This article concerns the debates around the literary language in the first thirty years of the nineteenth century and the first romantics attitudes in dealing with language. It  highlights the doubly-constrained situation in which those romantics found themselves as they had to face simultaneously the policy of the old regime which was still powerful and the necessity of expanding the scope of literary language as well as renewing it in depth. In addition they had to cope with a cherished national dream of the genius of the French language on the one hand and on the other hand with the cultural clash aroused by the opening up to foreign languages and literatures, to old French and to the Greek and latin pre- or postclassical literatures. The argument is developed in two steps : first we present a sort of panorama then we develop three examples in which we try to highlight the particularities but in the context of a common didactical approach : the examples of Stendhal, Lamartine and Vigny, three writers whose works were written after Chateaubriand’s “new era” but before Hugo’s great linguistic clarification.