The Revolutionary Look of Louis Sebastien Mercer's <italic>Tableau de Paris</italic>: Fid-Bau Portal

The Revolutionary Look of Louis Sebastien Mercer's Tableau de Paris

Becherer, Richard

This article explores the complex interrelationship between architecture and verbal narrative during the Revolutionary period in France. Utilizing a close reading of a passage from Louis-Sebastien Mercier's Tableau de Paris, the essay illustrates the ways that the author exploits architectonic figuration as a means of giving shape to his understanding of narrative time. His spatial metaphors can be discussed in terms of what Mikhail Bakhtin terms “chronotopes.” Mercier's prose juxtaposes differing chronotopes and, by extension, different conceptions of narrative time. This juxtaposition can be seen as substantiating Mercier's emerging understanding of “Revolutionary” history. Revolutionary architects, particularly Charles Percier and Pierre Fontaine, who are also topographic writers, appreciate this type of literary architecture and come to reimpress it into the city. Not only do they compose their Paris in light of a new sense of formal juxtaposition and disjunction, but they also come to regard the city in essentially metaphorical terms. What Mercier accomplishes in his descriptions of Paris, the architects recast into the city, making of it a symbol of the Revolutionary society which nas just begun to show its face.