ABSTRACT
This chapter presents the Hippolyte Fortoul project as a musical encounter between Parisian intellectuals and the French provinces. The work of Fortoul's committee and Jacques Ampere the evolution of a methodology for collecting folksong that can be seen as a nascent form of musical ethnography, by which the poetic resources of the 'folk' were intended to be apprehended and assembled into a monument of song. Ampere's document reveals how projects of folksong collection were shaped by broader political and ideological concerns. Ampere not only provided guidelines as to which languages, geographical areas, and eras would conform to the requirements of Fortoul's anthology. M. Damase Arbaud, furthermore, distinctly echoed the criterion developed by the Fortoul committee that censored recent songs with political content, stating that authentic popular songs represented nations at their time of infancy and were not borne of political and social circumstance.
