the article looks at a type of literary manifesto that deviates from the typical collective form of gender, as it is published outside a group and on an individual basis. A statistical study based on the Manart database shows that such writing became proportionally more frequent in literature since 1980, now representing more than one in two manifesto. Based on the analysis of five cases published in France since 1990 — by the poets Jean-Marie Gleise, Alain Jouffroy, Henri Meschonnic, Christophe Tarkos and writer Frédéric Pajak — the article seeks to identify the formal and discursive implications of the recovery of a genus considered historical. It thus highlights a tendency towards the aesthetisation of the manifesto, which merges programme and work, and which transforms pre-gardist rhetoric into a polishing device. These contemporaneous manifests seem to have a modified aim, which are inflicted by the reference to the pre-guards and the absence of the collective: they are now less a gesture of revolutionary subversion than an act of resistance, as they are signs of a literary history to be defended in today’s society. The article focuses on a type of literary manifesto published individually and outside the context of a group, thus preventing from its original collective form. A statistical study based on the Manart database shows that these texts have been proportionally more common since the 1980s, defending more than fifty percent of the literary demonstration in France. The aim of the paper is to identify the formal and discursive implications related to the use of a gender considered as historic. The study of five cases published by the poets Jean-Marie Gleise, Alain Jouffroy, Henri Meschonnic and Christophe Tarkos, and by the writer-cartoonist Frederic Pajak-indicates a tendency to flee the literary work and the like programme, but also to make use of the ruetoric of the avant-garde in order to eliminate the texts. Together with the absence of collective dimension, even the intention of the literary manifestos seems altered: they are now less than a gesture of revolutionary subversion than an act of resistance, since these voices are making present a literary history to defend in today’s society.