More is owed to the Russian formalists than a model of internal form based on the identification and linguistic characterization of literature. This linguistic paradigm has made it possible to objectify literary fact and formalize the existing object as a construction, the sum total of its devices and a distinct object. The formalists worked less on forms in the traditional esthetic sense of the term than on the putting into form, transformation and evolution of forms, the laws of poetic production and devices. For them, form is never either fixed or static. It emerges from a dynamic vision. This is why, in France, even though there has often been a desire to liken Paul Valéry and his cult of form with the Russian formalists, of which Valéry was a contemporary, it can be said that the conceptions of form defended respectively by Valéry and the formalists differed profoundly and were even opposed to one another.