The title of this first book by the French-American philosopher Rene Girard already contains all the pathos of his thought: “romanticism” for him is not so much a trend in European art as the illusion that man is free in his desires, and “novel” is not literary genre, but a “revelation” that exposes our radical dependence on the Other. Enlisting the help of great writers such as Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky, the author creates a conceptual history of desire from the modern era to the present, from the playful imitation of the “Sun King” Louis XIV to the grim hatred of all for all that swept the 20th century. The European novel becomes for him a guide through the human soul, which goes from vanity, envy and imitation of one's neighbor to the liberation that comes to the hero on his deathbed. If in subsequent books Girard will talk about culture and the world as a whole, then “The Lie of Romanticism” is his only work where the life and death of an individual person was found. Explicitly or in a condensed form, all the fundamental ideas of the philosopher are already present here: the mimetic principle, the sacrificial crisis, the scapegoat mechanism - and its overcoming in Christianity.