MERCIER, M. Louis-Sébastien

L'Homme Sauvage, Histoire traduite de...

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Chez Zacharie, Amsterdam, 1767. Duodecimo; a fine copy in contemporary French mottled calf gilt. First edition: the noble savage in the Americas, and an important work in the French utopian tradition.

Mercier (1740-1814) was a prominent French dramatist, and one of the first playwrights of drame bourgeois. He wrote over sixty largely didactic plays, ranging in style from light social comedy to radically anti-monarchical treatises. Unsurprisingly considering the title of this work, he was heavily influenced by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, earning himself the rather scathing sobriquet 'Le Singe de Jean-Jacques.' Imprisoned briefly during the Terror, he was released after the death of Robespierre.

Although it was his later work L'an Deux Mille Quatre Cent Quarante which led to him being called the 'father of the modern utopia', this work is an earlier example of Mercier's engagement with the theme. Long thought to be a direct translation of Johann Gottlieb Benjamin Pfeil's novel Der Wildemann it is now considered likely that much of it is Mercier's own work. The novel is largely a first-person narration by Zidzem, the noble savage of the title, of an idealised world in Peru: 'Je suis né parmi les Chébutois, peuple du Sud de l'Amerique; peuple long-tems illustre & vainqueur'.
Barbier, II, p. 859.

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