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Historical foreign language teaching as a research object necessarily requires a hermeneutic and/or heuristic approach from a methodological point of view due to the temporal distance to the period under investigation. Research questions on the methodology of foreign language teaching in the 19th century – especially on grammar- and translation-oriented methods of French teaching – can be examined, among other things, in the form of the analysis of historical sources that contain aspects of methodological considerations of the teaching and publishing pedagogues. This paper describes a corpus of prefaces from historical textbooks for teaching French that trace a methodological-didactic discourse among textbook authors and teachers in the period from 1800 to 1882. The composition and typology of the textbooks in the corpus are discussed at the outset. Subsequently, the lexical selectors and formal acquisition criteria on which the corpus generation was based will be explained. Furthermore, the temporal and geographical framing of the study corpus is contextualized and, finally, the publication years of the textbooks are highlighted. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]