This article seeks to nuance the thesis of a “revolution” in the reading of novels, according to which a new practice, marked by the affirmation of readers’ sensibility and subjectivity, emerged in the course of the second half of the Eighteenth Century. Analysed in the light of Seventeenth Century discourses on the novel, this sentimental reading, outlined by authors such as Denis Diderot and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, appears to be less a rupture with former reading practices than a claim towards a stronger assertion of an already-existing dimension of the reading of novels. Replaced in the context of the cultural appropriation of the novel throughout the “Ancien Régime”, this enhanced claim towards a sentimental reading is less the expression of a transformation of the collective sensibility than the sign of the institutionalisation of the reading of novels which takes place from the beginning of the Seventeenth Century. It is because of this institutionalisation that authors of the second half of the Eighteenth Century can fully assert an affective and subjective reading of novels, without having to fear the excesses of sensibility denounced by the disparagers of fiction.