This paper is a demonstration of the fact that, however much the late eighteenth-century Ducis-stagings perceived as inspired upon the coeval le Tourneur-translations may have been cried down in France in the first half of the nineteenth century, and however much vilified these translations may have been by subsequent French translators, they still (though often unacknowledged) remained the basis upon which all other nineteenth-century translations proceeded. This leads the author to conclude that even in the age of romanticism the French Shakespeare remained a classicist one, subject to the conventions propagated by Voltaire and his contemporaries, and that knowledge of the ‘real’ Shakespeare was restricted to those that had access to his work in the original.