By analyzing and comparing the actualizations of Beethoven, Goethe and Hugo during jubilees in their honor dating from the interwar period (1927, 1932, 1935) and the post-1945 period (1949, 1952, 1970), the thesis examines the conditions of permanence of these “classics” throughout the twentieth century. It shows how political and cultural actors engaged in these celebrations sought both to stabilize the figures’ and their works’ meanings as well as to frame the ways in which they were used. Simultaneously, by taking account of the dynamics of intercultural appropriation and of receptions in domains which remain understudied by literary studies such as mass media, it is possible to bring out alternative meanings and uses which do not fit dominant models and which tend to relativize or even to contradict them. So, by focusing resolutely on the reception of these figures, the thesis proposes a possible answer to the problem of the permanence of classics: The fact that Beethoven, Goethe and Hugo are functionalised simultaneously and / or successively in divergent discursive and cultural contexts explains their exceptional longevity. It is because they are the subject of heterogeneous and often contradictory uses – in other words: because they are polyfunctional – that certain figures and works survive the many cultural, ideological and media evolutions of the twentieth century.