Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Critic of the ㅊcensorship of the Ancien Régime Myongcheol Jou (Korea National University of Education) From reading Louis-Sébastien Mercier's works, we find that his notions of the censorship of his time ...

Louis-Sébastien Mercier's Critic of the ㅊcensorship of the Ancien Régime Myongcheol Jou (Korea National University of Education) From reading Louis-Sébastien Mercier's works, we find that his notions of the censorship of his time are very similar to those that the scholarship has developed for the last fifty years. This article aims to analyse Mercier's works based on the notions of censorship: preventive and constituent censorship. We suggest that Mercier was a very unique one of his time, because he had not only criticised the preventive censorship of Ancien Régime for hindering him from freely expressing and publishing his thoughts, but also proposed as an alternative the adoption of constituent censorship, which is governed by the public opinion. But it is anachronistic to think him as one of our contemporary because of his notion of constituent censorship: even in his work on utopian thoughts, L'An 2440, he did not go beyond the boundary of the kingdom, nor reached the threshold of the industrial society. We might conclude that Mercier was very regretful to see the preventive censorship hinder an ideal civil society from growing in which every citizen freely writes his experience and exchange his thoughts with others. We also figure out that he had always dreamed a society like a republic of letters, which can exist if every citizen uses his ability of constituent censorship to judge the every aspect of life, and in this respect, we appreciate his originality.