This research project takes the form of an investigation about a recurrent collective imagination throughout the 19th century: the idea of secular sainthood. In fact, numerous texts both historiographical accounts and novels, bring to the surface a character they endow with an exemplarity which is particularly developed and not exempt from a reinvented transcendence. If a being aspires to an end that surpasses its self, be it the pursuit of a political ideal (“the Republic”), “art,” or “science,” then that being can achieve a sainthood that deifies them. Secularized sainthood, which brings together two irreconcilable notions, arises at first glance from two different phenomena. On the one hand, it emerges from the resurgence of a Catholicism with strong ties to the French Restauration. In the realm of humanities, this resurgence brings forth the return to favor of Christianity as a subject, with Chateaubriand’s Génie du christianisme, published in 1802, spectacularly paving the way. On the other hand, this secularization process develops out of a reaction against the Catholic Church – and the Society of Jesus specifically – which takes places in the 1840s. From social romanticism to naturalism, from Michelet, Sands, Sue, and Lamartine through the Goncourt, Cladel and Zola, when novelists and historians reach for a hagiographic model, they no longer conjure it up to celebrate the Ancien Régime and its values. Under a well-known form, the Romantics want to spread a new and controversial education based upon emancipation rather than imitation. The Naturalists see in hagiographical narrative sequences and patterns – in particular martyrdom and asceticism – a way to describe the economic and social condition of the people. In a disenchanted century, the modern “resymbolisation” of hagiographical narrative sequences and patterns question the persistent needs for a religious imagination to build community – or, conversely, to describe unbridgeable class differences.