In Barbey d'Autrevilly's view, Flaubert's prose is that of a "rock breaker". How do we understand the complicity thus denounced between style as "the ultimate way of seeing things", the banality of the activity of labour, and democratic prose? This article attempts to come to terms with this paradox by returning to the primary solidarity, denounced by Plato, between democracy and the silent/garrulous written word. On this basis, literariness (littérarité) defines itself as a specific operation of writing in the division of the sensible which structures the order of human activities. As the absolutization of the act of writing, literature undoes norms of representation, thereby entering into a contradictory relationship of solidarity and conflict with the "disorder" of democratic literariness. With reference to Balzac, Flaubert, and Mallarmé, this article offers a certain number of purchases from which to analyze this configuration.