After sketching out an overall perspective on the two main books that Starobinski has devoted to the transformations in art and culture in Europe before and after the French revolution, this study concentrates on what he has to tell us about poetry’s status in the Revolution through his work on André Chenier. But poetry then withdrew in the face of eloquence’s growing importance, a phenomenon whose links to liberty have constituted one of the Geneva critic’s major and long-standing research interests; this leads finally to an analysis of the nature of the relationship Starobinski establishes between his emblematic author, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and the problem of the revolutionary government during the Terror.