In the middle of the 18 th century in Europe,‘cosmopolitan’ or ‘citizen of the world’ suddenly appears on the title pages of several literary works. What characterizes the cosmopolitan? And why does the term emerge at this particular moment in literary history? This article sets out to reveal the history of how ‘cosmopolitan’ is appropriated in French by tracing the origins and semantic transformations of the original Greek term cosmopolites (French cosmopolite orcosmopolitain) from its first rare appearances in late sixteenth-century French literature until the beginning of the 19th century, by which time the term had become quite common. The article identifies two distinct periods in this history – the cosmopolitan as author and the cosmopolitan as fictional character – and argues that there is a particular affinity between the French appropriation of the concept ‘cosmopolitan’ and the emerging field of literature.