The novel was lucky enough to be begotten in a century itself born amidst the tumult of revolution, which later put upon the throne a character who might have come straight out of a novel himself and who was to be the model for any number of future destinies : Napoleon. The novel is confronted with a world in turmoil, where social classes have been up-ended, from which God has flown. Within this more open world where social trajectories have become less predictable, the novel, more than other, more coded genres, finds its material. It is up to the novel, unconstrained by rules imposing either temporal or spatial unity, to tell the stories of the conquests made possible for the ambitious and the novices of both sexes, those who dream of being the heroes of their own lives. If the future novelists did not immediately understand that the novel offered a privileged position from which to observe what this society would give birth to, it is nonetheless towards that form that they turned once they had put away their youthful dreams. The novel allowed them to follow the vicissitudes of the only possible hero left, the individual, throughout the century.