The title of this first book of the French-American philosopher René Girard already contains all the pathos of his thought. “Romanticism” for him is not so much a trend in European art as an illusion that a person is free in his desires, and “novel” is not a literary genre, but a “revelation” that exposes our radical dependence on the Other. With the support of great writers Cervantes, Flaubert, Stendhal, Proust and Dostoevsky, the author creates a conceptual story of desire from modern times to the present, from the playful imitation of the “Sun King” Louis XIV to the gloomy hatred of all for everyone 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 his neighbor to liberation, coming 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 the only work where there was a place for the life and death of an individual person. Clearly or in a folded form, all the fundamental ideas of the philosopher are already present here: the mimetic principle, the sacrificial crisis, the mechanism of the scapegoat and its overcoming in Christianity.