Following the 1789 Revolution, the French language became a quintessential factor of democratic equality, in that all citizens should have access to the law texts. French linguistic unity was deemed necessary for the establishment of democracy, progress (scientific, economic, and commercial), and popular enlightenment. French, as the language of externalized revolutionary ideals, had to be rethought in order for it to reach the hearts of the people and break with the traditions of the Ancien Régime. To spread the new Republican ideals, it was essential to overcome the language barrier dividing the provinces from the capital, and citizens from one another. One of the first initiatives in this direction was the creation of the Société des Amateurs de la Langue Française, in October 1791, by the grammarian and journalist François-Urbain Domergue (1745–1810). Domergue had already published a Grammaire françoise simplifiée, ou Traité d’orthographe, avec des notes sur la prononciation et la syntaxe, des observations critiques et un nouvel essai de prosodie (1778) and founded the Journal de la langue française (bi-monthly, 1784-88; weekly, 1791-92). The Société des Amateurs de la Langue Française immediately achieved a resounding success, since 150 people joined it. As Domergue explained, this association aimed at “regenerating” the French language, and raising its prominence to the level of the Constitution. At the same time, by making the French language accessible to everybody, the association sought to forge a new sentiment towards language, henceforth considered as an undivided property of the sovereign people.

Nonetheless, in a multilingual country, such as France at the time, the attitude of revolutionaries towards languages in the French territory was contradictory. On the one hand, all the so-called patois (rural dialects) were considered as a remnant of the past, destined to disappear and to be replaced by the new revolutionary language. Even so, while being reduced to this status, these regional languages and their literatures needed to be studied. It was precisely in this context that the “Enquête Grégoire” concerning the patois was conducted. Launched in mid-1790 and gaining political influence as of 1794 (Year II), it was named after the prominent priest-revolutionary Henri-Baptiste Grégoire (1750–1831) and set out to define the number and extent of dialects in the Republic, as well as their linguistic forms, usages, and the cultures they conveyed. The survey consisted of 43 questions in total and was sent to the municipalities, the “Societies of Friends of the Revolution”, and many members of the clergy. It is the first large-scale linguistic survey; its outcome, the tellingly-titled Rapport sur la nécessité et les moyens d’anéantir les patois et d’universaliser l’usage de la langue française, was read from the rostrum of the Convention on June 16, 1794. Some years after Grégoire’s initiative towards linguistic homogenization, the Enquête by Charles Coquebert de Montbret invited 130 prefects of the Empire to find out about the dialects in use in their local territory, and thus map out the boundaries of the French language in relation to the other languages such as Flemish, Breton, Basque, Catalan, Italian, Alsatian, and German. The survey, launched in 1806, was directed by the Statistical Office of the Ministry of Interior, created by Napoleon with the aim of understanding the effects of the Revolution and directing the policies of his new Empire. Conducted by correspondence, it consisted of different translations of the parable of the prodigal son and an Essai d’un travail sur la géographie de la langue française, which marked the beginning of French dialectology and made Coquebert of Montbret one of its true precursors. Following these surveys, further studies were undertaken by local scholars at regional or municipal level. Until 1870, their aim was to gather knowledge of patois before linguistic unification would render them moribund.

Under the Empire, Napoleon set out to direct the French language by monitoring it also through the establishment of the Université impériale (1806), the Académie grammaticale (1807-11), founded by Domergue, and the Athénée de la langue française (1806). Moreover, when in 1803 the Institut national des sciences et des arts (established in 1795 to replace all the royal academies, including the Académie française, which had been suppressed in 1793) was reorganized and divided into three sections, one classe (the third) was given the remit of French language and literature, ancient history and language, and fine arts. Furthermore, a number of practical books were published with the purpose of teaching and disseminating knowledge of how to speak and write French correctly; examples are the Grammaire des gens du monde ou La langue française enseignée par l’usage by Philipon-de-la-Madelaine (1802) and the Grammaire des grammaires ou Analyse raisonnée des meilleurs traités sur la langue françoise by Girault-Duvivier (2 vols, 1812). And, in the 1820s, the first theory of grammar for use in schools took shape with the publication of the Nouvelle grammaire française (1823), by Noël and Chapsal.

Meanwhile, the illustrious tradition of the Grammaire générale et raisonnée de Port Royal (1660) – a Europe-wide standard, reprinted several times prior to 1830, and itself preceded by an Essai sur l’origine et le progress de la langue française, written by M. Petitot in 1803 – was slowly being replaced as comparative and historical studies in linguistics flourished under the influence of Rasmus Rask, Franz Bopp, and Jacob Grimm. Raynouard’s work on the Romance languages is an early French example of this new interest; but comparative studies remained scant in the first half of the century. The study of a language was still considered to be functional to the study of literatures and civilizations, and linguistic studies were carried out outside state educational institutions, often by provincial scholars. One of the few comparative works of the period was the Recherches sur les formes grammaticales de la langue française et de ses dialects au XIIIe siècle, by Gustave Fallot (posthumously in 1839). A secretary of the Guizot Committee, Fallot adopted the historical-comparative method applied in Germany at that time, and made a comparison between “grammatical forms” in order to demonstrate the dialectal character of the parlers d’oïl during the Middle Ages.

Following the educational reforms of the Education Minister Victor Duruy (in office from 1863 until 1869), the École Pratique des Hautes Études was established in 1867, which included a section for the study of historical and philological sciences. With the creation of a chair in comparative philology (immediately changed into comparative grammar), that discipline gained an institutional foothold, as did the study of the ancient French. This growing autonomy of French also led to the progressive weakening of comparative aspects in favour of more centralized langue d’oïl studies and their use for archeological and paleographical purposes.

In 1866, Émile Egger was appointed president of the Société de Linguistique de Paris, initially established as a rival organization of the Société d’Anthropologie de Paris (founded by Paul Broca in 1859). A professor of Greek literature at the Sorbonne, Egger was the author of Notions élémentaires de grammaire comparée pour servir à l’étude des langues classiques (1854). Under his presidency, a number of philologists joined the Société: Ernest Renan, Émile Littré, Michel Bréal, Gaston Paris.

Accordingly, the 1860s, and especially the 1870s, marked a change in philological studies in France as a consequence of their professionalization and nationalization policies. Indeed, during the 1870s, philology became a tool with which to build a new national consciousness. In 1872, Gaston Paris (1839–1903) and Paul Meyer (1840–1917) founded Romania, a philological periodical specializing in the study of ancient French and medieval literature, something which was considered both a scholarly and a patriotic undertaking. Through the philological analysis of texts, so it was felt, the study of medieval French literature would allow researchers to return to the origins of French literary grandeur, emphasizing the grandiloquence and the purity of the ancient language before its decline. The methodology of positivist philology they adopted was based on reconstructing an original medieval text through the comparative analysis of the subsequent manuscripts and purging it of all the imprecisions (as the editor saw them) that had crept in through reproduction and transmission.

Gaston Paris is also the “spiritual father” of the Atlas linguistique de France (ALF), by Jules Gilliéron and Edmond Edmont, published between 1902 and 1910. Unlike the previous Atlas, which had dealt specifically with the phonetics and morphology of the popular parlers (speech forms) in order to determine the areas of linguistic phenomena so that all dialects could be qualified and classified, the Atlas by Gilliéron addressed the need to become more acquainted with the complex and multiple linguistic reality of France. All the words and forms collected in the dialectological survey therefore appeared on the maps. In 1881, Gilliéron was appointed professor of dialectology, a newly created chair at the École Pratique des Hautes Études. With this, the term “dialectology” officially entered the French academic world.

Introduced in France at the beginning of the 19th century, the study of dialects underwent a transformation in the 1870s. The phonetician and dialectologist Jean-Pierre Rousselot and the philologist and linguist Antoine Thomas surveyed and recorded all possible dialect variations, with municipalities often becoming the reference point for the distinctive flavour of each patois. This went hand in hand with their defence of French as the sole language that could form the basis of a common understanding throughout the entire national territory. Yet, even though the Third Republic on the whole proved hostile to regional language revivals such as Breton, several chairs for regional languages were instituted in the 1870s and 1880s at university level: in Montpellier, Aix-en-Provence, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Rennes, and Douai. At the same time, the Parisian academics promoted the creation of the Revue des patois: Recueil trimestriel, consacré à l’étude des patois et anciens dialectes romans de France et des régions limitrophes by Léon Clédat, in Lyon (1887) – which later became the Revue de philologie française et de littérature (1887-88) and Revue de philologie française et provençale (1889-96) – the Revue des patois gallo-romains by Jules Gilliéron and Abbé Rousselot (1887-93), and the establishment of the Société des parlers de France (1893-1900).