In 1768, a Parisian fell asleep. He wakes up 672 years later, aged 700. Several “guides” will help him discover what his city has become in 2440. However, all this is only a dream: “I woke up” are his last words. This is the basis of the utopian novel The year 2440. A dream if ever there was onepublished anonymously by Louis Sébastien Mercier in 1770 or 1771.
Mercier (1740-1814) is a polygraphist, who defined himself as “the greatest deliveryman in France”. His production, in all genres (poetry, novel, theater, reporting, etc.), is superabundant and systematic: when he has a vein, he exploits it to the limit. Her Paris painting will be published over nearly ten years and will ultimately include more than 1000 descriptions of the city. The year 2440published a decade earlier, is no exception: the narrator covers a very wide variety of subjects.
He praises the urban improvements of 2440: air and water quality, traffic flow, greening. He likes temples, performance halls and museums (artistic, scientific, technical). He rejoices in the abolition of slavery, the transformation of political and religious power, and the evolution of education. He praises the refusal of luxury and social egalitarianism. Everyone now has the words “morality” and “virtue” on their lips. The character finds nothing wrong with this ideal civilization.
For Mercier, printing is an “august invention”, and his character is particularly sensitive to everything that affects the world of books (censorship, conditions of “people of letters”, periodical publications). He positively evaluates the new nature of the French Academy. And he visits the King’s Library. What he sees is disturbing, but momentarily, and with it, more permanently, the readers of 2024.
The origins of this library, the most official there is, can be traced back to the Middle Ages. In 1698, it would have housed 50,000 printed volumes and 15,000 manuscripts, distributed in 22 rooms, according to the testimony of an English traveler, Martin Lister. However, in fiction, it only has five cabinets. To arrive at this summary, the men of 2440 voluntarily burned billions of books: “By unanimous consent, we gathered together in a vast plain all the books that we judged to be frivolous or useless or dangerous; we formed a pyramid which resembled in height and size an enormous tower: it was certainly a new tower of Babel. »And we set it on fire.
This burning, carried out by people who claim to be the “torch of reason”, refers to two essential dimensions of the library imagination: conservation problems and threats of disappearance.
What to keep?
Every librarian encounters the same difficulty one day or another: the impossibility of keeping everything. We have long dreamed of a library that would contain all the books in the world, but we now know that this is not possible. On the one hand, libraries are receiving more and more books, and they have added masses of things to their book collections: records, CD-ROMs, government publications, various printed matter, etc. On the other hand, they also play a role in digital preservation: what to collect from the Internet? All ? It’s inconceivable. Whether we like it or not, “pruning” or “weeding” of “rays” are common operations in many establishments.
The librarian who welcomes Mercier’s character is presented as “a true man of letters”. He willingly explains the principles which served to “rebuild the edifice of human knowledge”. Not all books, according to him, are good to keep: “we discovered that a large library was the meeting place for the greatest extravagances and the wildest chimeras.” Books like these deserve to disappear. In other cases, we can shorten books that are too long or retain only a few pages from authors considered unequal.
What was the result of these operations in The year 2440 ? Some Greek or Latin authors have been preserved in two cupboards. The cabinet containing the English books “contained the most volumes”; the Age of Enlightenment being known for its “Anglomania”, this was self-evident. There is a cupboard of Italian books, but it seems sparse. Mercier liked neither theologians nor historians: out of the way!
Regarding French books, the novel gives insight into Mercier’s personal record. Let’s take three examples among many others. Bossuet? “Everything is gone. » Voltaire? “We had to burn a lot of it. » Rousseau? We kept it “entirely”. Mercier admired him and followed him in almost everything, including his misogyny.
Today, we must choose for reasons of space. Mercier, for his part, assumed a value of the works (positive or negative) on which there would have been consensus.
The ordeal by fire
The year 2440 is part of a long line of speeches which show the library threatened by flames. “Who says book says fire,” wrote Serge Bouchard in 2001.
We still don’t know much about the legendary Library of Alexandria, for example the cause of its disappearance. Among the circumstances mentioned, without it having been demonstrated, there is fire. The designers of Spaceship Earth, in the Epcot park at Walt Disney World Resort, remembered this: its visitors walked through, surrounded by burning smells, a fantasized representation of this library being destroyed.
“Did you just burn down the Library?” » is the first line of June. VIII. Whose fault is it ?, by Victor Hugo (The terrible year, 1872). The poet is relayed by novelists (Ray Bradbury, Farenheit 4511953), playwrights (Amélie Nothomb, Fuels1994) and filmmakers (Oana Suteu Khintirian, Beyond paper, 2022). We could easily multiply the examples, from Nazi Germany to Valentina Gomez, the Republican candidate for Secretary of State of Missouri who recently attacked books, flamethrower in hand.
What distinguishes the character from The year 2440 is that he is not horrified by what he discovers. He says he formulated “objections” and “reproaches” to the librarian who explained his reasons to him, but we do not find them in the novelist’s pen. On the contrary, he is quickly convinced: “I cannot number here all the salutary mutilations which had been made in several books, also renowned”; “Wisdom and love of order had governed this useful abatis. » Elsewhere, there will be talk of “judicious criticism”.
Before and after the chapter “ The King’s Library », the narrator is convinced by what he sees. The city, the school, medicine, law, religion, food, commerce, the theater: everything has been reformed for the better. Why should it be any different for the library? Reason is “universal”, the narrator believes; it applies there as elsewhere. This is simply stated: “a book that is not good in itself is bad”. These Enlightenments correspond very little to what we usually expect from the 18th century.e century.
Let’s not dream
Louis Sébastien Mercier offered his readers a dream (“if there ever was one”). This dream led his character to accept things that we cannot accept today. Neither the lack of space nor a supposed absence of value of the works can justify book burnings (public or private) or censorship of books.
” Oh ! Why was I not born in your century! » deplores the character of Mercier, who often complains about his own century. Let’s not follow him that far. Let’s have a more nuanced vision of the Enlightenment. Let’s use our reason better. Let’s not normalize losing books. Let’s defend libraries.