Louis Sébastien Mercier

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.

"Mulryan's book might as well be about the unannounced birth of sociology some fifty years before Auguste Comte. Through his reading of the urban space of Paris and his representation of the different strands of Parisian society, Mercier exposed in great detail the existence of inequalities, abuses, and injustices that had hitherto mostly been treated theoretically; and as Mulryan shows quite dexterously, this practical, urban approach allows Mercier to give practical solutions to the woes of France, before and after the Revolution."— Fayçal Falaky, author of Social Contract, Masochist Contract: Aesthetics of Freedom and Submission in Rousseau"This original investigation into pre-and post-Revolutionary Paris and its festive, social, and artistic spaces vividly captures Mercier's journalisme engagé. A fascinating study worthy of this eclectic, pivotal author."— Fabienne Moore, author of Prose Poems of the French Enlightenment: Delimiting Genre"Mulryan analyzes the social divisions and the reforming policies that are expressed through the representation of urban space. One of the most important contributions of this book lies in the exploration of unpublished texts and of perspectives little addressed by critics such as the religious anchoring of Mercier's thought."— Geneviève Boucher, associate professor of French, University of Ottawa"A comprehensive exploration of Mercier's wonderfully entertaining 'tableaux de Paris' and his lively, passionate, and multi-faceted commitment to social justice. In this highly informative, highly necessary study, Mulryan demonstrates with great clarity and precision why Mercier is a major late Enlightenment writer."— Laurence Mall, author of Emile ou les figures de la fiction

• List of IllustrationsIntroduction1          The Desolation of Festive Space in Tableau de Paris2          Authoritarian versus Enlightened Approaches to Urban Space in Tableau de Paris3          Art and Society in Tableau de Paris4          Mercier's "New" Chaotic Paris: Surviving a Moral Vacuum among the Delusional, the Dethroned, and the Disenfranchised5          The Regeneration of the French Citizen: The "Homme Nouveau" as the Cornerstone Mercier's Modern UrbsConclusionAcknowledgmentsNotesBibliographyIndex