The debate on the ethnic origins of the French nation started very early. The “Gallic myth” surfaced in the 16th century, when the Gauls were depicted as the most ancient people in Europe. In the reign of Louis XIV, debates concerning the relationship between the Gauls and the Franks (two peoples that historically succeeded one another on what was “French” territory) queried the older views of François Hotman and Claude Fauchet, and a new theory emerged, according to which French history was determined by a perennial struggle between the descendants of the subjected Gauls and the conquering Franks, thus aligning ethnic descent with feudal class division; the aristocracy derived its prerogatives from the Right of Conquest of Clovis and his Franks. By the end of the 18th century, anti-aristocratic forces during the Revolution stressed the originally Celtic character of France and adopted the Gauls as the nation’s true ancestors, thus giving a democratic-political impetus to antiquarian Celticism. Much of this was focused on Brittany and its regional culture, which was (erroneously) considered to be a last remnant of Gaulish Celticity. The Breton Jacques Cambry, who had been instructed by the departmental administration of Finistère to travel around the department to report on vandalism, is a case in point. His Voyage dans le Finistère, ou État de ce département en 1794 et 1795 (1799), not only combines geographical, topographical, and historical descriptions with detailed description of the peasantry’s habits and lifestyles, but also breathed a Celticist spirit. So did the album Galerie des mœurs, usages et coutumes des Bretons de l’Armorique (1808), a joint effort by painter Olivier Perrin and physician Louis-Auguste Mareschal, a series of engravings with commentaries.

Following earlier, unsystematic collections of popular custom made by enthusiasts and clerics, the early 19th century saw a more systematic research method come into force. Following the exhaustive Description de l’Égypte, conducted in the wake of Napoleon’s campaign there, the Académie celtique (established in Paris in 1805) developed a questionnaire (distributed among a network of informants), comprising fifty-one questions ordered under four rubrics. The first followed events and customs through the calendar year starting from the winter solstice; the second, the periods of human life; the third inventorized “ancient monuments”; the fourth analysed plays, tales, saints, sorcerers, and folk remedies. This final rubric accounted for almost half of all the questions. Unlike other surveys of the same period, such as, for example, the language-oriented enquête Grégoire and enquête Coquebert de Montbret, this survey was carried out by a scholarly (rather than state-administrative) institution. Compiled by Michel Ange de Mangourit and Jacques-Antoine Dulaure, it was sent to the prefectures of all the French departments. From then on, popular traditions (seen as remnants of historical roots) became the object of scientific study. Alongside this domestically-oriented interest in the manners and customs of the country’s own population (which was to be adopted in other surveys elsewhere in Europe over the next decades), an exotic interest in foreign societies and cultures persisted. The Société des Observateurs de l’Homme (Paris, 1799-1805), for instance, was founded with the aim of classifying different races. It sponsored several expeditions, and studied the specific traits which distinguished one people from another, and which, in many countries, diversified the original form and pigmentation of the human species.

In 1828, the historian Amédée Thierry published his Histoire des Gaulois, in an attempt to identify the racial composition of the French nation based on the historical method, which he argued owed its origin to the Gauls. He also made reference to the physiologist and naturalist William Edwards, who had designed the plan of a natural history of human races and theorized about the permanence of the European races. William Frédéric Edwards (1777–1842) is considered the founding father of ethnology in France. A member of the Royal Society of London, in 1829 he wrote a letter to Amédée Thierry, Des caractères physiologiques des races humaines, considérés dans leurs rapports avec l’histoire, in which he undertook to find the filiation of peoples, as well as reconstruct their different origins from their later commingling. He was also the author of Recherches sur les langues celtiques (posthumously published in 1844), in response to a prize essay set by the Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres on the character of the Celtic languages in France and the British Isles. In 1839, Edwards founded the Société ethnologique de Paris (1839-47). Largely devoted to race and physical anthropology, it also investigated material culture and customs. William Edwards also founded – together with phrenologist Johann Caspar Spurzheim – the first Société anthropologique (1832). The growth of a new comparative-ethnographical anthropology was also manifested in the Recherches sur l’histoire de l’anthropologie (1845) by the geographer Louis Vivien de Saint-Martin, a member of the Société ethnologique de Paris.

In 1855, the French naturalist Jean Louis Armand de Quatrefages de Bréau (1810–1892), a zoologist by training who had been appointed professor of anatomy and natural history of man at the Muséum national d’histoire naturelle, decided to rename his professorship as the chair in anthropology, thus establishing the first official chair of anthropology. In 1873, he was appointed president of the Académie des sciences; he was one of the founding members of the Association française pour l’avancement des sciences, and in 1890 he was appointed president of the Société de géographie (established in Paris, in 1821). In 1859, Quatrefages founded the Société d’anthropologie de Paris together with Pierre-Paul Broca, linking comparative anatomy and anthropology. Pierre-Paul Broca (1824–1880), physician, anatomist, and anthropologist, is considered the initiator of physical anthropology in France. He practised anthropometry, the proportionate measurement of body parts (e.g. crania) for the purpose of systematizing physical typological variations – which were habitually classified by “race” and seen as indicators of racial differences. Broca also founded the Laboratoire d’Anthropologie at the École Pratique des Hautes Études (1867), and some periodicals, such as the Bulletins and Mémoires of the Société d’anthropologie, and the Revue d’anthropologie (1872-89). In addition, he instituted the École d’anthropologie de Paris (1876), which was devoted to physical anthropology, together with Quatrefages and his alumni Ernest-Théodore Hamy and René-Pierre Verneau. In his inaugural lecture at the École d’Anthropologie, Broca presented a science which merged raciology, archeology, linguistics, and ethnography. Broca published a number of studies on the brain localizations of language, as well as Mémoires d’anthropologie (5 vols, 1871-88) and Sur l’origine et la répartition de la langue basque (1875).

A disciple and collaborator of Paul Broca, Paul Topinard (1830–1911), set out methodological guidelines in his L’anthropologie (1876) and Éléments d’anthropologie générale (1885). From 1877 up to 1900, Topinard was assistant director at the Laboratoire d’anthropologie at the École Pratique des Hautes Études; he taught at the École d’anthropologie, and was appointed secretary-general of the Société d’anthropologie.

In the second half of the century, the idea of creating a French museum of ethnography began to take shape, as a consequence both of the development of ethnography as a scientific discipline and of French expansionist politics and colonial conquests. The 1878 World Fair, which was to be held in Paris, accelerated its establishment: the Museum ethnographique des Missions Scientifiques was created by Hamy and opened its doors in time for the event. Its aim was to collect ethnographical materials from missions, donations, exchanges, or acquisitions. It became a permanent exhibition at the Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro in 1882. In 1884, in addition to the rooms devoted to exotic cultures, a Salle de France was opened at the Trocadéro Museum, with domestic home furnishings and mannequins dressed in traditional regional clothes, so as to display the diversity of the French provinces both chronologically and geographically. The collections (which came to comprise oral literature, games and pastimes, traditional ethnography, linguistics, popular arts, and literary production) were systematized by Armand Landrin and Paul Sébillot (Instructions sommaires relatives aux collections provinciales d’objets ethnographiques, 1897).

Paul Sébillot (1843–1918) had become interested in popular traditions through his study of Breton dialects and their use in proverbs, songs, and customs. Founder and secretary-general of the Société des traditions populaires (1885) and of the Revue des traditions populaires (1886-1919) and Le folklore de France (4 vols, 1904-07), it was he who disseminated the term folk-lore (the savoir du peuple) in France, a term first used by William Thoms in 1846. A member of the Société d’Anthropologie (from which he drew his interest in material culture, typical of archeologists and ethnologists who were members of the association), Sebillot was an adept of its scientific materialism, which manifested itself mainly in his intention to inventorize, describe, and classify all subjects. His Le folklore de France is an example of this systematizing tendency.

Even if Sebillot’s work was criticized by his successor Arnold Van Gennep, Sébillot’s encyclopedism is still noticeable in Van Gennep’s Manuel de folklore français contemporain (1937-58). An ethnologist, Arnold Van Gennep (1873–1957) started a closer study of rural populations after having conducted research into remote and “primitive” cultures and civilizations. Indeed, according to him, folklore corresponded to the ethnography of rural populations of Europe; he is still renowned today for his Les rites de passage (1909).

From its beginnings in the Napoleonic Description de l’Egypte, ethnography was also entangled with 19th-century Orientalism. In 1822, the newly-founded Société Asiatique had the purpose of studying the great Oriental civilizations, with, among its founders and early members, the Sanskritist Silvestre de Sacy (1758–1833), the Egyptologist Jean-François Champollion (1790–1832), and the Sinologist Pierre Rémusat (1788–1832). In 1859, the ethnologist and first Japanologist in France, Léon Prounol de Rosny (1837–1914), founded the Société d’ethnographie américaine et orientale (Société d’ethnographie from 1864 on). Rosny organized the first Congrès international des orientalistes, held in Paris in 1873; among the participants was the Semitic and biblical scholar Ernest Renan.