Relations between the Coulomb gas picture and conformal invariance of two-dimensional critical models

Partition functions of critical 2D models on a torus can be derived from their microscopic formulation and their free field representation in the continuum limit. This is worked out explicitly for the O(n) and Q-state Potts model. For n or Q integer we recover results obtained from conformal invariance, but our procedure also extends to nonintegral values. In the latter case the expansion on characters of the Virasoro algebra involves real coefficients of either sign. The operator content of both models is discussed in detail.