Born into a bourgeois Protestant family from Ganges, in Languedoc, in 1779, Fabre d’Olivet was sent to Paris, where he permanently settled from 1786 on and dedicated himself to literary and musical pursuits. In 1787 he wrote his first poem (discovered in 1880, but first published in 1970), Força d’Amour, in which he eulogized the language of southern France, which, according to him, had given rise to French poetry. During the 1789 Revolution, his play Le génie de la Nation (1789, celebrating the values of Enlightenment Patriotism and a benevolent constitutional monarchy) was performed more than two hundred times. After having lost his property in 1796-97, due to the financial policy of the revolutionary governments, Fabre d’Olivet aligned with the reactionaries. In 1799, he started working as a civil servant for the Ministry of War.

In 1799, Fabre d’Olivet published Azalaïs et le gentil Aimar, histoire provençale, which he pretended to be the translation of an ancient manuscript; it was one of the first “troubadour genre” novels of the post-revolutionary period. In 1803-04, he published Le troubadour, poésies occitaniques du XIIIe siècle, a 2-volume anthology of poems in French and Occitan. He presented these poems, which he had written himself, as if he had found a manuscript that was preserved in Montpellier by one Rescondut (meaning “hidden”). Pushing the game of mystification to its extreme, he gave Rescondut the role of an Occitan Macpherson. Well aware of the literary games of his times, he used them to take a position in the ongoing dispute on the authorship of the Ossian poems, but also to present an unknown poetic tradition. Exposed as a mystification in 1824 by Raynouard, Le troubadour not only helped to set a French and European trend rediscovering and re-appreciating the glories of medieval Occitan literature; it also re-actualized the 16th-century historical reconstructions of the Provençal historian and writer Jean de Nostredame (Les vies des plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaus, 1575). Indeed, Fabre d’Olivet incorporated some of Nostredame’s material. Beyond the question of its authenticity, Le troubadour placed a semi-forgotten literary tradition back on the agenda and delivered an instrument that would help prepare the Occitan literary renaissance.

Between 1805 and 1810, after a religious and intellectual crisis, Fabre d’Olivet abandoned literature, converted to theosophy and fully dedicated himself to the history and study of languages. In this period, he started his work on Hebraic. Since he could not afford the publishing expenses, he asked the government for assistance, but Napoleon prevented the publication of his work. La langue hébraïque restituée was therefore only published in 1815. The book’s unpublished Occitan counterpart, La Langue d’Oc rétablie dans ses principes (1820), consisting of a grammar, a Vocabulaire de la langue d’oc, and the second version of Le Troubadour, was in the mode of speculative antiquarian etymologizing and involved connections with Basque, Phoenician and Carthaginian; the author was by now also deeply involved in occulticism.

In 1822, Fabre d’Olivet published De l’état social de l’homme, which he considered the most important work of his life and which also incorporated his linguistic ideals. He published it again two years later with the title Histoire philosophique du genre humain, without success. He died of a stroke in Paris in 1825.