The French esoteric corpus falls into two connected parts. The nineteenth century occult revival is the more visible. Eliphas Levi's French-language treatment of ceremonial magic and of tarot symbolism proved highly influential on English-language occultism once translated, and the systems built in London and Paris in the decades afterwards took their structure from his French rather than from any older source directly.
Behind him stands the French grimoire literature of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, magical books compiling ritual instructions, invocations and symbolic correspondences, of which the Grimorium Verum is the most often cited. These drew on earlier Latin and vernacular magical manuscript traditions, which is why a French grimoire is best read as a stage in a longer transmission rather than as an origin.
French Catholic and Huguenot Protestant theological writing belongs to the same language but to a different world, and it is worth naming beside them because the French of a devotional treatise and the French of a grimoire were being written in one country at one time, sometimes for the same readers.
A modern French translation of a text composed in another language is not part of any of this. The distinction is not pedantry: it decides whether a French phrase is an author's own or a translator's, and those two questions are answered by different means.