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

Michael J. Mulryan, ’98, is the author of “Louis Sébastian Mercier: Revolution and Reform in Eighteenth-Century Paris,” the first book in English devoted to Mercier in decades.

Mercier, a French playwright, novelist, activist, and journalist, passionately captured scenes of social injustice in pre-Revolutionary Paris in his prolific oeuvre, but today remains an understudied writer.

In this study, Mulryan explores Mercier’s unpublished writings and urban chronicles, “Tableau de Paris” (1781–88) and “Le Nouveau Paris” (1798), in which he identified the city as a microcosm of national societal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. An outcast for his controversial views during his lifetime, Mercier has been called the founder of modern urban discourse, and his work a precursor to investigative journalism.

Mulryan is an associate professor of French at Christopher Newport University in Newport News, Virginia.