When Renaissance linguists took charge of the French language and its evolution, trying to define what French eloquence would be, they relied mostly on classical Greek philosophers' theories about language. Divine inspiration, as evoked by Plato, was in the ancient times opposed to Aristotle's art of oratory and its more technical approach. In the same way, during the Renaissance, Ciceronians promoted Aristotelian rhetoric, whereas their opponents, such as Erasmus or Montaigne, revived Plato's thesis. / Within this context, the present study is centred on two grammarians-philosophers living towards the end of the sixteenth century and the beginning of the next. In his Eloquence Francoise, Guillaume Du Vair propounded a conception of the Fench language inspired by the stoic theory of representation. Francois de La Mothe Le Vayer, on the other hand, refers to sceptic philosophers in orders to develop in his Considerations sur l'Eloquence de ce tems (1637) a theory of aestheticism based on doubt.

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