The article revisits the issues involved in writing a history of French as a Foreign language in the Middle East, targeting Ottoman and Mandate Palestine, until the period after the creation of the State of Israel (1850-1950). Palestine constituted an emblematic scene for the history of the spread of competing national languages and cultures, where different mandates met and lived together (state-controlled, religious, symbolic, supranational). It is thus a difficult area to grasp without a global and a connected approach. The article will analyze archives, corpus and concepts so as to understand the multidimensional history of the spreading of the French language.