The article examines the impact of the French Enlightenment and the French revolution on the Russian socio-political language, on the literary process of Romanticism in Russia and, finally, on the change of the intellectual paradigm in the second half of the 19th century. The history of the concepts of citizen, of society, and of political opposition is traced from the second half of the 18th century (on the example of Nakaz by Catherine II, the texts by the writer A. Radishchev) to the 1830s (on the example of the political texts of the Decembrists). In conclusion, it is argued that the defeat of the Decembrist’s republicanism that was inspired by the French Enlightenment had oriented, in the second half of the 19th century, the Russian intellectuals to the problematics of human diversity and the nationalisation of the Empire. The universal principles of the Enlightenment were replaced by an interest in the human diversity of the Russian Empire that in turn required the development of a specific language and its concepts. However, this turn itself is viewed as a consequence of the reception of the ideas of the French Enlightenment and accelerated by the French Revolution.