves meals, the other serves at the bar …; all men serve and perhaps the one we call a valet is the least valet-like of the whole pack.⁵¹ He further proclaims that a man may have a lot of money, but most often he is nothing in terms of his mind, his heart, and his virtues.⁵²

Although Marivaux does critique old regime hierarchy, declaring that a man’s worth should be established based on virtue and not rank, he never demands permanent change to the system. A good example of this is in his Spectateur français, when he criticizes servants who expect to benefit from the same privileges as their masters.⁵³ He does not demand a change to social rank but rather that French subjects act virtuously in the roles they have been given. Lionel Gossman sums up Marivaux’s position on the status quo quite nicely: What we have to do, Marivaux implies, is to assume [social] … conventionality with complete lucidity, to play our part as prince, duke or valet, remembering that is only a part and that as wearers of the mask to which history or accident has assigned us, we are all equal.⁵⁴ He furthers notes that Marivaux did not question the rules of the game, however, or indicate that they might be changed.⁵⁵

Mercier’s position on the same issue is more radical. He not only asks that all people be treated with dignity but also that a rag picker or a bootblack be treated with more respect than less useful members of society including lackadaisical wealthy people. Most importantly, he demands permanent social reform, since to allow such inequity to exist is intolerable for public mores: Every state where fortunes are at about the same level is tranquil, prosperous, and seems to make a coherent whole.… Every other state abides by a principle of discord and eternal division. One person sells himself, another purchases him, and both are degraded by it.⁵⁶ For Mercier, France follows the latter model. Through the structure of his urban chronicles, he defies this type of social inequity, granting textual space to everyone in the cityscape, regardless of social standing.

MERCIER AS URBAN GUIDE: A MODERN NAVIGATION OF THE CITY

Mercier implements analytical methods that run completely opposite to the tradition of the urban guide. He does not use the monarchy as the nucleus for urban descriptions, as was the case with guidebooks published previously, by only describing historic monuments and other sites related to the king’s power and glory but rather by describing people’s use of space.⁵⁷ For Mercier, a critique of the city requires an unorthodox manner of description that reflects his humanitarian goals. In Paris as Revolution: Writing the Nineteenth-Century City, Priscilla Parkhurst Ferguson explains that as an amalgam of texts that can be read in any order, the structure of Tableau de Paris reflects the egalitarian political opinions of Mercier.⁵⁸ Urban guide authors who attempted to describe Paris solely as an unchanging physical reality, divorced the city from its actual historical and social context. Vincent Milliot contends that guides changed little in their numerous editions from the sixteenth to the eighteenth century and that they all present the same problem: Paris is an unchangeable and fixed idea.⁵⁹ This is of course counterfactual, notes Milliot, since the city is a place of constant movement in terms of social, economic, and physical change.⁶⁰ In attempting to reassemble the capital’s moral physiognomy textually, Mercier was obliged to depict the moment in his tableau(x) and not a somewhat fictitious, rigid entity established by tradition. As Stierle has observed, the spirit which is imprinted upon the physiognomy of the city in Mercier’s work is not a timeless idea: it is, in its very essence, temporal.⁶¹

The same is true for both of Mercier’s urban chronicles. However, this is not to say that Mercier’s imagination does not leave its imprint on his urban tableaux as well. Regardless of however historically accurate many of his vignettes often are, this is not Mercier’s main contribution. In spite of the interference of Mercier’s own personal perspective in his urban narrative, he almost always captures the essence of a moment and as such, one of the building blocks of the city’s identity.

Mercier acts as the reader’s guide, defining a slice of time in the city’s history. Michel de Certeau’s definitions of space/place and spatial narratives are useful to account for Mercier’s strategy for describing Paris. In his work on social customs, de Certeau defines place as the order (whatever it may be) according to which elements are distributed among living relationships whereas space is an intersection for moving things. It is sort of animated, brought to life, by all the movements that are deployed within it.⁶² Thus, place is simply the order of coordinates without relationship to movement, whereas space is defined by people’s movement. He also states that objective descriptions that do not show how to traverse a space but rather the general layout of a specific area are maps, while guided descriptions that demonstrate how to navigate space are routes.⁶³ The vast majority spatial stories are routes and not maps since authors make a space of their own as a guide for the reader during their narrative.⁶⁴ The author of a spatial story creates a theater of actions, a spatial foundation that grants legitimacy to revolutionary social practices by allowing the traveler/reader to pommel restrictive places that are not their own.⁶⁵ Spatial stories act as guides, which facilitate spatial transgression of the established order by means of the walk they establish for the reader.⁶⁶ Mercier decodes urban space with the reader by his side, demonstrating how Parisians subvert sociopolitical norms associated with the ancien régime by exploiting them for their own ends but not necessarily by openly challenging them. He takes the reader on a myriad of spatial routes throughout the city, illustrating how members of every social stratum navigate it. Most of Mercier’s descriptions are not maps because he normally does not provide an objective view of a geographic area but rather shows the reader how to move through space; this serves as a way of communicating what it means to be Parisian rather than simply describing a physical entity.

Capturing the essence of the city accurately required not only an innovative way of navigating it for Mercier, however, but also an original poetic. His literary approach to describing the city reflects Stierle’s assertion that the city is an inexhaustible generator of signs and that only text, to some degree, can render the urbs intelligible.⁶⁷ Even though his chronicle is not a discussion of the physical layout of Paris per se, the author must nonetheless address the innumerable minutiae that constitute the metropolis. This challenge explains both the overwhelming length of Tableau de Paris (twelve volumes and over three thousand pages in its modern edition) and Le Nouveau Paris (six volumes and around a thousand pages) and also the brevity of their individual chapters. He often tackles only one urban phenomenon at a time in a strikingly short description, either comical or quite accusatory and serious in tone, or in a denunciation of some form of corruption in desperate need of reform. His chronicles effectively replicate both the grandeur, in their overall length, and the details, in the specificity of their chapters, of Paris.

Mercier’s lens for analyzing urban phenomena is strikingly original in several respects. Joanna Stalnaker describes his camera lens as a kaleidoscope of views that not only depicts Paris and what it contains from several different angles but also in close-ups and long shots from various perspectives.⁶⁸ One striking example Stalnaker identifies that