This Ph.D thesis, chosen for the doctoral degree of French, French-speaking and comparative literatures, consists in a comparative literary approach, axed on ten historical novels, theoretically attached to the historical genre, and dealing all with antiquity. The corpus of works, established on a period covering the 19th and the 20th centuries, includes four French novels: Les Martyrs by François-René de Chateaubriand (1809), Le Roman de la momie by Théophile Gautier (1858), Salammbô by Gustave Flaubert (1862), Mémoires d’Hadrien by Marguerite Yourcenar (1951); and six foreign novels: The Last Days of Pompeii by Edward G. Bulwer-Lytton (1834), Quo vadis ? by Henryk Sienkiewicz (1895), Siddhartha by Hermann Hesse (1922), Der Tod des Vergil by Hermann Broch (1945), Aztec by Gary Jennings (1980) and Creation by Gore Vidal (1981). This representative selection of samples from the archaeo-fictive genre takes mainly into account the notoriety of the historical novels, their geographical and cultural diversity, and their adhesion to the subject of the thesis. Indeed, each novel is akin to a remarkable « archaeologico-literary » recovery’s attempt of an ancient civilization annihilated by the erosion of time: the Ancient Egypt, Carthage, Rome, Pompeii, Greece, Persia, India, Cathay (Ancient China) and the Aztec empire. The generic problem of the historical novel; the religious substratum in the archaeofictive anastylosis; the transfiguration of the landscape and the language draw the main literary and thematic lines of the thesis.
