French Romanticism emphasized cultural continuity from the medieval to the post-revolutionary period. The call for unity and continuity of national identity was often openly acclaimed as a remedy for the evils inflicted by the Revolution of 1789. The medieval heritage, stripped of its idyllic charm, started to be represented as sublime and spectacular. In literature, this enthusiasm was manifested through the proliferation of re-editions of original medieval texts, as well as the growing distance between the literary public, on the one hand, and academics on the other.

In the 19th century, text editing in France underwent a major change. The medieval period had been studied by well-known antiquarians with a literary taste, such as Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (1697–1781), author of the Histoire littéraire des troubadours (1774); and at the beginning of the century, a new taste for le style troubadour emerged, which also affected taste in painting and dress. Its literary manifestation was Antoine Fabre d’Olivet, author of Les amours de Rose et de Ponce de Meyrueis (published posthumously in 1825, but dated 1787) – which he presented as the translation into French prose of a narrative poem written in medieval Occitan – as well as Azalaïs et le gentil Aimar, histoire provençale (1799) and the two volumes of Le Troubadour, poésies occitaniques du XIIIe siècle (1803-04).

More conscientious were the philological editions by François Just Marie Raynouard (Choix des poesies originales des troubadours, 6 vols, 1816-21). The term “original” in the title emphasized the fidelity of the edition and the authenticity of the material’s provenance. Both Fabre d’Olivet and Raynouard, who were particularly interested in the medieval Occitan language, contributed substantially to the dissemination of Romance studies in France. An institution for the training of textual scholars, the Ecole des Chartes, was established in 1821. A Collection des anciens poëtes de France by François Guessard was subsidized by imperial decree in 1856.

From 1830 to 1860, text editions were the hallmark of early medievalists, such as Francisque Michel, who, in 1835, found the most ancient manuscript of the Chanson de Roland at the Bodleian Library in Oxford. It was published in 1837, and gained the status of France’s national epic, especially after the re-edition by Léon Gautier in 1872, at which time the heroic death of Roland for his “douce France” had an allegorical value for the country’s defeat in the Franco-Prussian War.

While Michel, who had many English contacts and produced a voluminous body of text editions, also on the tradition of Mélusine legends, was still an amateur scholar, the growing professionalization of medieval text editions meant that the focus of attention shifted from Provençal troubadour material to northern French material. Paulin Paris (1800–1881), historian and philologist, appointed director of the Royal Library in 1828, made an important typological distinction between the Matière de Bretagne (Arthurian material), Matière d’Antiquité (such as La conquête de Constantinople by Geoffrey de Villehardouin, edited in 1838), and the chivalric Chanson de geste, his true specialism. He felt that the most ancient, Carolingian-themed chansons de geste were French rather than German and competed for this symbolic ownership with his German philological colleagues; he also claimed the Reynard the Fox material as originally and materially French (opposing, in this view, Jacob Grimm and his followers).

This did not prevent his son, Gaston Paris (1839–1903), from studying philological methods and the Lachmann style of critical editing under Grimm’s pupil Friedrich Christian Diez. Nor did this affect the French patriotism of Paris fils. In December 1870, on the occasion of a lecture on the Chanson de Roland, he emphasized the need to rediscover and re-appropriate French literary history in order to galvanize a sense of national identity. For him, the philological analysis of French medieval texts was important for tracing and re-claiming the origins of France’s literary heritage.

In 1875, together with Paul Meyer, he founded the Société des anciens textes français, whose aim was to publish previously unknown medieval texts according to rigorous philological criteria. Gaston Paris was also the first scholar to advocate the popular origins of the epics. Joseph Bédier (1864–1938) disagreed with this claim; in his Les fabliaux: Études de littérature populaire et d’histoire littéraire du Moyen Âge (1893), Bédier questioned the Indian origins of these medieval tales and stated their bourgeois origins. Accordingly, Bédier favoured a more diplomatic editing method, starting from the best available manuscript redaction rather than reconstructing a putative textual prototype. His Le roman de Tristan et Iseut (1900) reconstructed the text in modern language from the 12th-century fragmentary poems by Béroul and Thomas. He also published a critical edition of Le roman de Tristan by Thomas (1902-05). Appointed to the Collège de France in 1903, his main work, Les légendes épiques (4 vols, 1908-13), was intended to demonstrate that the French epics had recent, non popular, and non-Germanic origins, were connected to places of pilgrimage and roads, and were therefore products of the rich exchange between jongleurs and clerics. In 1922 Bédier, too, published an edition of the Chanson de Roland after the Oxford manuscript.