The aim of this article is to explore the very beginning of French Applied Linguistics from 1880 to 1900. In this period, a new language teaching methodology was being elaborated and put to test: the direct method. This method emerges in the context of a general movement of innovation, including scientific discoveries, political projects and new perspectives for education at a national and international level. Therefore, this new teaching method supports the republican educational project of francization, changes profoundly the teaching of French to foreigners, and restructures schools and pedagogy in the colonies. The corpus, on which this study is based, has been selected among the extensive pedagogical literature of the time. It highlights specifically how linguists, pedagogues, work on the relationship between mother tong and language of instruction, by using alterity as a crucial ideological variable.