This paper determines whether the French nouns oeuvre and ouvrage can be considered as general nouns when they refer to concrete objects like novels or sculptures, i.e. when they are used as ideality nouns, as Husserl named them. We compare oeuvre and ouvrage with the general nouns on the basis of the following parameters: their use as lexicographic classifiers and as hypernyms, their contribution to discourse cohesion and the possibility of clausal complementation. While the results of this comparison are not clear-cut, they still raise interesting issues regarding the typology of both noun classes.