Les aventures de Max et Eve, j’ai aimé

It is generally considered that in French, unlike English, the phenomenon of topica-lisation applied to a direct object, as in This book, I have read, does not exist. In fact, constructions such as this are common in oral language and are also encountered in written language. I shall nevertheless show that, appearances to the contrary, in a sentence such as La tarte, j'ai aimé, the NP la tarte is not a direct object and that, in consequence, this construction is not an instance of topicalisation (it should be recalled that the canonical example of topicalisation is Le chocolat, j'aime). My demonstration is based on comparisons between the orthographic, intonational, distributive and syntactic properties of utterances such as La tarte, j'ai aimé and Trois enfants, j'ai eus.