French Romance studies arose in an early-19th-century climate of salvaging national antiquities, with writers like François-Just-Marie Raynouard, Antoine Fabre d’Olivet and Henri-Pascal de Rochegude raising the status of the troubadours and their language. They drew on earlier work by scholars like La Curne de Sainte-Palaye but did so in a new Romantic-historicist mode.

Raynouard, a Provençal from Brignoles, is generally considered as the initiator of Romance languages studies prior to Friedrich Christian Diez who, as a scholar of Jacob Grimm, defined a new philological method. The originality of Raynouard’s contribution, as well as those of his contemporaries, lies in the particular attention paid to the verbal substance and historical position, rather than the literary merit, of the texts. This is what distinguishes his Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (1816) from La Curne de Ste-Palaye’s Histoire littéraire des troubadours of 1774. Raynouard’s use of the term “original” indicates that the poems selected were published in Old Provençal, the language in which they were written, but also that they had been collected from the manuscripts themselves. Raynouard’s advocacy of comparative and historical analysis of the language represents a clear break with the classical tradition of French grammatical studies, while also reflecting a gradual move away from the purely picturesque vision of the medieval period.

Fabre d’Olivet was the author of Les amours de Rose et de Ponce de Meyrueis (written from 1787 but posthumously published in 1825), which he presented as the French prose translation of a medieval narrative poem in Occitan. The procedure copied that of James Macpherson and his Ossianic forgeries. Fabre d’Olivet used the conceit in 1799 with his Azalaïs et le gentil Aimar, histoire provençale, and in 1803-04 with the two volumes of Le Troubadour, poésies occitaniques du XIIIe siècle. In this book, he pretended to have received his MS material from a middleman hiding behind the soubriquet “Rescondut” (which, in Occitan, means “hidden”). The mystification was pushed to the extreme by Fabre expressing a suspicion, in his introduction, that “Rescondut” may have presented what (so Fabre claimed) were undoubtedly original fragments in a contrived restructured whole à la Macpherson. Fabre d’Olivet’s ruse, which was definitively exposed by Raynouard in 1824, nevertheless did serve to present a still-obscure poetic tradition to the public.

Rochegude published his Parnasse occitanien in 1819, which distinguished itself from its forerunners thanks to the editor’s critical integrity and concern for historical truth. Rochegude argued that troubadours had begun to romaniser very early in the 10th century, establishing a literary dominance that came to an end following the devastation of the realm of Raymond VI by the 13th-century Albigensian Crusade. Rochegude demonstrated the decay into which Occitan letters had fallen since then, and part of his anthology’s aim was to revive Occitan literary glory and to retrieve the troubadours from nostalgic reminiscence.

Fabre d’Olivet and Raynouard also helped to reinforce the commonplace that Occitan poetry was the mother of vernacular European lyricism, much as the Occitan language was the mother of all Romance languages (including French). Their philological interest valorized the “monuments” and remains of ancient and even “dead” languages over living vernacular speech.

A disciple of Raynouard, Claude Fauriel was influenced by his comparative and historical method, although he gave much more importance to the popular oral tradition, especially through the epic. After having devoted his early years to the study of oral material from Greece and Serbia, he turned his attention to the history of the Midi of France, which he believed to be the cradle of post-classical European civilization. Following his appointment, in 1830, as professor of foreign literature at the Sorbonne, in Paris, he inaugurated his lectures with the history of Provençal poetry. In 1846, his lectures were published as Histoire de la poésie provençale.

Fauriel’s denunciation of the monstrous Albigensian Crusade as having destroyed the civilization and literature of the Midi was made public in his 1837 edition/translation of the Histoire de la Croisade contre les hérétiques albigeois écrite en vers provençaux par un poëte contemporain, thus establishing a direct link between the troubadours and the Albigensians. Later, Fauriel was to contradict the consensus of scholars like Raynouard, Diez and Giovanni Galvani that the Provençals’ achievement was limited to the genre of lyric poetry; against this, Fauriel argued that Provençal epics actually were at the origin of the French epics and the Round Table romances. Although meeting with much disagreement at first, these notions were later endorsed by Edgar Quinet and Hippolyte Fortoul.