Understanding how the historic novel has evolved and its relation to the grand history of the novel, demonstrating its specificity, determining its components, reviewing its main themes, situating it in terms of its own challenges, assessing its ranking in the literary field, evoking similar genres — in short, describing, defining and interpreting the historic novel — are just a few of the primary objectives of this work.
The author — having studied prevailing present-day synopses and theories while briefly referring to a few great authors such as Balzac, Stendhal and Dumas, focused on French fiction but without omitting the prolific contributions of other great linguistic areas, highlighted several particularly illuminating examples such as the Napoleonic theme or Victor Hugo's Notre-Dame de Paris, taken care to ask and answer questions clearly, banished jargon, and monitored as closely as possible the latest literary and cultural events — shows his originality by offering the reader both a relevant panorama of literary history and a form of essay on the pertinence and interesting aspects of one of the most lively genres in literature, which may be the most successful one of our time.

Gérard Gengembre is a professor who specializes in nineteenth-century French literature at the Université de Caen. His most notable works are La Contre-Révolution ou l'Histoire désespérante ; Balzac, le Napoléon des lettres ; and Le Théâtre français du XIX^e siècle.