My dissertation seeks to answer the question: what harm did French symbolists of the 1880s and 1890s perceive the greater public as doing to literature? During the Third Republic, the symbolists had the reputation of a profoundly anti-democratic avant-garde. My project consists of a thorough study of the specific terms and figures with which these young writers conceived of the poet-public rupture. Rather than categorizing the poets themselves, it analyzes trends in what they wrote in letters and, primarily, in the many “petites revues” of the period.