On the occasion of the recent publication (2019) of the French translation of a 1987 book by Franco Moretti (The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture), and returning to another of his books still not translated into French (The Bourgeois 2013), the author of this article proposes to explore Moretti’s thoughts on the novel, and more particularly the European novel of the 20th century. She analyses his comparative perspective and his theoretical framework, which borrows from Marxism and structuralism. She highlights Franco Moretti’s ambivalent position with respect to the novel, defined as the form of compromise, and towards the bourgeoisie and capitalism, whose evolution he sees as determining that of the novel in more or less complex ways. In contrast to the method of distant reading Moretti recommends in other books, in these two books, especially The Bourgeois, his practice is one of close reading and focuses on style and form. He defends the autonomy of art, resisting conceptions of art based on morality. He thus traces an original path, which calls for scientific models, notably Darwinian evolutionism, opposing current trends more interested in effects on the reader than in the works themselves.