The impossible transformation into a discipline of the folklore of the French hexagon, a folklore which, because it lacked academic anchorage, became increasingly an amateur’s preserve subject to a number of different uses from the beginning of the 20th century onwards, suggests that the study of poplar customs and traditions confines by its very “nature” to the exaltation of the small state. Things were in reality much more complex, both because a number of students of folklore invested the “local” with the values of patrimony rather than of politics, and because its absolutisation did not necessarily obliterate the will to create “universal” knowledge. The paper describes the tensions which fed the erudite galaxy whose apparent concentration on the local can only be understood in relation to the interests its main stars found in the affirmation of a transnational body of knowledge or the establishment of a regionalised and sanctuarised preserve.