Mercier - Le Tableau

In the extracts of Le Tableau de Paris (1781) of Louis-Sébastien Mercier, we can see how Diderot influenced the way of thinking of his contemporaries. In many ways the Tableau resembles the concept and function of the Encyclopedia. As Mercier states in the chapter “Que deviendra Paris?” one of the goals of his Tableau is to preserve the memory of Paris when, as all great cities, it will perish: “Echappez mon livre, échappez aux flames ou aux barbares: dites aux generations futures, ce que Paris a été: dites que j’ai rempli mon devoir de citoyen” (345). The Tableau has an utilitarian function which copies Diderot’s interest in making a data base out of the Encyclopedia, which would work as a tangible memory of all the knowledge of civilization.

The Tableau copies the Encyclopedia in its unachievable attempt of gathering all the knowledge of Paris and of the world. The massive size of both works is also a proof of its limits: everything cannot be registered and the existence of such works can only show that a selection has been done.

The Tableau is a strange work. It sometimes seems a medieval text because of the allegoric significance it gives to plain things of the city, such as the révèrberes, the enseignes, the cafés. However, it is also a modern text because of its sociologic and semiotic approach to the urban space. Mercier is describing the elements of the city (a new space) to explain human behavior: he states that he wants to explain “la physionomie morale de cette gigantesque capitale” (v). If a century before, Nature was to explain the moods and personalities of humans, Mercier shows us that the city and its physiognomy were now the way to understand human costumes and lifestyle. And as medieval the idea of “reading” the environment may seem, Benjamin’s interpretation of Baudelaire’s poems in the 1930s is not so far away from Mercier’s conception. In my opinion, Mercier was trying to explain how the changes the city was going through, were molding the everyday life of its.

Lets take for example Mercier’s description on how the fact that Paris is a cosmopolitan city (“un large creuset”, 2) gives the Parisian a “sentiment vif et léger… cette étourderie” which stimulates the spirit. As he explains, what exalts the spirit of the citizens is the consequence of the food that arrives from the entire world and mixes like salt in the streets. Mercier is using a cooking metaphor to describe a cultural exchange: his explanation is in terms of the smoke, the vapors and exhalations, the liquors that run on the street, the attenuated particles in the air. As poetic and mystical the causes he gives may seem, they do however hide a degree of truthfulness. With a market and a growing population and no sewage system, the air and the streets of Paris must have had a dizzying smell. Mercier’s text is a picture of Paris and on how the city was changing; but it is also a picture of how the thinkers of that time were changing their ways of understanding a world which was also changing.