In the history of linguistics, Saussure is considered as the founder of structuralism and authors insist on his breaking away from all studies which came before his General Linguistics Course, and they particularly underline his opposition to comparatism. Analysing the notes taken by his students clarifies his relation with an inheritance he both claims to be his and takes a distance from at the same time. In the experience provided by the critical reaction to the Mémoire, both the affiliation he endorses and his critic comments have largely been suppressed by his editors, at the risk of warping the full significance of his propositions. Bringing together the sources and the edited works makes it possible to trace back the way in which diachronic analysis was replaced by synchronic analysis, historical phonetics by phonology and semantics by morphology.