Éric Marty, the editor of the complete works of Roland Barthes, traces in this essay the history, effect and declinations of that famous text entitled The Death of the Author. He shows how this was inscribed in an ideological puritanism of the time and a theoretical position in favour of the maximum autonomy of the work, thus demanding the invisibility of the author's image. It was Roland Barthes himself who, in a sophisticated way, dismantled this dogma.