The Provençal Raynouard (Brignoles 1761 – Passy 1836) was one of the founding fathers of Romance studies and the first scholar to describe medieval Occitan as Roman. After having practised as a lawyer in Draguignan, he was elected as a representative to the French Legislative Assembly in 1791. During the Terreur he was imprisoned and wrote the tragedy Caton d’Utique (1794). Established in Paris, while working as a lawyer, Raynouard wrote the poem Socrate au Temple d’Aglaure, which won an award from the Institut de France in 1804. This academic success gave him acess to the Théâtre-Français: in 1805, his historical drama Les Templiers was played there, running to no less than 35 performances. In 1807, Raynouard was appointed to the Académie française, whose Permanent Secretary he became in 1817. He kept his office for ten years and resigned for health reasons in 1826.

With  La grammaire romane, ou grammaire de la langue des troubadours (1818), Raynouard (together with his correspondent from Albi, Rochegude) pioneered the study of the language of the medieval troubadours, which he believed to be the original Romance language from which the different languages of the south of Europe had later branched off. He authored ground-breaking studies on Provencal literature with his Choix des poésies originales des troubadours (6 vols, 1816), which opened the field to philological medievalism and redeemed it from the speculations and forgeries of Fabre d’Olivet. His purpose was, again, to demonstrate the seniority of the Romance language, not only over French, but over all other languages that had descended from Latin. It would only be in his Lexique roman ou Dictionnaire de la langue des troubadours (6 vols, published posthumously 1836-44), that Raynouard distinguished between the “primitive Romance language” and the langue d’oc, which he defined “as the first Romance language established as a literary language”.

In 1821, Raynouard (who had in 1820 been given a prize of honour by the Toulouse Académie des Jeux Floraux, which in subsequent decades would become an inspiration for literary revivalists) published the Grammaire comparée des langues de l’Europe latine, dans leurs rapports avec la langue des troubadours. In it, he asserted the historical usefulness of the troubadours for understanding the habits and opinions of their times and for a comparative understanding of the family relations between the Romance idioms. This comparative-historical interest was highly innovative in the French context of the time. Although the theory of the seniority of Provençal over other Romance languages would be refuted (by A.W. Schlegel’s Observations sur la langue et la littérature provençales, 1818, and by Friedrich Christian Diez in his Grammatik der romanischen Sprachen, 1836-44), Ryanouard’s name remained prestigious in the history of the Romance studies.