The article proposes a comparative study of the religious ideas of Pierre‐Simon Ballanche and Edgar Quinet, focusing on the relations that in their context the two authors establish between the notions of evolution and revolution. Both admit the existence of a divine revelation at once eternal and progressive that unfolds in history, in both also French Revolution and the rupture it has operated occupies a central place in the reflection on religion. But while Ballanche’s universal religion is closer to traditionalist and theosophical conceptions, Quinet’s one, taking the form of modern millenarianism, is representative of the current of secular humanitarianism.

Long before the first translations of Charles Darwin’s works, evolutionary thought had been developing in France thanks to such authors as Georges‐Louis Leclerc de Buffon, Charles Bonnet and Jean‐Baptiste de Lamarck. Although Georges Cuvier’s fixism and creationism remained the dominant scientific paradigm throughout the 19th century, writers drew their inspiration from evolutionary thought, subjecting it to lyrical and often parareligious interpretations. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how Charles Nodier in his essay “De la palingénésie humaine et de la résurrection” and Camille Flammarion in his short stories “Clairs de lune” reinterpret different theories of evolution.

The motif of mirror often appears in the 19th century fantastic tales. It performs there various functions, such as a possessor of knowledge, a malicious object, a place where living being meets revenant, the threshold of the real world and the beyond. The manner in which the motif of mirror is presented reflects how the 19th century fantastic tales evolve.

In “classical” gothic stories, following the patierns established by E. T. A. Hoffmann or E. A. Poe, death is the starting point of the storyline which is imagined in relation to a central extraordinary event, like the appearance of a ghost, a phantom or any other supernatural being. In the 19th century, the fascination with achievements of human mind is completed by the study of mental diseases. Hence, the central event of most of the gothic stories of this time is the imaginary appearance of a double, an invisible persecutor or any other manifestation of the ideas hidden in a sick brain. Zola and Maupassant have created a number of stories following this pattern, where death is no more a starting point, but the last stage of a long process leading a man to madness. Thus, the dialectic of life and death is completely inversed.

Darwin has become the face of a scientific revolution, initiating what T. Kuhn calls a “paradigm shift”. Darwin’s theory undermined the intellectual foundations on which the understanding of the world was based: stability and unchangeability. Darwin replaces them with the idea of a continuous but imperceptible change – evolution – which takes place in the world of living beings. Literature and culture in the 2nd half of the XIXth century succumbs to the power of this theory, which affects the imagination of the creators. Among them is Zola, in whose cycle Les Rougon‐Macquart we find “evolutionary poetics”, which models the way of presenting the characters (social evolution) and their corporality, which is the purpose of the article to demonstrate (an evolutionary portrait of especially Gervaise Macquart). A fictional body becomes a place of constant transformation, (de/re) materialization, which proves the fluid plasticity of life. After Darwin, dynamism replaces the ontology.

This article focuses on the evolutionary character of the literary work of Joris‐Karl Huysmans which expresses itself in the mutual penetration of naturalism, symbolism and decadence. The abandonment of the moralizing epithet and its ipseity seems to be the most important proof of the permeation of these tendencies. Therefore the writer’s heroes are able to find the integrity of their identity only in this heterogeneity.

The paper aims to show a dandy as a performer who acts as if he was guided by a kind of a revolutionary manifesto, which we attempt to recreate by referring to essays of Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, Charles Baudelaire, Jules Lemaître or Oscar Wilde. The dandy’s rebellion against the outside world consists in the creation of his own personality, as well as in the rejection of the rudimentary uniformity and the duty of utility. He seeks to give his life an exceptional character, his unique goal is to serve the highest value: the Beauty. His responsibility is to impress his audience and not to let himself be amazed, as he cannot disclose his feelings and he has to adopt an impenetrable attitude, guided by the constant urge of staging his life, as a form of protection against the surrounding world, malevolent and rude.

This article shows two opposite reactions to the revolutionary events of 1848‐1849. For George Sand June Days meant the end of dreams of the social revolution whereas for Richard Wagner, who was a participant of the Dresden Revolution of 1849, they became the direct inspiration to outline the utopian project of the art revolution. The rejection of the idea of revolution inclines George Sand to the concept of evolution which would lead to the social republic in the future. Richard Wagner, by contrast, in his essay ‘Art and Revolution’ supports the idea of the revolution based on art. This turnaround, which in fact is evolutionary, shall lead to the political and esthetic development as well as to the inception of the ‘artistic humanity’.

The objective of this study is to analyze the transition from one period of Rachilde’s creation to another, which is represented by her novel Le Mordu (1889). While saying goodbye to a form of expression that seems obsolete, the novelist indicates directions to take. She also presents the dilemma of artistic compromise versus pure art. Thus the terms of revolution and evolution find their meaning: in relation to the intransigence of the artistic principles which, during the course of life, switch to morally dubious mercantilism. The meaning of these two terms is examined not only in the context of Rachilde’s novel, but also in relation to her own choices.

The aim of the present paper is to answer the question whether the Oriental travelogue by Gustave Flaubert, notorious for the bawdy descriptions of various sexual experience the author gains during his trip, represents a revolution or an evolution in the literary approach toward the Middle East. The paper is divided into three parts. The first describes briefly the history of the Oriental dream and the 19th‐century predilection for the voluptuous odalisques. The second discusses a few Oriental travelogues and the meeting of the dream with the reality while the last one analyses the sexualisation of the Oriental experience becoming increasingly important during the 19th century.

In her two novels, La Force du désir and Folle de son corps, Krysinska tackled stereotypes concerning the portrayal of sexuality. The writer rejects the image of the woman that places her in the frame of feminine romanticism, of the "eternal femininity". She creates women, heterosexual and bisexual, all conscious of their sexuality; men whose inclinations are strictly homosexual, children discovering their bodies and their emerging desires. And since her observation concerns both women and men, I dare to say that Krysinska goes far beyond what was accepted by the nineteenth century doxa and what was presented by the other authors. It is tempting to say that Krysinska announced the end of the phallocratic society, since clitoris is equal to phallus, both of which are never literally mentioned. The conclusions derived from the analysis of Krysinska's two novels betray the more revoluyionary than evolutionary character, the latter resulting from the omnipresence of sex equal to its omni‐absence.