Abstract: This article aims to reveal the place occupied by the Journey to the West in the intellectual sphere of nineteenth-century France, from the perspective of the history of science and knowledge that has developed since the second half of the twentieth century. The author describes the formation of the gaze of the Western subject, from the emergence of Jesuit proto-Sinology to the establishment of institutionalized knowledge, including the French Revolution. Indeed, from the arrival of the Jesuits in China until the beginning of the nineteenth century, the paradigm of knowledge was gradually constituted, where natural science (such as that of Linnaeus and Buffon) and human science (such as that of Condillac and Condorcet) intertwine in such a way that renders it difficult to establish a clear border between the two. And on the other hand, the monarchical and ecclesiastical powers give way to relatively autonomous educational institutions, where knowledge becomes more and more formalized. Witness the inaugural lesson of Jean-Pierre Abel Rémusat, first professor of Sinology at the Collège de France, which illustrates very well that the Sinological knowledge of the time was framed by the episteme described above. Taking for example Théodore Pavie, an orientalist who studied the novel in question for the first time, the author endeavors to highlight the way in which knowledge of the novel is placed in the general field of the human sciences of the time. In this field dominated by historical progressivism (more on the side of human science) and scientific racism (more on the side of natural science), the classical Chinese novel can only lurk on the sidelines of the splendid map of knowledge. In the history thus traced, attention is paid not only to the circulation and transformation of knowledge, but also to the rise and fall of spiritual and temporal powers, and to the institutionalization of the human sciences.