Louis-Sébastien Mercier

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Louis-Sébastien Mercier.

Louis-Sébastien Mercier (born June 6, 1740 in Paris , † April 25, 1814 there ) was a French writer .

Life

Born in Paris, Mercier enriched the cultural life of the capital early on with enlightened novels, philosophical treatises and dramas such as Jennval (1769), Natalie (1775) and La Destruction de la ligue (1782).

His famous novel L'an deux mille quatre cent quarante. Rêve s'il en fût jamais (1771) marks the turning point in the utopian genre from afar into the future. He describes a person's journey through time from Paris in 1769 to Paris in 2440 and thus relocates the ideal community into the future of an existing space. The temporalization of utopia begins with his novel ( Reinhart Koselleck ). The work, which was initially published anonymously, has seen countless new editions and is considered a milestone in the emergence of science fiction literature. It is also important for the development of the philosophy of history .

In his Tableau de Paris (1781) he put together impressions from everyday life in the big city. With this he established a new way of describing the city and set new accents for the perception of urban life. The total of 1049 chapters follow a structure that is uniform in structure and linguistic style, which at first glance reminds of an encyclopedia. On closer inspection, however, it becomes apparent that the content of the chapters contradicts the objectified statements of an encyclopedia. In his tableau, Mercier countered the factual description with an urban reality that he himself had experienced and researched. In order to be able to describe its seething and contrasting fragments, he developed four techniques with which he gave presence and emphasis to the phenomena he had experienced, aroused his readers' curiosity or disturbed them. In this way, perception and conventional knowledge should be "freed and cleared from the dregs of errors and cloudiness of centuries of ignorance."

The French Revolution , he first experienced as a journalist . From 1789 he was co-editor of the Annales politiques, civiles et littéraires .

In October 1792 Mercier became a member of the National Convention . Because he was close to the Girondins , he was arrested in early October 1793, but escaped execution during the reign of terror . He watched the execution of Robespierre on the 10th Thermidor (July 28th) with great joy , but was not released from prison until December 1794.

In his Le Nouveau Paris (1799) Mercier described the political events as well as everyday experiences from the revolutionary years.

Fonts (selection)

literature

  • Paul Alkon: The Paradox of Technology in Mercier's L'An 2440 , in: Klaus L. Berghahn, Reinhold Grimm (Ed.), Utopian Vision, Technological Innovation and Poetic Imagination , Heidelberg 1990, pp. 43-62.
  • ET Annandale: Johann Gottlob Benjamin Pfeil and Louis-Sébastien Mercier , in: Revue de littérature comparée, Vol. 44 (1970), pp. 444–459.
  • Léon Béclard: Sébastien Mercier. Sa vie, son œuvre, son temps. Avant la Révolution 1740-1789 , Paris 1903.
  • Jean-Claude Bonnet (Ed.): Louis Sébastien Mercier (1740-1814). Un hérétique en littérature , Paris 1995.
  • Fawzi Boubia: Theater of Politics - Politics of Theater. Louis-Sébastien Mercier and the dramaturgy of Sturm und Drang , Frankfurt am Main, Bern, Las Vegas 1978.
  • Gregory S. Brown: Scripting the Patriotic Playwright in Enlightenment-Era France. Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Self-Fashionings between “Court” and “Public” , in: Historical Reflections, Vol. 26 (2000), Issue 1, pp. 31-58.
  • Jürgen Fohrmann : Utopia and Downfall. L.-S. Merciers L'An 2440 , in: Klaus L. Berghahn, Hans U. Seeber (Ed.): Literary Utopias from More to the Present , Königstein / Ts. 1983, pp. 105-124.
  • Hermann Hofer (ed.): Louis-Sébastien Mercier précurseur et sa fortune , Munich 1977.
  • Joseph Jurt : The image of the city in the utopian designs from Filarete to L.-S. Mercier , in: Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch, Vol. 27 (1986), pp. 233-252.
  • Koselleck, Reinhart: “Temporary Utopia”, in: Vosskamp, ​​Wilhelm (ed.): Utopieforschung. Third volume , Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, ​​1985, 1-14
  • Till R Kuhnle: "The Perseverance of Millenarianism", in: Four studies on the pathogenesis of literary discourses, Tübingen: Stauffenburg (colloquium) 2005, 224–233. ISBN 3860571621 [deals with Merciers L'An 2440 in the context of the millenarian tradition of the philosophy of history]
  • Henry F. Majewski: The Preromantic Imagination of L.-S. Mercier , New York 1971.
  • Enrico Rufi: Le rêve laïque de Louis-Sébastien Mercier entre littérature et politique , Oxford 1995.
  • Andreas Urs Sommer: Creation of meaning through history? On the emergence of the speculative, universalistic philosophy of history between Bayle and Kant , Basel 2006, pp. 268–291.
  • Paola Vecchi: La balance et la mort. Progrès et compensation chez Louis-Sébastien Mercier , in: Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century , Vol. 264 (1989), pp. 905-908.
  • Everett C. Wilkie Jr .: Merciers L'An 2440. Its Publishing History During the Author's Lifetime , in: Harvard Library Bulletin, Vol. 32 (1984), pp. 5-25 and pp. 348-400.
  • Eva Kimminich, Chaos and Structure - Step and Look in L.-S. Merciers Tableau de Paris , in: Romanist magazine f. History of Literature Heft 3/4 (1994), pp. 263–282.

Web links

Wikisource: Louis-Sébastien Mercier  - Sources and full texts
Commons : Louis-Sébastien Mercier  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ See Eva Kimminich, 1994, pp. 263–282.
  2. ↑ See Eva Kimminich, 1994, p. 208.
personal data
SURNAME Mercier, Louis-Sébastien
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French author
DATE OF BIRTH June 6, 1740
PLACE OF BIRTH Paris
DATE OF DEATH April 25, 1814
Place of death Paris