Un savoir littéraire sur la Révolution: le Nouveau Paris de Mercier

Olivier Ritz (1)

1 CERILAC (URP_4410) - Centre d'Etudes et de Recherches Interdisciplinaires de l'UFR LAC

Le Nouveau Paris, published in 1798, is a long and tumultuous work about the French Revolution, by one of his main witness, actor and writer: Louis Sébastien Mercier. Written in opposition to the rationality of history, Le Nouveau Paris used many paradoxes and contradictions in order to deal with the complexity of the Revolution. Nevertheless, it produced a specific kind of knowledge. The first part of this paper focuses on the way Mercier defined this knowledge and used it by producing lively sketches of Paris in Revolution. The second part deals with the reception of this book in France and Germany: whereas Mercier’s contemporaries rather dismissed it, claiming order as the main esthetical and political value, Le Nouveau Paris was an important source of inspiration for a later generation of authors such as Georg Büchner and Victor Hugo. Thereby the literary knowledge about the French Revolution invented by Mercier found his way to posterity.

Mots clés: Louis-Sébastien Mercier; Révolution française; littérature française; savoir; postérité

Domaines: Littératures

Olivier Ritz. Un savoir littéraire sur la Révolution: le Nouveau Paris de Mercier. Rivista di Letterature moderne e comparate, 2021, LXXIV (2), pp.145-155. ⟨hal-03872670⟩