Abstract

Based on Paul Bourget’s literary development, this article seeks to explore the shift that takes place between his psychological criticism, marked by an aware-ness of decadence, and his socially-oriented psychological novels, in which the au-thor endeavours to highlight moral laws. The very concept of revolution, which some critics had used to describe Bourget’s novels, takes on a social and moralizing dimen-sion in the psychological novelist’s discourse, which is the strength of his so-called “novels with ideas”. Between a desire for innovation and an anti-revolutionary, even anti-modern reaction, Bourget’s novels could be seen as an evolving thought that seeks, as the author points out, to deconstruct the Revolution in order to restore the organic unity of the social body