Starting in 1670, partisans of the Ancients and of the Moderns conflict in a literary argument. When the Ancients (La Fontaine, Racine, Molière, La Bruyère, Boileau) base their aesthetics on the imitation of the Greco-roman antiquity, the Moderns (Charles Perrault, Fontenelle) stand up for the idea that art, like sciences, is submitted to the law of progress.