‘The word realism’, wrote Champfleury (pen-name of the minor French novelist and art critic Jules-François-Félix Fleury-Husson) in 1857, ‘a transitional term that isn't likely to last more than thirty years, is one of those ambiguous words that lend themselves to all kinds of uses.’ He notes that at the moment he is writing critics wield the term mainly as an insult. ‘Doubtless a moment will come’, he predicts, ‘when critics will begin trying to divide writers into good realists and bad ones.’ Champfleury's comments suggest that the word realism did not gain widespread use in France as a term for describing or classifying literary texts until the 1850s, well after the two novelists often taken to be the founders of French realism, Balzac and Stendhal, had ceased writing. Its usage in relation to literature has in fact been traced back at least to 1826, when an article in the Mercure français suggests that le réalisme is likely to be ‘the dominant literature of the nineteenth century’. At least one critic, Gustave Planche, used the term in relation to literature several times in the 1830s. Bernard Weinberg confirms that the term starts picking up momentum in relation to literature around 1846 (when Hippolyte Castille refers to Balzac and Mérimée as members of the École réaliste), finally gaining ‘real currency’ in 1851. (The term was at the centre of a polemic in French painting in the 1840s and 1850s as well.