Modelli per la religione del futuro. Aspetti dell’Utopia di More e della Nuova Atlantide di Bacon ne L’an 2440 di Mercier

[Machine translation] The essay offers an unpublished reading of the utopia L'an deux thousand four hundred quarante by Louis-Sébastien Mercier (1771) trying to identify some possible sources or suggestions for reading that provided ideas, images and themes reshaped by the French author with inventive experimentation. Given the complexity of the Mercierian work, the analysis focuses on two of the best-known exponents of utopian literature, Thomas More and Francis Bacon, limiting the discussion to a specific topic, religion. In other words, it is an approach that is not intended to be exhaustive nor to preclude other threads and topics worthy of attention and study. Nevertheless, some elements seemed sufficient to develop this line of research and attempt a first, albeit partial, comparative investigation capable of bringing out certain ideas through which the French society of 2440 took shape. First of all, his intense admiration for England made Mercier a real Anglophile, so much so as to push him to visit the country in person on a sort of pilgrimage across the Channel, undertaken with an attitude of profound enthusiasm that changed abruptly after the outbreak of the Revolution, turning into positions of bitter and open hostility. Clear impressions or references attributable to the works of English utopians in the Paris of the future have prompted us to deepen the comparison, beyond the obvious distance of the contexts in which the individual authors developed their original vision of an “other” society in space (More and Bacon) and in time (Mercier), as well as the peculiarity of the themes and issues on the agenda with which everyone had to deal with. In the Paris of the future, echoes of utopian origin resound in the description of places of worship and in the functioning of public ceremonies, but Mercier's position on the subject generally seems less tolerant than the Morean one. As for the comparison with Bacon, the echo that resounds between the inhabitants of New Atlantis and the Parisians of the future around the link between religion and science, which both authors, albeit in different forms, develop with particular attention, is significant.