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Brumoy’s reflections on the birth of tragedy bring together, in 1730, the various propositions of the previous century; they seemingly epitomise the way French Classicism construes the origin of drama and the notion of invention, as it connects the former to what they theorize not as civilisation, but as politeness: an origin framed in retrospect, meant to justify paradoxically a linear conception which leads to claim both the continuity between classical Greece and 17th-century France, and a line of progress by which the French nation is to be sacred as the leader of a genre that their famous ancestors have initiated, but that they have brought to its apogee. That two-fold strategy, which in Brumoy’s mind ought to reconcile the Ancients and the Moderns, relies on the theorisation of a balanced relativism, thanks to which he avoids both the criticisms leveled by the Moderns at shows they judge too barbaric for a modern public, and the philological approach of the Ancients Brumoy thought was unable to translate the spirit of the originals and have them appreciated.