What did the notion of "Littérature" encompass in France in 1816 when the University of Warsaw was created?

This article aims to give an overview of the way the French word “Littérature” came to adopt its usual contemporary meaning by 1750. Applying a lexico-semantic approach, it shows how the evolution of the word – the denotation of which moved from a wide general meaning to a specialized one – depends on the correlative semantic drift of the words “Lettres” and “Sciences” towards their contemporary antonymic meaning. It also explains how the neologism “Belles-Lettres,” which appeared around 1630, paved the way for the new meaning of “Littérature.” The article also calls for a comparative history of this semantic field in the main languages of Europe