From Isabelle de Charrière's lettres trouvées dans des portefeuilles d'émigrés ( 1793) to Victor Hugo's Quatrevingttreize(1874), which reinterprets the period in the mirror of the Commune, the Terror fed the imagination of manynovelists. Unprecedented surge of violence or unheard of democratic moment ? The fecundity of this revolutionary moment is in part due to its paradoxes and the tensions triggered by its memory. At the heart of the historical and ideological controversies that, to this day, have not been extinguished, the Terror was, throughout the 19th century, a subject even more topical than the revolutionary tremors of 1830 and 1848, particularly by reawakening the memory.Exceeding the historical nove! genre, the fictional treatment of the Terror is not the result of a simple fictional transposition of the historical reality, but can be envisaged as the fruit of a system of complex relationships between historiography, memorial literature and other literary genres.From the Revolution to the Commune, the fictional genre was one of the spaces where the invention of what we have chosen to call an "imagination of the Terror" - in homage to Daniel Arasse's great book - was not exhausted by the image of the guillotine. Looking at how the novel participated, in conjunction or competition with other types of writing, in discursive constructions and the development of this imagination, and how undertaking fictional figurationrevolved around ideological issues and political choices, is the challenge of this new investigation. From Ducray Duminilto Dumas, Sénac de Meilhan to Barbey d'Aurevilly, Germaine de Staël to George Sand, via Ballanche, Nodier, Balzac and even Vigny, this genealogy of fiction dissertation is supported by a large corpus oftexts and intends to makeway for little-known works, whose role was no less than that of the most canonical works in fictionalising the revolutionary Terror.