A Gascon, Mary-Lafon (nr Montauban 1810 – Montauban 1884), the son of a physician, moved to Paris in 1827, where he devoted himself to literature. A Romantic spirit, he published a novel about the medieval Midi, Mœurs du Midi (1835), in the style of Sir Walter Scott, with, for its protagonist, Bertrand de Born, one of the most famous troubadours. A disciple of Augustin Thierry and Claude Fauriel, member of the Société des antiquaires de France – and later of the Société de linguistique – he was also the editor of the Journal de la langue française et des langues en général in 1837-38. His Tableau historique et littéraire de la langue parlée dans le Midi de la France (1841) failed to win the Prix Volney, awarded for linguistic works by the French Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettres, but it did receive honourable mention.

Mary-Lafon is best known for his Histoire politique, religieuse et littéraire du Midi de la France depuis les temps les plus réculés jusqu’à nos jours (4 vols, 1842-44). Against the dominant northern-French, Paris-centred perspective on French history, he set himself the task of redressing the balance, using, for his tools, comparative philology, “biblionomie” (i.e. the careful reading of all literature on the subject, and the preliminary collection of all new materials), popular tradition, and a new historiographical emphasis on the experience of the people in its struggle for freedom. Mary-Lafon was the first to assert the existence of a southern region (which until then had been seen as a set of isolated provinces) with its own long-term history predating the Middle Ages and continuing into the present. He was therefore the first person to advocate the existence of a Midi as a place of history, and not just as a linguistic space.

Mary-Lafon edited and modernized various medieval texts from the Midi: Le roman de Jaufré (the only Occitan romance on an Arthurian theme; 1855, modernized 1856); Fierabras (subtitled Légende nationale, 1857, and in reclaiming the text as French following the editio princeps of 1829 by the German classicist Immanuel Bekker); and the Croisade contre les Albigeois (after Fauriel’s earlier edition of 1837, and subtitled Epopée nationale, 1868). His Histoire littéraire du Midi de la France was published in 1884, the year of his death.