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

Abstract

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.

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Richard Becherer

Richard Becherer is Associate Professor of Architecture at Carnegie Mellon University, Pittsburgh, PA. He received a B.A. in French, Fine Arts and Art History as well as a B. Arch. from Rice University in 1974. His 1977 M. A. in Architectural History was followed by a doctorate from Cornell University in 1980. The present essay extends from work undertaken when Dr. Becherer was a post-doctoral fellow at Cornell University's Society for the Humanities in 1985. His list of publications includes the book, Science Plus Sentiment: César Daly's Formula for Modern Architecture (Ann Arbor, 1984), and a series of articles pertaining to the manifold forms and theories associated with French modernism from the eighteenth century onward. At present, he is at work on a biography of the Parisian Jazz-Age architect, Robert Mallet-Stevens.