Mercier’s Clinic: Public Health Utopianism in L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais

Abstract

The eighteenth-century medical Enlightenment in France saw fierce conflicts between inoculistes and anti-inoculistes, attacks from philosophes and surgeons on the privileges and dogmas of elite academic doctors, and attempts by reformers to improve medicine, hospitals, and sanitation. In this article, I show that Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’An 2440, rêve s’il en fut jamais (1771) intervenes in this debate by portraying a France experiencing a public health crisis and providing compassionate remedies in a futuristic “public health utopia” for the diseases of France’s individual and political bodies, including a proposal for a new inoculation clinic. Mercier’s novel is the first French biopolitical novel, assigning responsibility for health and medicine to the state; it is also technocratic and sometimes anti-populist, and it aims to suppress as much as resolve social antagonisms on the eve of the French Revolution. I argue that Mercier’s view of the state’s role in public health is closer to physiocratic than republican or liberal positions, and affirms several characteristics of the absolutist tradition.