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THE PLAYWRIGHT, ESSAYIST, AND NOVELIST Marivaux (1688-1763) is well known for his Epicurean explorations of love and chance, his esprit galant and préciosité, yet is seldom considered to be a substantial contributor to Enlightenment social thought or a signifcant political theorist. Past critics such as Michel Deguy have focused on the abstract, geometrical structure of his works, and in doing so have tended to decontextualize his literary production, thus effacing its engagement with contemporary mores and the actual geographical spaces of early modern Paris.1 This article proposes to reconsider Marivaux's neglected position as an ethnographer of the French capital. His early periodical essays, the Lettres sur les habitants de Paris, Le spectateur français and L'indigent philosophe, far from being a mere prelude to his better known Epicurean plays and novels, showcase a cynical social philosopher who is acutely invested in the socioeconomic and demographic issues of Regency Paris. His unfinished novel Le paysan parvenu brings these ethnographical inspections to fruition by making the city of Paris the very locus of modernity, a heightened space for social encounters with people of all stripes, who newly engage with each other as members of a market economy. As springboard for his anthropological reflections, Paris is posited in his work as "cet abrégé du monde," a metonomy for the universal stage of human folly-a space that is allegorized as much as it is represented in its referential historicity.2 If, as Catherine Gallouët claims, "Paris est la seule ville représentée dans ses écrits,"3 Marivaux's engagement with the city was highly specific to his time. His recurrent preoccupation with urban poverty, the marginalization of paupers, and the financial bankruptcy of the bourgeoisie and aristocracy during the heady years of the Regency (1715- 1723) suggests that his engagement with contemporary cultural changes in Paris was substantive, personal, and even political. Writing during a historical period when the traditional sources of religious and moral authority were waning, Marivaux directs us to his sympathy and identification with the poor by proposing prescriptive social models of empathy to growing inequality in urban France. Yet by situating poverty in its Regency context of a theatricalized and predatorial social world of posers, parasites, cougars, and golddig- gers, Marivaux also engages with poverty as a complex, ambiguous cultural...