This paper aims to try and gauge the extent of the influence of Saussure's Course in General Linguistics on works on French grammar written or published in the interwar period. Six authors are considered: Gustave Guillaume (from 1919 for Le problème de l'article et sa solution dans la langue française), Ferdinand Brunot for La pensée et la langue (1922), the "two-headed monster" consisting of Jacques Damourette and Édouard Pichon for Des mots à la pensée, Essai de grammaire de la langue française (from 1930 on), Georges Gougenheim for his Système grammatical de la langue française (1938), Knud Togeby, for the Structure immanente de la langue française (1951) based on Hjelmslev's glossematics, and Lucien Tesnière, for the Éléments de syntaxe structurale (1959), written from the 1930s on. The "Saussurian effect" varies greatly according to the period, the author and his background, and the theoretical underpinning of the work. It is never non-existent. It occurs earlier than in other areas of linguistics and, more generally, of the humanities.
