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This special report is dedicated to highlighting a largely forgotten part of French aesthetics: that of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and more precisely the doctrines that relate to a metaphysics of beauty. This introduction sets out to contextualize the latter by tracing in broad strokes the vast and complex panorama of writings which, in the French field of this long century, relate to aesthetics and the philosophy of art. It shows that this moment was that of a lively debate between aesthetics “from above” and aesthetics “from below”—in other words, between authors advocating a scientificization of aesthetics and those practicing varied forms of metaphysics of beauty. It allows us to understand that, as a result, variable definitions of the “aesthetics” discipline have come into play.