Imaginary journey & Utopia MERCIER (Louis-Sébastien) The... - Lot 714 - Briscadieu

Lot 714
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Imaginary journey & Utopia MERCIER (Louis-Sébastien) The... - Lot 714 - Briscadieu
Imaginary journey & Utopia MERCIER (Louis-Sébastien) The year Two Thousand Four Hundred and Forty. A dream if ever there was one. Followed by L'homme de fer, songe. New edition with figures. Slne, 1787. 3 volumes in-8 : 2f, 251pp ; frontispiece / 2f, 241pp, 2f ; frontispiece / 2f, 203pp ; frontispiece. Contemporary marbled fawn basane, spine ribbed and decorated, green title and endpapers, gilt fillet on edges, yellow edges. One of the first French novels of anticipation in which the hero falls asleep and dreams, then wakes up 700 years old in a Paris guided by Reason. In his famous "Tableau de Paris" published in 1781, Mercier alludes to the misery of the people and the conditions in which they live. Here, everything is a pretext for a criticism of society and "the future is rich with all possibilities". He deals with education, morality, culture, commerce, town planning and politics in a society where everyone is happy and the light shines. This novel, at the origin of a real craze for anticipation, was a victim of its success (see "Notice of the author" in which he complains about forgeries, falsifications and usurpations of his work since 1770).
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