François Sabatier’s manuscripts, deposited in the Montpellier library, reveal the unique ambition, which forms the red thread of this teeming work, to build a bridge between social science and a metaphysics of art. Like Fourier, this polyglot author allowed himself to coin neologisms. The sources used make it possible to link Sabatier’s ideas and commitment. And while this approach devotes much importance to aesthetics and to German philosophy – thus revealing a theoretician and art historian trained through practical criticism –, it also proposes a synoptic presentation of painting under the aegis of explicit realism and of Fourier’s ideas in the field of budding art history.