In France, the teaching of the Romance languages at university level was introduced late in the 19th century, and not without controversy. Compared with the situation in other European countries, notably Germany and, to a lesser extent, Italy, Romance studies in France were inexplicably neglected. In 1874, in the Revue des Langues Romanes (RLR), the Société pour l’étude des Langues Romanes pleaded for the creation of chairs of Romance philology in the south of France, in order to assure the oral teaching of the discipline. The establishment of the periodical Romania (1872), by the two French philologists Gaston Paris and Paul Meyer, had, so the RLR argued, not only officially conferred academic status on Romance studies in France, but it had also provided (together with the RLR) a written body of knowledge in the field.

In 1876, the creation of three chairs of Romance philology in Italy (Naples, Rome and Padua) reawakened the debate. Romania, which welcomed the Italian initiative, saw no need to create a Romance philology chair in France without having previously carried out a serious reform of higher education. Moreover, Paul Meyer did not consider it necessary to create new chairs, since, according to him, seminars such as the ones held by Claude Fauriel and Eugène Baret (1816–1887), tenured, respectively, with the chair of foreign literature at the Sorbonne (since 1837) and at the Faculty of Letters of Clermont-Ferrand (since 1859), sufficed for such purpose. Indeed, both of them had chosen to broach the subject of Provençal literature in their courses. Finally, in 1878, two chairs of language and literature of the Middle Ages were created at the Faculty of Arts of Montpellier. One was dedicated to the south of France, the other to the north, and both of them were appointed to members of the Société pour l’étude des Langues Romanes: Camille Chabaneau to the langue d’oc chair, and Anatole Boucherie to the langue d’oïl one.

In the meantime, in 1876, Léon Clédat was appointed professor of French medieval literature at the Faculty of Arts in Lyon. Introduced to Romance philology by Paul Meyer, Clédat was particularly interested in Provençal literature, and in 1875 he obtained a diploma as paleographer/archivist with a thesis on the troubadour Bertrand de Born. In 1887, Clédat founded the Revue des patois, replaced two years later by the Revue de philologie française et provençale, which ultimately (in 1897) became the Revue de philologie française et de littérature.

In 1883, the linguist Antoine Thomas was appointed to the first chair of language and literature of southern France, established in Toulouse. After Thomas went to Paris in 1889 to take up the Chair of Romance Philology at the Sorbonne, Occitan studies at the University of Toulouse took a new turn under the influence of the medieval philologist Joseph Anglade, a former student of Chabaneau in Montpellier who had also studied at the German universities of Bonn and Freiburg/Breisgau. A troubadour specialist, he founded the Institut d’études méridionales (Toulouse, 1914), and adopted and propagated the term “Occitan” for the Provençal language in order to emphasize its transregional unity.