Abstract EN:

Plays by chateaubriand, stendhal, balzac and flaubert are hardly acknowledged as essential parts of their works. Is this an avowal of failure ? yet might not this failure partake of the emerging of the novel as a manor genre ? if such is the case, it is necessary to consider the state of the novel before the french revolution and that of the theatre all through the nineteenth century. From this comes the wish to analyse the causes of the theatrical failure of the above-mentionned authors together with - as a corenterpart - this question : was not the novel - at least partly - the fantasmatical outflow of a theatre submitted to contingencies that may have worked as a many limitations ? finally, in this perspective, there was every justification to look at the themes - even at the poetics - that the four authors had proposed, not so much as to rehabilitate them but rather with the purpose of shedding light on a theatre which has been largely ignored.